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I agree that it seems like the problem is more a lack of reputation and trust than decentralization. But how do we build trust in a decentralized network the si

I agree that it seems like the problem is more a lack of reputation and trust than decentralization. But how do we build trust in a decentralized network the size of the human population? How do I know if this username on my screen is publishing in good faith without some kind of transitive trust? I might trust someone my real-world friends trust when it comes to local gossip. If I want trustworthy national news my only recourse seems to be to go through a centralized journalism institute. But which one? Well I'll probably look at what people around are looking at. If there's a national broadcaster or dominant cable news channel in my country I'll probably look at that, but if I don't like what I see I may be biased to go search out another institution that I find more agreeable. Then you get things like Macedonian teens running sites dressed up to look like US-based newspapers posting straight-up bullshit because there's always a market telling people what they want to hear. How can we build a decentralized system to overcome people's biases and laziness? People are going to gravitate to sources their friends and family use, and collectively to sources that fit their preexisting beliefs. It's no wonder we're in this situation where people are struggling to agree on reality. >> Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content But what if a decentralized network of trust collectively agree that covid is a hoax and the Earth is flat? I'm not sure if the (de)centralization of the underlying technology really has an impact on that problem.

FreeTrade 6y ago
Transitive trust / Web-of-Trust is the solution I think. You do need to find one trustworthy entry point to such a web of trust, maybe a journalist or a news source that you trust. Once you trust one node in a network that is providing trust ratings of other nodes, you start to have some footing to judge content and authors. Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.
- rablackburn 6y ago
  > Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable. I wish I had your optimism... :(
  - c22 6y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population? If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so. If the concern is that some people will hold mistaken beliefs then I am not sure there is a technological or sociological solution to the problem. I believe there will be people holding mistaken beliefs regardless of whether the world's information channels are "decentralized" but I agree with your parent's poster that a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
    - rablackburn 6y ago
      > I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population? Not at all, but the fact is that these beliefs are growing at all thanks to the web. There are always going to be some people with completely illogical fringe beliefs. Conspiracy theories were always a thing. It's just not that despite the quality of these conspiracy theories dropping (seriously...the Earth is flat? That hasn't been a topic of debate for a loooong time), their reach and number of adherents are going up. That seems like a pretty clear regression in our society. We shouldn't be complacent about regression. > ... a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time. But I don't understand how decentralized tech is somehow going to be more immune to this than the current web, which is already decentralized in most ways. Anyone can host a blog on their PC and publish what they want. We thought the blogosphere was the start of this golden age. But people aren't techies, they choose to centralise with providers like Google for gmail (email is a federated, decentralized protocol!) and Facebook for social media. If IPFS takes off, what makes it immune from people going with the same massive provider all their friends and family are on? There's no hard barrier stopping everyone from moving off Google and Facebook tomorrow with the current web, but they won't. The big players understand this, that's why Google pays Apple billions a year to make Google the default search engine. That's all it takes to ensure everyone keeps using Google. Competition is literally a click away, people just don't click. That said, I do support the decentralization efforts. It seems like an improvement over the current technology. I just don't buy into the hype that it's going to cure any of the problems we're seeing now. Our problem is less one of censorship, more overload of bots and bad actors. > If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so. Except that it's a real, measurable regression in our knowledge as a species. I get the point you're making but that doesn't give me comfort, hence the pessimism.
- scrollbar 6y ago
  I’m interested in this approach, it is broadly what I’ve been wondering about since 2016. Is anyone working on systems like this right now? Any projects come to mind?
  - thu2111 6y ago
    The web already provides this: people or groups can publish under semi-stable names, linked to their real identity or not, and people can hyperlink to each other's content. The link graph is the web of trust and Google famously uses it to rank content. What is it really missing?
    - scrollbar 6y ago
      I guess theoretically and in some ways in practice. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “search through the web only returning results bookmarked with 2 degrees of trust” or something like that. Where each of the nodes are not documents but are identities- which may often tie 1:1 to a human
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Isn't that basically newspapers? Journalists post articles and links to indicate they're at least interesting if not trustworthy, and usually under their own name. Webs of trust never worked for cryptography though.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      At the very least, people would need a reliable way of indicating whether the site they are linking to is one they are endorsing or criticising, and there would need to be some clever crawler that can calculate a trustworthiness score from this graph for each page you visit. Presumably this would be implemented as a browser extension. It could also recommend similar pages with a higher score, and maybe highly scored pages that offer a different perspective on the same topic as the page you are reading.
      - 6y ago
- tbrownaw 6y ago
  Right now, on Twitter, I can have a list of people I follow. I assume this is something like saying I "trust" them in some way. I get a feed full of stuff from them, and stuff they've re-tweeted ie said explicitly that they trust, etc. The whole "social network" thing really is approximately the same shape as an explicitly reified "web of trust". I would not expect the results to be terribly different, other than the added effort of having additional explicit system entities to manage.

FreeTrade 6y ago

Transitive trust / Web-of-Trust is the solution I think. You do need to find one trustworthy entry point to such a web of trust, maybe a journalist or a news source that you trust. Once you trust one node in a network that is providing trust ratings of other nodes, you start to have some footing to judge content and authors. Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.

rablackburn 6y ago
> Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable. I wish I had your optimism... :(
- c22 6y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population? If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so. If the concern is that some people will hold mistaken beliefs then I am not sure there is a technological or sociological solution to the problem. I believe there will be people holding mistaken beliefs regardless of whether the world's information channels are "decentralized" but I agree with your parent's poster that a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
  - rablackburn 6y ago
    > I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population? Not at all, but the fact is that these beliefs are growing at all thanks to the web. There are always going to be some people with completely illogical fringe beliefs. Conspiracy theories were always a thing. It's just not that despite the quality of these conspiracy theories dropping (seriously...the Earth is flat? That hasn't been a topic of debate for a loooong time), their reach and number of adherents are going up. That seems like a pretty clear regression in our society. We shouldn't be complacent about regression. > ... a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time. But I don't understand how decentralized tech is somehow going to be more immune to this than the current web, which is already decentralized in most ways. Anyone can host a blog on their PC and publish what they want. We thought the blogosphere was the start of this golden age. But people aren't techies, they choose to centralise with providers like Google for gmail (email is a federated, decentralized protocol!) and Facebook for social media. If IPFS takes off, what makes it immune from people going with the same massive provider all their friends and family are on? There's no hard barrier stopping everyone from moving off Google and Facebook tomorrow with the current web, but they won't. The big players understand this, that's why Google pays Apple billions a year to make Google the default search engine. That's all it takes to ensure everyone keeps using Google. Competition is literally a click away, people just don't click. That said, I do support the decentralization efforts. It seems like an improvement over the current technology. I just don't buy into the hype that it's going to cure any of the problems we're seeing now. Our problem is less one of censorship, more overload of bots and bad actors. > If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so. Except that it's a real, measurable regression in our knowledge as a species. I get the point you're making but that doesn't give me comfort, hence the pessimism.
scrollbar 6y ago
I’m interested in this approach, it is broadly what I’ve been wondering about since 2016. Is anyone working on systems like this right now? Any projects come to mind?
- thu2111 6y ago
  The web already provides this: people or groups can publish under semi-stable names, linked to their real identity or not, and people can hyperlink to each other's content. The link graph is the web of trust and Google famously uses it to rank content. What is it really missing?
  - scrollbar 6y ago
    I guess theoretically and in some ways in practice. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “search through the web only returning results bookmarked with 2 degrees of trust” or something like that. Where each of the nodes are not documents but are identities- which may often tie 1:1 to a human
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Isn't that basically newspapers? Journalists post articles and links to indicate they're at least interesting if not trustworthy, and usually under their own name. Webs of trust never worked for cryptography though.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    At the very least, people would need a reliable way of indicating whether the site they are linking to is one they are endorsing or criticising, and there would need to be some clever crawler that can calculate a trustworthiness score from this graph for each page you visit. Presumably this would be implemented as a browser extension. It could also recommend similar pages with a higher score, and maybe highly scored pages that offer a different perspective on the same topic as the page you are reading.
    - 6y ago
tbrownaw 6y ago
Right now, on Twitter, I can have a list of people I follow. I assume this is something like saying I "trust" them in some way. I get a feed full of stuff from them, and stuff they've re-tweeted ie said explicitly that they trust, etc. The whole "social network" thing really is approximately the same shape as an explicitly reified "web of trust". I would not expect the results to be terribly different, other than the added effort of having additional explicit system entities to manage.