20 ms·

The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

261 points by Balgair 7y ago

notasnakein 7y ago
Hurr durr my Russian bots
- nexuist 7y ago
  Ignoring the politics behind this article, it still has a point in how fake, scripted posts alter the global conversation.
- allemagne 7y ago
  What is this comment intended to mock?
  - boomboomsubban 7y ago
    It assumes the entire post is about a throwaway example given as a eye-catching part of the piece. It's also an example of the low-trust society discussed, the commenter assumed the worst if the article and attacked immediately.
lmm 7y ago
This is the most intelligent take on internet trust issues that I've seen. The conclusion is overly glib though: it took centuries for high-trust societies to develop the mechanisms that allow them to function as such, and even small changes can upset that balance (as we've been seeing in the real world over the last couple of years). We shouldn't assume it will be trivial to bootstrap those kinds of institutions on the internet.
- jaspax 7y ago
  People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the new normal. This is exactly how the liberal societies of the west evolved. But don't remember that any more, though.
  - yborg 7y ago
    This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.
    - moate 7y ago
      That's a take. I'm assuming you mean "The US as created by white European invaders who had to decimate a local indigenous population using slavery and warfare after purging itself of imperial overlords" right? Like the US in its current coast to coast form didn't spring out fully formed from Liberty's bosom. It also had centuries of European innovation that lead to it.
    - ikeyany 7y ago
      There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.
      - jjoonathan 7y ago
        We're talking about whether or not coercion is necessary to bootstrap a high-trust society. Are you arguing that those types of coercion were fundamentally necessary to establish the United States? Or are you forgetting this context in order to have something to be upset about?
        ikeyany 7y ago
        Yes, I am arguing that. There is no way the US is the world power it was through the late 1800s and beyond, without centuries of coercion [0]. [0] https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...
danShumway 7y ago
In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy. If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans themselves are relatively cheap to buy.
- thejohnconway 7y ago
  The article doesn’t focus on bots ( in fact it specifically mentions times when humans pretend to be bots). It’s really about internet fakery in general eroding trust.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Yep, just expanding on the premise of the article and reinforcing that this is a general trust problem, since a large portion of the current conversation around internet trust does revolve around bots.
- jmoss20 7y ago
  Right -- it's ultimately a trust problem, and we're in an unfortunate negative feedback loop here. Bots aside, what we post on the internet (and believe in general) is a function of the information we consume. That information is increasingly consumed through the internet, and the internet (as typically used) is feeding us increasingly poor quality information. (To be consumed, then shared. Recurse...) We can (and I think do) cope by having different levels of trust for different sorts of internet information. I generally have higher trust in an HN post than an Amazon review, for example. This is useful, but has a dark side: some of the things I (and likely, you) take as a sign to "increase trust" happen to correlate with things that have nothing to do with trust. I trust Amazon reviews more if they have good grammar and spelling, largely because I trust general internet information more when it has good grammar and spelling. But perhaps I shouldn't when e.g. buying a screwdriver (what does writing ability -- and the things it correlates with -- have to do with evaluating a screwdriver?). Coming up with social/political-flavored-information examples is an interesting (and worrying) exercise.
rosterface 7y ago
There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust-in-media-hits-bottom-60-percent-say-sources-pay-for-stories https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust... It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs... Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to that.
- projektfu 7y ago
  All modern forms of yellow journalism.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?
  - iagovar 7y ago
    Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us! I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.
0xfeba 7y ago
At probably a naive glance it seems related to anonymity. Would tying identity to online posts increase this trust? What if you had to insert your National ID Card to comment in some feedback forums? I remember YouTube tried this and failed due to pushback. What's the driver of this clickbait/instant gratification/hot take culture that's developing? Is it just ads?
- 0815test 7y ago
  People on Facebook are posting with their real names, and much of the worst, most polarizing crap gets spread on there. Some people do post with their real names as a way of visibly holding themselves accountable for what they say, but it's something that really only makes sense as a voluntary choice.
  - 0xfeba 7y ago
    True. Is it similar to "road rage" where people are safe and secure in their moving "castle", and freely criticize and yell at others without fear of consequences?
- pjc50 7y ago
  Some of the worst clickbait is published in national newspapers under a byline and photograph of the author. The Boris Johnson fiasco has got journalists openly saying "who are the people who called the police when they heard shouting and screaming next door? We need to find and expose them". Requiring ID means the culture war side with the best harassment capability can take over the space and decide who becomes the story and who gets made unsafe.
  - josinalvo 7y ago
    > Boris Johnson fiasco Could you provide some context? > who are the people who called the police when they heard shouting and screaming next door? We need to find and expose them". Could you provide some links? (sorry, not doubt, truly uninformed)
- ggggtez 7y ago
alwaysanagenda 7y ago
All of this mistrust is built around eyeballs and advertising revenue. Once you realize you can't monetize the network, you will understand why "lol, nothing matters." If you're doing anything of worth on the Internet, put out your tip jar and point people to your PayPal or Venmo. You build an empire on ads, it will always crumble. The author seems to recognize this fact, with the note that the current 'economic' model on internet revenue is indeed based on ads promising the right eyeballs. However, I take a huge issue with this statement that the Internet was supposed to "rationalize [information]—to create markets where impartial metrics would automatically surface the truest ideas and best products, at a vast and incorruptible scale. " That's a massive pile of assumptions that affect only a small chunk of individuals who hold unrealistic notions about an Internet that somehow works FOR them. This is not the Internet. What you are dreaming about is some big-data pie-in-the-sky AI algo, which last I check, doesn't exist. YOU CAN'T MONETIZE THE NETWORK. VALUE FOR VALUE.
ggggtez 7y ago
>Better rules and technologies that authenticate online transactions; a different ad-tech infrastructure that resists fraud and preserves privacy; I don't disagree with the premise, but this solution seems vague at best. Authentication and privacy? Great things to be sure, but where is the connection? As it said, even "verified" purchases could be (and sometimes are) done by paid shills. I guess the proposal is to create laws that prohibit lying on the internet? This person has clearly fallen on the wrong side of the authoritarian argument if that's the solution they came up with to prevent power consolidation in big business.
Kenji 7y ago
Complete nonsense. Yes, trust has been eroded, but only trust concerning the media and garbage websites like facebook, Twitter, etc. Go into niche communities (hackernews is already too large imho) and you will find beautiful flourishing microscopic ecosystems that do perfectly well (think of speedrunning and other niche gamer communities, programmer communities, lgbt communities, etc.). People trust each other, are kind to each other, etc. It's just that they are out of the public's view precisely because they are precious and if the public ever discovers them, they're destroyed. Oh, also, it's always been this way on the internet, for decades. The good stuff is always hidden away from the public because the public is not fit for the good stuff. Just like you wouldn't let just anyone join your research team or your backyard grill party, you wouldn't let just anyone join a great community. You may call that exclusionary or even elitist, I call it having standards. Also, this post may be ironic because I'm shadowbanned. But I don't really care if anyone reads my messages, this is more of a thought dump.
apoph3nia 7y ago
> In low-trust societies, you never know. You expect to be cheated, often without recourse. You expect things not to be what they seem and for promises to be broken, and you don’t expect a reasonable and transparent process for recourse. It’s harder for markets to function and economies to develop in low-trust societies. It’s harder to find or extend credit, and it’s risky to pay in advance. 'Bout sums it up.
ChainOfFools 7y ago
In Trust We Trust
abathur 7y ago
If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale well. The exploiter can skate on anonymity if the community is large enough to continually prey on someone new. Spreading news of an exploiter's behavior to others can greatly improve how well this scales, but this behavior also requires trust. I think the more direct problem is with scale, and that the internet is at the nexus of many trust issues only because it has ramped up the scale and scope of many interactions. I'm not super optimistic on solving this intrinsic problem of trust in social exchanges, but I do see this framing as a silver lining. It seems at least plausible to iterate offline at significantly smaller scales on mechanisms for building and maintaining trust--and rectifying its breaches--in ways that do actually scale.
- Sushi-san 7y ago
  So, should we just try to ignore the larger-scale exploitation of trust?
  - abathur 7y ago
    No, we shouldn't ignore it. But I think there's a risk of sending a lot of bright, productive people off to tilt at technological/interface/regulatory windmills in a way that leaves fundamental trust issues out of scope. Even if Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could wave a magic wand and remove every fake review, counterfeit product, scam, personal threat, or piece of false/fraudulent media, there would still be a trust issue. We still have to trust that they did what they said, that whatever disappeared was correctly identified, and that they didn't wrongly remove many legitimate items in the process. Even if the magic wand that makes these decisions has the utmost ethical and logical integrity, there will still be some mix of skeptics, cynics, malign actors, competitors, bots, etc. who chum the waters with accusations to the contrary. We'd still have to choose whether or not to trust this process and the actors behind it. So, I think it might be productive to focus on some smaller questions first. To be semi-arbitrary: can we find a protocol for reliably building a 50-person trust network with a limited scope/focus (maybe identifying reliable providers of a single service), where each participant knows a small fraction of the network, which is capable of meeting both its purpose and is capable of detecting and reforming or ejecting exploiters? If the first is tractable, can you expand the scope/focus of the networks and retain these properties? Can you compose a higher-order network that retains these properties?
Merrill 7y ago
It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society. Back in the day, when you placed a long distance call, an operator would come on to ask you what your number was so the call could be billed to you. A single call might be a dollar or a few dollars, which would be ten to several tens of dollars in today's money. No one would imagine that such a system would work today.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society. And that's probably rooted in people being fundamentally devalued and taken advantage of. We are seeing worse income inequality than in The Gilded Age and people act like it's a natural and unavoidable side effect of the existence of tech, the internet, whatever. That's BS. People created these things. If these things exploit people, it's because people designed them to exploit people. If people want people to be treated better, then people need to stop blaming machines for our social values. Tech merely magnifies those values. It doesn't cause them to exist. Bill Gates said that automating an efficient system amplifies the efficiency and automating an inefficient system amplifies the inefficiency. I propose that you can similarly amplify whatever underlying social values you have, whether that's something good -- pro education! -- or something bad -- racism and misogyny! And classism. We are using technology to amplify extractive economic practices, then blaming the robots as if Judgement Day had already arrived and Skynet is now in charge of our lives. (A la the Terminator movies.)
  - coding123 7y ago
    I'd almost rather society just admit it's classist so it can be handled appropriately. Instead we're just in denial and no policies (for better or worse) will ever go towards what we need. I might sound conservative but I'm definitely democrat/liberal in most of my values. I just don't want to live near someone that is thuggish and may steal from my house.
- kabwj 7y ago
  That’s back when those systems could only be used by wealthy, educated people. Like usenet before the eternal September.
ex3xu 7y ago
I'm a bit surprised this article has zero reference to any interdisciplinary work on trust metrics, and stuff like trust propagation algorithms. I'm even more surprised, with the blockchain having becoming such a buzzword these days, that Bitcoin's proof-of-work approach was not even mentioned, let alone evaluated for effectiveness. And where's the love for Bruce Schneier [0]? I think the article's approach of referencing historic stragies from government and social infrastructure is a bit useless in this context because how much the problem changes when scarce information becomes abundant light-speed communication. I understand that they are trying to make the point that corporate overlords are bad, but maybe it would serve the purposes of the article better to just focus on the variables that matter, now that there's new capacities for transparency and accountability metrics based on some combination of historic behavior, web of trust node size, and other situational variables based on the medium -- like users that spend a lot of money, or consistently downvote known bad actors. Forcing users to have skin in the game with strict enforcement of transgressions is of course a reasonably effective, if coercive, strategy as well, and you can take the edge off this authoritarian approach if you pair it with some variant of restorative justice. My approach is perhaps not rigorously useful, but for my personal conceptions of trust in a world of bad actors, I like looking at strategies from Axelrod's iterated prisoner's dilemma[1]. Tit for Tat is famously a good strategy, and there's also a good strategy where you forgive on multiple cooperations but gradually increase the punishment of defectors to n times for their nth defection [2]. Though I should mention that tribalist collusion with other bad actors is unfortunately a very viable approach as well. [0]: https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/ https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/ [1]: https://axelrod.readthedocs.io https://axelrod.readthedocs.io [2]: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html
mensetmanusman 7y ago
The less trust there is, the more hardship there is. We are due for tough times ahead.
chmod775 7y ago
This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could. If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself. Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudonymously is now the norm for many people. This changed how people interact online, but it also changed their expectations. A full name however doesn't make a person or their opinions any more real than a pseudonym will. People will lie to you with a fake name just as shamelessly as they would hiding behind a pseudonym.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I think it's more that the perception of it is being twisted. The media twists the way that the internet has worked since time immemorial as something that's suddenly gotten a lot worse, that all trolls are on par with criminals, and that we need to take drastic measures.
  - chmod775 7y ago
    I wholly agree. But. The people who write those kinds of articles are mostly just your average Joe who uses the internet exclusively to browse Facebook and the like. Of course this gives them a twisted understanding of the medium. And then there's those who are just lying I guess (duh!). Plenty of reason for that with the whole fake news hysteria. If you don't want to risk ending up on the wrong end of that debate, your article is already written for you. Risky to defend the free(-er) internet nowadays or even just to refrain from attacking it. Further there's the fact that "a war on fake news" might give the established media an edge, but I'm unconvinced any reputable journalist would consciously consider that when deciding on the tone of his article. In any case you can also find plenty of articles displaying a better understanding of the matter. It's not like there's some secret global conspiracy against the free internet.
- arugulum 7y ago
  This goes beyond trust, I think. The social structures of Internet communities are very different from those those in real life, and I'm highly disturbed when people try to transplant IRL social norms to the Internet thoughtlessly. This is where we get bone-headed ideas like the real-names policy for "the Internet". Now, I am not discounting that there is actually toxic, horrific harassment that goes on the Internet. Doxxing and things like it are terrible and should never happen. Rather, I'm arguing that people need to acquire a sort of "street smarts" when navigating the Internet. Much like when you travel to a foreign country, you may expect a different culture with different norms, so it is the same with the Internet. What's rude in one culture is simply social convention in another. What is casual conversation in one is taboo in another. I spent a lot of time on the Internet growing up and I feel like I have been inoculated against the worst parts of the Internet, but at times it feels like many people haven't. A good example of this is how a lot of people and media take 4chan posts at face value, without realizing that a lot of it is completely self-aware and that the worst posts are almost always a game of who can post the most needlessly offensive thing possible. A lot of 4chan is an exercise is communication with no names and no filter. And yet some of my most informative conversations have been on 4chan precisely because there is no politeness filter, and posters can be as devastating critical as they want. But a reader also needs to learn how to tune in and out, correspondingly discount and read between the lines to get the most out of 4chan conversation, otherwise you simply come away with the idea that the community hates everything and everyone. For a more tame example, I follow a couple of Twitch streamers. For example, for streamer A, most communication with their chat is saccharine and supportive. But for streamer B, the chat makes fun off and insults him the whole way especially he makes a mistake, and the streamer, and the streamer gives as good as he gets and makes fun of the chat the whole time too. And this is normal and fun engagement for all parties. From afar, streamer B's community looks extremely toxic, but that's the furthest thing from the truth. (What is abhorrent is when you take streamer B's chat behavior into streamer A's chat, and that is frowned upon by all parties.) I believe that Internet activity should be diverse. There should be places where communication is an extension of real life (Facebook, emails), places of semi-anonymous and professional communication (Hacker News, certain subreddits/slack communitiees/GitHub), and then places where you should be able to go hogwild with whatever you want to say (fun subreddits, discord). Twitter is unfortunately one of those places that has had all of these mixed together, which is why I decided to have multiple Twitter accounts targeting professional/personal hobby communication. From what I hear, kids are already tuning to this idea, with things like public/private instagram accounts. The Internet is not all the same, and that's great. The Internet is not just real life, and that's great.
Proven 7y ago
Statist nonsense. > Better rules and technologies that authenticate online transactions; a different ad-tech infrastructure that resists fraud and preserves privacy; In other words, more rules, more government (including global, to "match" the Internet), mandatory fascist registration of every user for every service, and so on. Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather deal with low trust private companies.
buboard 7y ago
Can we trust the article that it is the internet that is becoming low trust, or is it reflecting society's trends? Trust has been fading in societies for decades [1] and apparently millenials are the most cynical [2] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us_v2_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us... https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/03/pew-millennial-trust.png https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/... First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were always predominantly american-culture oriented) are now global and thus reflect low trust cultures as well. Second, Goodhart's law, the internet metrics exist mainly to be gamed, thats why they should change. Reviews worked for a while, when the internet had a very different audience , they no longer work, that's normal wear and tear. Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews. Crowdsourcing no longer works. (Which explains why wikipedia should maintain a very conservatiove editing policy from now on)
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  Where is the footnotes?
  - Wildgoose 7y ago
    The first and second link I presume.
- chongli 7y ago
  Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews Given that platforms earn a commission on every sale, why should they be trusted to procure specialists' reviews? Maybe they would prefer to hire professional charlatans to boost the reviews on everything, in order to drown out the legitimate opinions of aggrieved customers?
  - buboard 7y ago
    Sure that's a great recipe to lose your customers. Shops have an interest in having honest reviews, and if they are gaming them, someone else will provide more honest ones.
macawfish 7y ago
Funny title change
taneq 7y ago
> Things are increasingly getting worse General purpose headline for attracting views, tying into the seductiveness of a general perception of doom and gloom. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the-world-is-getting-better-why-hardly-anyone-knows-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the...
okjustgo 7y ago
Maybe I missed something, but when was the internet ever high-trust? I feel like since it's inception savvy users always applied a healthy amount of skepticism and made thier own choice whether or not they believed something "on the internet". This included both facts on websites and conversing with other humans on chat.
- buboard 7y ago
  > but when was the internet ever high-trust? Exactly. It started when big corp tried to lure in more users by giving them free cheese, making them believe that the internet is a safe place to post your name, address, work life and sex habits. Everyone at the time thought it was crazy that people did that, and yeah they were right.
dschuetz 7y ago
That is not really surprising, is it? 20 years ago the Internet was populated with different people, because the subscriptions were expensive. And besides that, there was no mobile Internet, the user demographic was completely different. Now that literally everybody on this planet has access to the Internet, and, well, there are some rather unpleasant people out there, I think we've reached a new historical period with these "low-trust societies".
- buboard 7y ago
  Things were worse 20 years ago for the general internet , with few "trustable" brand names anyway. Piracy, viruses and scams were all over the place. If anything it's cleaner today, thanks to investments in security/antispam, but the mode of operation for scammers has changed.
aantix 7y ago
Welcome to digital socialism. It always ends with long lines for a few blocks of cheese.
galkk 7y ago
As it should be, I think. You don't inherently trust stranger on a street, you shouldn't do that on the internet as well.
- pferde 7y ago
  Not quite. While I wouldn't trust a random stranger on the street with e.g. my money or private data. However, I have no problem trusting them to honestly and truthfully answer questions like "how do I get to X from here?" or "here, can you please mark my bus ticket in that marking machine over there and hand it back to me? I can't quite reach it in this crowded bus". On the internet, however, I don't trust a random stranger (e.g. a youtube commenter, or a reddit user) with answering "2+2" correctly, let alone with something that involves my possessions, no matter how low-value they might be.
Allower 7y ago
no shit. people aren't trustworthy..
kerblang 7y ago
Maybe the problem is that ever since google the only metric anyone has bothered to devise is "popularity", which was never a particularly good indicator of truth to begin with.
- adventured 7y ago
  Google was built heavily on authority, not just popularity. Otherwise you could easily buy your way above Wikipedia, a non-profit organization (Wikimedia) - which ranks at or near the top for every query. Quora, or some other VC backed knowledge service with a couple hundred million to vaporize, would overtake Wikipedia through the direct purchasing of popularity. Then others would quickly follow, entirely wiping Wikipedia from the first pages. That can't be done. If it could, private equity via Answers.com and other such very low quality sites would have already done it, seeking billions of dollars in return on such positioning.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Yeah google isn't built on popularity, but everything else is. And it's partly our fault for using aggregators.
  - kerblang 7y ago
    Interesting, but how do they assign this authority? Anything to cite?
bawana 7y ago
scale is indeed the problem. scale has perverted our capitalist society as well, long before the internet. Adam Smith wrote about capitalism but he never envisioned Amazon. Changing a system from a one-to-one interaction to a one-to-many interaction should not allow us to apply the same rules. In math for example, commutativity works for single numbers, but not matrices.
flimflamvirII 7y ago
reflects perfectly it does

261 points by Balgair 7y ago

notasnakein 7y ago

Hurr durr my Russian bots

nexuist 7y ago
Ignoring the politics behind this article, it still has a point in how fake, scripted posts alter the global conversation.
allemagne 7y ago
What is this comment intended to mock?
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  It assumes the entire post is about a throwaway example given as a eye-catching part of the piece. It's also an example of the low-trust society discussed, the commenter assumed the worst if the article and attacked immediately.

lmm 7y ago

This is the most intelligent take on internet trust issues that I've seen. The conclusion is overly glib though: it took centuries for high-trust societies to develop the mechanisms that allow them to function as such, and even small changes can upset that balance (as we've been seeing in the real world over the last couple of years). We shouldn't assume it will be trivial to bootstrap those kinds of institutions on the internet.

jaspax 7y ago
People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the new normal. This is exactly how the liberal societies of the west evolved. But don't remember that any more, though.
- yborg 7y ago
  This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.
  - moate 7y ago
    That's a take. I'm assuming you mean "The US as created by white European invaders who had to decimate a local indigenous population using slavery and warfare after purging itself of imperial overlords" right? Like the US in its current coast to coast form didn't spring out fully formed from Liberty's bosom. It also had centuries of European innovation that lead to it.
  - ikeyany 7y ago
    There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      We're talking about whether or not coercion is necessary to bootstrap a high-trust society. Are you arguing that those types of coercion were fundamentally necessary to establish the United States? Or are you forgetting this context in order to have something to be upset about?
      - ikeyany 7y ago
        Yes, I am arguing that. There is no way the US is the world power it was through the late 1800s and beyond, without centuries of coercion [0]. [0] https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...

danShumway 7y ago

In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy. If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans themselves are relatively cheap to buy.

thejohnconway 7y ago
The article doesn’t focus on bots ( in fact it specifically mentions times when humans pretend to be bots). It’s really about internet fakery in general eroding trust.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Yep, just expanding on the premise of the article and reinforcing that this is a general trust problem, since a large portion of the current conversation around internet trust does revolve around bots.
jmoss20 7y ago
Right -- it's ultimately a trust problem, and we're in an unfortunate negative feedback loop here. Bots aside, what we post on the internet (and believe in general) is a function of the information we consume. That information is increasingly consumed through the internet, and the internet (as typically used) is feeding us increasingly poor quality information. (To be consumed, then shared. Recurse...) We can (and I think do) cope by having different levels of trust for different sorts of internet information. I generally have higher trust in an HN post than an Amazon review, for example. This is useful, but has a dark side: some of the things I (and likely, you) take as a sign to "increase trust" happen to correlate with things that have nothing to do with trust. I trust Amazon reviews more if they have good grammar and spelling, largely because I trust general internet information more when it has good grammar and spelling. But perhaps I shouldn't when e.g. buying a screwdriver (what does writing ability -- and the things it correlates with -- have to do with evaluating a screwdriver?). Coming up with social/political-flavored-information examples is an interesting (and worrying) exercise.

rosterface 7y ago

There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust-in-media-hits-bottom-60-percent-say-sources-pay-for-stories https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust... It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs... Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to that.

projektfu 7y ago
All modern forms of yellow journalism.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?
- iagovar 7y ago
  Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us! I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.

0xfeba 7y ago

At probably a naive glance it seems related to anonymity. Would tying identity to online posts increase this trust? What if you had to insert your National ID Card to comment in some feedback forums? I remember YouTube tried this and failed due to pushback. What's the driver of this clickbait/instant gratification/hot take culture that's developing? Is it just ads?

0815test 7y ago
People on Facebook are posting with their real names, and much of the worst, most polarizing crap gets spread on there. Some people do post with their real names as a way of visibly holding themselves accountable for what they say, but it's something that really only makes sense as a voluntary choice.
- 0xfeba 7y ago
  True. Is it similar to "road rage" where people are safe and secure in their moving "castle", and freely criticize and yell at others without fear of consequences?
pjc50 7y ago
Some of the worst clickbait is published in national newspapers under a byline and photograph of the author. The Boris Johnson fiasco has got journalists openly saying "who are the people who called the police when they heard shouting and screaming next door? We need to find and expose them". Requiring ID means the culture war side with the best harassment capability can take over the space and decide who becomes the story and who gets made unsafe.
- josinalvo 7y ago
  > Boris Johnson fiasco Could you provide some context? > who are the people who called the police when they heard shouting and screaming next door? We need to find and expose them". Could you provide some links? (sorry, not doubt, truly uninformed)
ggggtez 7y ago

alwaysanagenda 7y ago

All of this mistrust is built around eyeballs and advertising revenue. Once you realize you can't monetize the network, you will understand why "lol, nothing matters." If you're doing anything of worth on the Internet, put out your tip jar and point people to your PayPal or Venmo. You build an empire on ads, it will always crumble. The author seems to recognize this fact, with the note that the current 'economic' model on internet revenue is indeed based on ads promising the right eyeballs. However, I take a huge issue with this statement that the Internet was supposed to "rationalize [information]—to create markets where impartial metrics would automatically surface the truest ideas and best products, at a vast and incorruptible scale. " That's a massive pile of assumptions that affect only a small chunk of individuals who hold unrealistic notions about an Internet that somehow works FOR them. This is not the Internet. What you are dreaming about is some big-data pie-in-the-sky AI algo, which last I check, doesn't exist. YOU CAN'T MONETIZE THE NETWORK. VALUE FOR VALUE.

ggggtez 7y ago

>Better rules and technologies that authenticate online transactions; a different ad-tech infrastructure that resists fraud and preserves privacy; I don't disagree with the premise, but this solution seems vague at best. Authentication and privacy? Great things to be sure, but where is the connection? As it said, even "verified" purchases could be (and sometimes are) done by paid shills. I guess the proposal is to create laws that prohibit lying on the internet? This person has clearly fallen on the wrong side of the authoritarian argument if that's the solution they came up with to prevent power consolidation in big business.

Kenji 7y ago

Complete nonsense. Yes, trust has been eroded, but only trust concerning the media and garbage websites like facebook, Twitter, etc. Go into niche communities (hackernews is already too large imho) and you will find beautiful flourishing microscopic ecosystems that do perfectly well (think of speedrunning and other niche gamer communities, programmer communities, lgbt communities, etc.). People trust each other, are kind to each other, etc. It's just that they are out of the public's view precisely because they are precious and if the public ever discovers them, they're destroyed. Oh, also, it's always been this way on the internet, for decades. The good stuff is always hidden away from the public because the public is not fit for the good stuff. Just like you wouldn't let just anyone join your research team or your backyard grill party, you wouldn't let just anyone join a great community. You may call that exclusionary or even elitist, I call it having standards. Also, this post may be ironic because I'm shadowbanned. But I don't really care if anyone reads my messages, this is more of a thought dump.

apoph3nia 7y ago

> In low-trust societies, you never know. You expect to be cheated, often without recourse. You expect things not to be what they seem and for promises to be broken, and you don’t expect a reasonable and transparent process for recourse. It’s harder for markets to function and economies to develop in low-trust societies. It’s harder to find or extend credit, and it’s risky to pay in advance. 'Bout sums it up.

ChainOfFools 7y ago

In Trust We Trust

abathur 7y ago

If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale well. The exploiter can skate on anonymity if the community is large enough to continually prey on someone new. Spreading news of an exploiter's behavior to others can greatly improve how well this scales, but this behavior also requires trust. I think the more direct problem is with scale, and that the internet is at the nexus of many trust issues only because it has ramped up the scale and scope of many interactions. I'm not super optimistic on solving this intrinsic problem of trust in social exchanges, but I do see this framing as a silver lining. It seems at least plausible to iterate offline at significantly smaller scales on mechanisms for building and maintaining trust--and rectifying its breaches--in ways that do actually scale.

Sushi-san 7y ago
So, should we just try to ignore the larger-scale exploitation of trust?
- abathur 7y ago
  No, we shouldn't ignore it. But I think there's a risk of sending a lot of bright, productive people off to tilt at technological/interface/regulatory windmills in a way that leaves fundamental trust issues out of scope. Even if Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could wave a magic wand and remove every fake review, counterfeit product, scam, personal threat, or piece of false/fraudulent media, there would still be a trust issue. We still have to trust that they did what they said, that whatever disappeared was correctly identified, and that they didn't wrongly remove many legitimate items in the process. Even if the magic wand that makes these decisions has the utmost ethical and logical integrity, there will still be some mix of skeptics, cynics, malign actors, competitors, bots, etc. who chum the waters with accusations to the contrary. We'd still have to choose whether or not to trust this process and the actors behind it. So, I think it might be productive to focus on some smaller questions first. To be semi-arbitrary: can we find a protocol for reliably building a 50-person trust network with a limited scope/focus (maybe identifying reliable providers of a single service), where each participant knows a small fraction of the network, which is capable of meeting both its purpose and is capable of detecting and reforming or ejecting exploiters? If the first is tractable, can you expand the scope/focus of the networks and retain these properties? Can you compose a higher-order network that retains these properties?

Merrill 7y ago

It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society. Back in the day, when you placed a long distance call, an operator would come on to ask you what your number was so the call could be billed to you. A single call might be a dollar or a few dollars, which would be ten to several tens of dollars in today's money. No one would imagine that such a system would work today.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society. And that's probably rooted in people being fundamentally devalued and taken advantage of. We are seeing worse income inequality than in The Gilded Age and people act like it's a natural and unavoidable side effect of the existence of tech, the internet, whatever. That's BS. People created these things. If these things exploit people, it's because people designed them to exploit people. If people want people to be treated better, then people need to stop blaming machines for our social values. Tech merely magnifies those values. It doesn't cause them to exist. Bill Gates said that automating an efficient system amplifies the efficiency and automating an inefficient system amplifies the inefficiency. I propose that you can similarly amplify whatever underlying social values you have, whether that's something good -- pro education! -- or something bad -- racism and misogyny! And classism. We are using technology to amplify extractive economic practices, then blaming the robots as if Judgement Day had already arrived and Skynet is now in charge of our lives. (A la the Terminator movies.)
- coding123 7y ago
  I'd almost rather society just admit it's classist so it can be handled appropriately. Instead we're just in denial and no policies (for better or worse) will ever go towards what we need. I might sound conservative but I'm definitely democrat/liberal in most of my values. I just don't want to live near someone that is thuggish and may steal from my house.
kabwj 7y ago
That’s back when those systems could only be used by wealthy, educated people. Like usenet before the eternal September.

ex3xu 7y ago

I'm a bit surprised this article has zero reference to any interdisciplinary work on trust metrics, and stuff like trust propagation algorithms. I'm even more surprised, with the blockchain having becoming such a buzzword these days, that Bitcoin's proof-of-work approach was not even mentioned, let alone evaluated for effectiveness. And where's the love for Bruce Schneier [0]? I think the article's approach of referencing historic stragies from government and social infrastructure is a bit useless in this context because how much the problem changes when scarce information becomes abundant light-speed communication. I understand that they are trying to make the point that corporate overlords are bad, but maybe it would serve the purposes of the article better to just focus on the variables that matter, now that there's new capacities for transparency and accountability metrics based on some combination of historic behavior, web of trust node size, and other situational variables based on the medium -- like users that spend a lot of money, or consistently downvote known bad actors. Forcing users to have skin in the game with strict enforcement of transgressions is of course a reasonably effective, if coercive, strategy as well, and you can take the edge off this authoritarian approach if you pair it with some variant of restorative justice. My approach is perhaps not rigorously useful, but for my personal conceptions of trust in a world of bad actors, I like looking at strategies from Axelrod's iterated prisoner's dilemma[1]. Tit for Tat is famously a good strategy, and there's also a good strategy where you forgive on multiple cooperations but gradually increase the punishment of defectors to n times for their nth defection [2]. Though I should mention that tribalist collusion with other bad actors is unfortunately a very viable approach as well. [0]: https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/ https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/ [1]: https://axelrod.readthedocs.io https://axelrod.readthedocs.io [2]: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html

mensetmanusman 7y ago

The less trust there is, the more hardship there is. We are due for tough times ahead.

chmod775 7y ago

This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could. If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself. Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudonymously is now the norm for many people. This changed how people interact online, but it also changed their expectations. A full name however doesn't make a person or their opinions any more real than a pseudonym will. People will lie to you with a fake name just as shamelessly as they would hiding behind a pseudonym.

ravenstine 7y ago
I think it's more that the perception of it is being twisted. The media twists the way that the internet has worked since time immemorial as something that's suddenly gotten a lot worse, that all trolls are on par with criminals, and that we need to take drastic measures.
- chmod775 7y ago
  I wholly agree. But. The people who write those kinds of articles are mostly just your average Joe who uses the internet exclusively to browse Facebook and the like. Of course this gives them a twisted understanding of the medium. And then there's those who are just lying I guess (duh!). Plenty of reason for that with the whole fake news hysteria. If you don't want to risk ending up on the wrong end of that debate, your article is already written for you. Risky to defend the free(-er) internet nowadays or even just to refrain from attacking it. Further there's the fact that "a war on fake news" might give the established media an edge, but I'm unconvinced any reputable journalist would consciously consider that when deciding on the tone of his article. In any case you can also find plenty of articles displaying a better understanding of the matter. It's not like there's some secret global conspiracy against the free internet.
arugulum 7y ago
This goes beyond trust, I think. The social structures of Internet communities are very different from those those in real life, and I'm highly disturbed when people try to transplant IRL social norms to the Internet thoughtlessly. This is where we get bone-headed ideas like the real-names policy for "the Internet". Now, I am not discounting that there is actually toxic, horrific harassment that goes on the Internet. Doxxing and things like it are terrible and should never happen. Rather, I'm arguing that people need to acquire a sort of "street smarts" when navigating the Internet. Much like when you travel to a foreign country, you may expect a different culture with different norms, so it is the same with the Internet. What's rude in one culture is simply social convention in another. What is casual conversation in one is taboo in another. I spent a lot of time on the Internet growing up and I feel like I have been inoculated against the worst parts of the Internet, but at times it feels like many people haven't. A good example of this is how a lot of people and media take 4chan posts at face value, without realizing that a lot of it is completely self-aware and that the worst posts are almost always a game of who can post the most needlessly offensive thing possible. A lot of 4chan is an exercise is communication with no names and no filter. And yet some of my most informative conversations have been on 4chan precisely because there is no politeness filter, and posters can be as devastating critical as they want. But a reader also needs to learn how to tune in and out, correspondingly discount and read between the lines to get the most out of 4chan conversation, otherwise you simply come away with the idea that the community hates everything and everyone. For a more tame example, I follow a couple of Twitch streamers. For example, for streamer A, most communication with their chat is saccharine and supportive. But for streamer B, the chat makes fun off and insults him the whole way especially he makes a mistake, and the streamer, and the streamer gives as good as he gets and makes fun of the chat the whole time too. And this is normal and fun engagement for all parties. From afar, streamer B's community looks extremely toxic, but that's the furthest thing from the truth. (What is abhorrent is when you take streamer B's chat behavior into streamer A's chat, and that is frowned upon by all parties.) I believe that Internet activity should be diverse. There should be places where communication is an extension of real life (Facebook, emails), places of semi-anonymous and professional communication (Hacker News, certain subreddits/slack communitiees/GitHub), and then places where you should be able to go hogwild with whatever you want to say (fun subreddits, discord). Twitter is unfortunately one of those places that has had all of these mixed together, which is why I decided to have multiple Twitter accounts targeting professional/personal hobby communication. From what I hear, kids are already tuning to this idea, with things like public/private instagram accounts. The Internet is not all the same, and that's great. The Internet is not just real life, and that's great.

Proven 7y ago

Statist nonsense. > Better rules and technologies that authenticate online transactions; a different ad-tech infrastructure that resists fraud and preserves privacy; In other words, more rules, more government (including global, to "match" the Internet), mandatory fascist registration of every user for every service, and so on. Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather deal with low trust private companies.

buboard 7y ago

Can we trust the article that it is the internet that is becoming low trust, or is it reflecting society's trends? Trust has been fading in societies for decades [1] and apparently millenials are the most cynical [2] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us_v2_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us... https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/03/pew-millennial-trust.png https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/... First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were always predominantly american-culture oriented) are now global and thus reflect low trust cultures as well. Second, Goodhart's law, the internet metrics exist mainly to be gamed, thats why they should change. Reviews worked for a while, when the internet had a very different audience , they no longer work, that's normal wear and tear. Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews. Crowdsourcing no longer works. (Which explains why wikipedia should maintain a very conservatiove editing policy from now on)

HNLurker2 7y ago
Where is the footnotes?
- Wildgoose 7y ago
  The first and second link I presume.
chongli 7y ago
Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews Given that platforms earn a commission on every sale, why should they be trusted to procure specialists' reviews? Maybe they would prefer to hire professional charlatans to boost the reviews on everything, in order to drown out the legitimate opinions of aggrieved customers?
- buboard 7y ago
  Sure that's a great recipe to lose your customers. Shops have an interest in having honest reviews, and if they are gaming them, someone else will provide more honest ones.

macawfish 7y ago

Funny title change

taneq 7y ago

> Things are increasingly getting worse General purpose headline for attracting views, tying into the seductiveness of a general perception of doom and gloom. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the-world-is-getting-better-why-hardly-anyone-knows-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the...

okjustgo 7y ago

Maybe I missed something, but when was the internet ever high-trust? I feel like since it's inception savvy users always applied a healthy amount of skepticism and made thier own choice whether or not they believed something "on the internet". This included both facts on websites and conversing with other humans on chat.

buboard 7y ago
> but when was the internet ever high-trust? Exactly. It started when big corp tried to lure in more users by giving them free cheese, making them believe that the internet is a safe place to post your name, address, work life and sex habits. Everyone at the time thought it was crazy that people did that, and yeah they were right.

dschuetz 7y ago

That is not really surprising, is it? 20 years ago the Internet was populated with different people, because the subscriptions were expensive. And besides that, there was no mobile Internet, the user demographic was completely different. Now that literally everybody on this planet has access to the Internet, and, well, there are some rather unpleasant people out there, I think we've reached a new historical period with these "low-trust societies".

buboard 7y ago
Things were worse 20 years ago for the general internet , with few "trustable" brand names anyway. Piracy, viruses and scams were all over the place. If anything it's cleaner today, thanks to investments in security/antispam, but the mode of operation for scammers has changed.

aantix 7y ago

Welcome to digital socialism. It always ends with long lines for a few blocks of cheese.

galkk 7y ago

As it should be, I think. You don't inherently trust stranger on a street, you shouldn't do that on the internet as well.

pferde 7y ago
Not quite. While I wouldn't trust a random stranger on the street with e.g. my money or private data. However, I have no problem trusting them to honestly and truthfully answer questions like "how do I get to X from here?" or "here, can you please mark my bus ticket in that marking machine over there and hand it back to me? I can't quite reach it in this crowded bus". On the internet, however, I don't trust a random stranger (e.g. a youtube commenter, or a reddit user) with answering "2+2" correctly, let alone with something that involves my possessions, no matter how low-value they might be.

Allower 7y ago

no shit. people aren't trustworthy..

kerblang 7y ago

Maybe the problem is that ever since google the only metric anyone has bothered to devise is "popularity", which was never a particularly good indicator of truth to begin with.

adventured 7y ago
Google was built heavily on authority, not just popularity. Otherwise you could easily buy your way above Wikipedia, a non-profit organization (Wikimedia) - which ranks at or near the top for every query. Quora, or some other VC backed knowledge service with a couple hundred million to vaporize, would overtake Wikipedia through the direct purchasing of popularity. Then others would quickly follow, entirely wiping Wikipedia from the first pages. That can't be done. If it could, private equity via Answers.com and other such very low quality sites would have already done it, seeking billions of dollars in return on such positioning.
- buboard 7y ago
  Yeah google isn't built on popularity, but everything else is. And it's partly our fault for using aggregators.
- kerblang 7y ago
  Interesting, but how do they assign this authority? Anything to cite?

bawana 7y ago

scale is indeed the problem. scale has perverted our capitalist society as well, long before the internet. Adam Smith wrote about capitalism but he never envisioned Amazon. Changing a system from a one-to-one interaction to a one-to-many interaction should not allow us to apply the same rules. In math for example, commutativity works for single numbers, but not matrices.

flimflamvirII 7y ago

reflects perfectly it does