[jasode]

>how they guarantee uniqueness of users

I was curious too so I clicked on the sign-up button to see how it worked. It immediately takes you to a page to pay $9.00 by credit-card.

I guess it guarantees you're a "real person" because bots† don't pay with credit-cards.

†(At the large scale required for profitable fraud)

[realpeopleio]

Right. Bots aren't going to pay. But a user might pay $9/year for all websites. Websites don't have to pay for the service either. The more websites that use the service, the more cost effective it is for users (since they pay once for all sites), and for websites (since the likelihood that the user signing up already has a RealPerson account and doesn't need to pay anymore).

This is the primary way to prevent bots, but there still are secondary means like IP address, credit card, behavior pattern than can be used to detect bots. But with estimated millions of bots operating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, the bot operators are not going to spend millions of dollars on RealPerson accounts.

[corobo]

> But a user might pay $9/year for all websites

Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of it

It's hard enough for Netflix to get customers to pay (account sharing) never mind a site that - from the user's point of view - does nothing

On the thought of the website side - Why would I as a website owner have my users pay your service when I could set up my own paywall and also enjoy the monetary rewards? I really feel like I've missed something here

Side note, there's also no way to delete my account

[realpeopleio]

At first maybe for most people they won't want to pay the cost. What (hopefully) will happen is that smaller sites who have problems keeping bots and fake accounts at bay will decide it's worth it to them to require all their users to use RealPerson. And then (hopefully) over time users face no additional cost using RealPerson on other sites because they already have an account.

Incidentally, this is how RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) is able to have no ads because the revenue from RealPerson.io subsidizes it since they're owned by the same company.

[corobo]

The way you're addressing this site is confusing, you're talking as if your username isn't "realpeopleio" - are you affiliated with the site or just registered under a confusing username?

I apologise for asking this rather than any actual followup questions but it's got me proper distracted

[realpeopleio]

Yes I am affiliated. I'm arguing why we built RealPeople.io and RealPerson.io to solve the problems listed in the article. I don't think I've tried to hide that.

[laumars]

> Bots aren't going to pay.

If your site ever gains traction then would quickly become rife with stolen credit card details as the amount is small enough that most banks wouldn't question it (at first at least - but it's small amounts like these that attackers use to verify the card details are still valid) and those attackers would get the added bonus of growing their database of fake user accounts, thus rendering the point behind your site irrelevant.

Worse still, you'd then need to find some way to differentiate between stolen details and legitimate accounts (you will legally need to do this otherwise you'd quickly get shut down) - which means you're back into the arms race against the bad actors. This is going to cost you money (hopefully not more than you're making but that really depends on how heavily you get targeted) and will mean you'll likely end up adding counter measures that add further hurdles for legitimate customers.

And thus we're all back to square one.

I do wish you luck with your endeavor; but I don't agree with you that this solves any of the problems you're hoping to address (or at least described in this thread - if your problem was merely to earn some extra cash on the side then this might work beautifully for you).