On this question of verification, I don’t have a particularly foolproof solution, but maybe there just isn’t one.

I can criticize the modern web for a lot of things, but as long as we have situations where we want to check whether an account is a real person, as opposed to FarmingBot #295038, they need something. I'm not a fan of phone verification, but I'd only criticize it when we have alternatives.

I'd even be in favor of some kind of one-way algorithm by which a trusted real-person-identifying entity could tell a random third party site: Yes, this is a genuine human.