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This reminds me of something Matt Levine said recently. It went something like "modern finance will find a way to make a risk-free asset risky". To me it's simi
by CogitoCogito 3y ago
This reminds me of something Matt Levine said recently. It went something like "modern finance will find a way to make a risk-free asset risky". To me it's similar to the idea that reputation has value and hence destroying it to turn a profit can make economic sense. Hence corporate raiders destroying 100 year old brands in a couple years by extracting all good brand value. And then you have Google doing some sort of ranking where being at the top has worth. So then whatever algorithms there are get gamed which eventually leads to a loss in useful signal. Ignoring any critiques of mistakes or shortsightness of Google, it seems to me that this is in some sense inevitable.
I saw a poster (here on Hacker News maybe?) make the point that the fact that anonymous reviews on e.g. Amazon are no longer trustworthy is the historical norm. The fact that we had ~20 years were we could maybe trust people without their reputation was the weird part not the fact that you no longer can trust them. I mean personally I find it all sad, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Our trust in anonymous people has value and hence exploiting it (and hence destroying that trust) makes sense.
I think all of this is some human version of social entropy at work. Maybe it's a historical ebb and flow over time, but it seems like a natural result of our human nature.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago> The fact that we had ~20 years were we could maybe trust people without their reputation was the weird part not the fact that you no longer can trust them. I disagree, they did have reputation. The fact the those anonymous people were online and posting reviews during that specific timeframe in that specific environment served as a filter. Once everyone was online, the filter no longer filtered, and so the reputation caused by the filter disappeared too.
- CogitoCogito 3y agoI think that's a fair description of things. Taken things with your vocabulary, the reputation that existed was exploited for profit until the reputation was not more.
- mbg721 3y agoI think of the explotation of reputation as a form of arbitrage resulting from social norms loosening in the 1960s. It's another expression of the postmodern idea "Well, our institutions do untrustworthy things, so let's tear them all down!" At some point we realize we need institutions again.
- CogitoCogito 3y agoYeah I don't mean to say that it's all hopeless or something. More that there are forces that build up and forces that tear down and they are all kind of part of the same thing. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
- rchaud 3y ago20 years ago I would spend hours browsing the Amazon.com music section because there would be hundreds of real-people reviews of records. Today those types of honest reviews are long gone. I have to use all my spidey senses to figure out if a review was paid for, or even written by a human.