This community is so tight knit that trying to be anonymous while earning community trust is a steep hill to climb. The secret sauce comes from two major reasons which includes the way Filipino interpersonal relationships work and the way onboarding programs are done.
Filipinos like to pry on other people's lives, whether you take this in a negative light or not, the fact remains that being involved with one another at a personal level if possible helps with survival as a community and sense of belongingness. This meant being open to share some of your personal stuff as a "social currency" to with others and these currencies are traded to form social bonds.
Introduction posts that share limited or vague information about the individual is an automatic red flag. Where one lives, their name, age, school and mastery of the local language. The country is an archipelago and the people have multiple dialects that Google translate couldn't pick up. So anyone that claims they're from this area of the country can shit test the user in native tongue. We have a network of people living in different parts to reach out to confirm any suspicious accounts.
The cases shared below are only two of the many profiles that have attempted to scam this community. But these are the recent ones.
Can someone still be part of the community even if they're anonymous? sure, I'm anon but have previously shown my face to some members. If I didn't start on the legacy chain and became part of the formative group, trying to thrive now as an anon within the community is just making it hard for yourself if this is the only community you want to belong. An anon Filipino would have more success in other communities.
If anyone noticed a pattern on the onboarded newbies in this community, there's a section in the blog post that mentions an existing user referring them to join the platform. This is due to how reputation is built on the community, and if existing members with good credibility vouch for the new user, it further adds to the reliability that what people are reading on the introduction posts is close to the truth.
Here's are the two sample case below that didn't pass the smell test:
Nenecy's Introduction
Nosaky's Introduction
Let's ignore the part that Nosaky was an idiot for using a public photo readily seen on reverse image search. Both accounts show just have awkward use of English, limited personal information, and most of all, not a single mention of who their friend is that could've vouch for their credibility.
We've been taught English since kindergarten so it's not a surprise if you can find a Filipino who is better at English than their native tongue. While onboarding orientation specifically stress not to include sensitive information about the individual, there are minor details the person shares that add more authenticity to their origin which I'm not going to go into detail so as not to get the fakers some more ideas. The most difficult thing a faker can pull off is trying to have an existing member of good standing vouch for them.
A lot of the discussions if a new user seems like a red flag happens on discord. Our methods to verify can range from asking who's living within the area to confirm a story, who knows the local language, contact the user on their other social media profile and others I won't go into detail just to challenge fakers. Sometimes some profile do get passed a week before they are detected, but they'll be found out eventually unless they invest a lot of research on language, cuisine, local history related to the persona they want to project.
I've stressed how important it is to maintain a good reputation on this community. I could argue that it's one of the most important asset an account has because how one carries their name will dictate how much social rewards they can earn. No matter how good the content is, a self respecting curator would never vote on the post if the person behind the account is known to do something shady. That's why reputation care is important especially in growing one's network. If the person of bad standing onboards another person who has yet to a chance on Hive, they'd be doing their onboardee a disservice all because of their own personal oopsies.
There are more checks that could be done for suspicious fake profiles. Though it's not really full proof since it's possible to bypass detection especially if they didn't start their debut on HivePH and has grown their account somewhere else before coming into contact with this community.
Because the demand for authenticity is high when trying to make friends with the members of this community, a fake profile should have to invest heavily on crafting their story and sometimes it's not even worth the pocket change they could've been getting had they faked their identity on some other community.
Thanks for your time.