[varispeed]

Sadly out of reach for small projects. For example if you had a site with 100k users, you'd barely cover server costs with Ad Sense. $150k to check all of them? Would never happen :/ Maybe if they could pay for verification themselves?

[jhugo]

In many cases you don’t need to verify the identity of every user. You can use some signal to determine when you need ID, or require it for accessing certain products/features.

[whimsicalism]

If you're not offering a service for $, why do you need to verify identity?

What is the usecase?

This strikes me as classic HN bikeshedding.

[varispeed]

Spam and other malicious behaviour. It's time consuming for mods to block spammers.

Instagram also don't charge users and yet they verify identity.

[arcturus17]

Instagram may be verifying identity now (I didn't know... letting FB scan my id would be one of the last things I would want), but I'm pretty sure they reached a massive scale without such a measure.

[michaelt]

Stripe's website shows users scanning their government ID documents and taking selfies.

Using that as a means to block spammers would be.... unusual.

[spoonjim]

You don’t need to verify a user’s real identity to serve them AdSense.

[varispeed]

They can post AdSense violating image and report the URL to get the page demonetised. Users of similar project done that many times.