4 ms·

We've enjoyed a certain period (at least a couple of decades) of global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to be

We've enjoyed a certain period (at least a couple of decades) of global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews.

theshrike79 9mo ago
I've been trying to manifest Web of Trust coming back to help people navigate towards content that's created by humans. A system where I can mark other people as trusted and see who they trust, so when I navigate to a web page or in this case, a Github pull request, my WoT would tell me if this is a trusted person according to my network.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  You need a very complex weighing and revocation mechanism because once one bad player is in your web of trust they can become a node along which both other bad players and good players alike can join.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    Build a tree, cut the tree at the first link, now you get rid of all of them. Will have some collateral damage though, but maybe safe to assume actually "good players" can rejoin at another maybe more stable leaf
    - jacquesm 9mo ago
      It's a web, not a tree... so this is really not that simple.
      - embedding-shape 9mo ago
        Yeah, that's the problem, and my suggestion is to change it from a web to a tree instead, to solve that issue.
        theshrike79 9mo ago
        What is a web if not multiple trees that have interconnected branches? :)
        embedding-shape 9mo ago
        In the end, it's all lists anyways :)
        foobar10000 9mo ago
        Well - lists of tuples. Otherwise knows as a graph :)
        jacquesm 9mo ago
        That does not work because you won't have multiple parties vouching for a new entrant. That's the whole reason a web was chosen instead of a tree in the first place. Trees are super fragile in comparison, bad actors would have a much bigger chance of going undetected in a tree like arrangement.
  - theshrike79 9mo ago
    Then I can see who added that bad player and cut off everyone who trusted them (or decrease the trust level if the system allows that).
  - thephyber 9mo ago
    Trust in the real world is not immutable. It is constantly re-evaluated. So the Web of Trust concept should do this as well. Also, there needs to be some significant consequence to people who are bad actors and, transitively, to people who trust bad actors. The hardest part isn’t figuring out how to cut off the low quality nodes. It’s how to incentivize people to join a network where the consequences are so high that you really won’t want to violate trust. It can’t simply be a free account that only requires an a verifiable email address. It will have to require a significant investment in verifying real world identity, preventing multiple accounts, reducing account hijackings, etc. those are all expensive and high friction.
    - phoplar 9mo ago
      I really don't want to expand the surveillance state...
      - theshrike79 9mo ago
        Are GPG signing parties part of the “surveillance state”? It is the exact thing this system needs
  - 0ckpuppet 9mo ago
    aka clown explosion
- IsTom 9mo ago
  Unfortunately trust isn't transitive.
- thephyber 9mo ago
  I would go even further. I only want to see content created by people who are in a chain of trust with me. AI slop is so cheap that it has created a blight on content platforms. People will seek out authentic content in many spaces. People will even pay to avoid the mass “deception for profit” industry (eg. Industries where companies bot ratings/reviews to profit and where social media accounts are created purely for rage bait / engagement farming). But reputation in a WoT network has to be paramount. The invite system needs a “vouch” so there are consequences to you and your upstream vouch if there is a breach of trust (eg. lying, paid promotions, spamming). Consequences need to be far more severe than the marginal profit to be made from these breaches.
- jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
  At protocol (Bluesky) will I hope have better trust signals, since your Personal Data Server stores your microblog/posts and a bunch of other data. And the data is public. It's much harder to convincingly fake being a cross-media human. If someone showed up on at-proto powered book review site like https://bookhive.buzz https://bookhive.buzz and started trying to post nonsense reviews, or started running bots, it would be much more transparent what was afoot. More explicit trust signalling would be very fun to add.
- dizhn 9mo ago
  Trust and do what with it though. I trust Chomsky but I can mark his interviews "Don't show" because I'm sick of them. Or like Facebook lets your follow 'friend' but ignore them. So trust and do what with that trust? A network of people who'll let each other move on short notice ? Something like that?
- solaire_oa 9mo ago
  I've been thinking this exact thing! But it's too abstract a thought for me to try creating anything yet. A curation network, one which uses SSL-style chain-of-trust (and RSS-style feeds maybe?) seems like it could be a solution, but I'm not able to advance the thought from just being an amorphous idea.
- 1718627440 9mo ago
  The problem is that even the people I would happily take advise from when meeting in real life, occasionally mindlessly copy AI-output about subjects they don't know about. And they see nothing wrong with it.
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life I don't think it's coming to an end. It's getting more difficult, yes, but not impossible. Currently I'm working on a game, and since I'm not an artist, I pay artists to create the art. The person I'm working closest with I have basically no idea who they are, except their name, email and the country they live in. Otherwise it's basically "they send me a draft > I review/provide feedback > Iterate until done > I send them money", and both of us know basically nothing of the other. I agree that trust in the individual is becoming more important, but it's always been one of the most important thing for collaborations or anything that involves other human beings. We've tried to move that trust to other system, but seems instead we're only able to move the trust to the people building and maintaining those systems, instead of getting rid of it completely. Maybe, "trust" is just here to stay, and we all be better off as soon as we start to realize this, and reconnect with the people around us and connect with the people on the other side of the world.
- contrast 9mo ago
  Your tone is disagreement, but it's not clear why? There is an individual who you trust to do good work, and who works well with you. They're not anonymous. Addressing the topic of this thread, you know (or should know) that it is not AI slop. That is a significant amount of knowledge and trust in an individual, and the very point I thought the GP was making.
- willis936 9mo ago
  How do you know it's a person on the other end? Would you even see a difference if you had a computer generate that art? These are very important questions that cut to the heart of "what is art".
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    > How do you know it's a person on the other end? Would you even see a difference if you had a computer generate that art? Unless AI companies already developed and launched plugins/extensions for people to do something that looks like hand drawn sketches inside of Clip Studio, and suddenly got a lot better at understanding prompts (including having inspiration of their own), then I'm pretty sure it's a human. I don't think I'd get to see in-progress sketches and it wouldn't be as good at understanding what I wanted to have had changes then. I've used various generative AI image generators (latest one Qwen Image 2511 and a whole bunch of others) and none of them, including with "prompt enhancements" can take very vague descriptions of "I want it to feel like X" or "I'm not sure about Y but something like Z" and turn it into something that looks acceptable. At least not yet. And because I've spent a lot of time with various generative image making processes and models, I'm fairly confident I'd recognize if that was what was happening.
agumonkey 9mo ago
trust in trust.. as programmer would say the web brought instant infinite 'data', we used to have limits, limits that would kinda ensure the reality of what is communicated.. we should go back to that it's efficient
globular-toast 9mo ago
Some projects, like Linux (the kernel) have always been developed that way. Linus has described the trust model in the kernel to be very much "web of trust". You don't just submit patches directly to Linus, you submit them to module maintainers who are trusted by subsystem maintainers and who are all ultimately, indirectly trusted by the branch maintainer (Linus).
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jruohonen 9mo ago
> Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews. I'd add science here too.

theshrike79 9mo ago

I've been trying to manifest Web of Trust coming back to help people navigate towards content that's created by humans. A system where I can mark other people as trusted and see who they trust, so when I navigate to a web page or in this case, a Github pull request, my WoT would tell me if this is a trusted person according to my network.

jacquesm 9mo ago
You need a very complex weighing and revocation mechanism because once one bad player is in your web of trust they can become a node along which both other bad players and good players alike can join.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Build a tree, cut the tree at the first link, now you get rid of all of them. Will have some collateral damage though, but maybe safe to assume actually "good players" can rejoin at another maybe more stable leaf
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    It's a web, not a tree... so this is really not that simple.
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      Yeah, that's the problem, and my suggestion is to change it from a web to a tree instead, to solve that issue.
      - theshrike79 9mo ago
        What is a web if not multiple trees that have interconnected branches? :)
        embedding-shape 9mo ago
        In the end, it's all lists anyways :)
        foobar10000 9mo ago
        Well - lists of tuples. Otherwise knows as a graph :)
      - jacquesm 9mo ago
        That does not work because you won't have multiple parties vouching for a new entrant. That's the whole reason a web was chosen instead of a tree in the first place. Trees are super fragile in comparison, bad actors would have a much bigger chance of going undetected in a tree like arrangement.
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  Then I can see who added that bad player and cut off everyone who trusted them (or decrease the trust level if the system allows that).
- thephyber 9mo ago
  Trust in the real world is not immutable. It is constantly re-evaluated. So the Web of Trust concept should do this as well. Also, there needs to be some significant consequence to people who are bad actors and, transitively, to people who trust bad actors. The hardest part isn’t figuring out how to cut off the low quality nodes. It’s how to incentivize people to join a network where the consequences are so high that you really won’t want to violate trust. It can’t simply be a free account that only requires an a verifiable email address. It will have to require a significant investment in verifying real world identity, preventing multiple accounts, reducing account hijackings, etc. those are all expensive and high friction.
  - phoplar 9mo ago
    I really don't want to expand the surveillance state...
    - theshrike79 9mo ago
      Are GPG signing parties part of the “surveillance state”? It is the exact thing this system needs
- 0ckpuppet 9mo ago
  aka clown explosion
IsTom 9mo ago
Unfortunately trust isn't transitive.
thephyber 9mo ago
I would go even further. I only want to see content created by people who are in a chain of trust with me. AI slop is so cheap that it has created a blight on content platforms. People will seek out authentic content in many spaces. People will even pay to avoid the mass “deception for profit” industry (eg. Industries where companies bot ratings/reviews to profit and where social media accounts are created purely for rage bait / engagement farming). But reputation in a WoT network has to be paramount. The invite system needs a “vouch” so there are consequences to you and your upstream vouch if there is a breach of trust (eg. lying, paid promotions, spamming). Consequences need to be far more severe than the marginal profit to be made from these breaches.
jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
At protocol (Bluesky) will I hope have better trust signals, since your Personal Data Server stores your microblog/posts and a bunch of other data. And the data is public. It's much harder to convincingly fake being a cross-media human. If someone showed up on at-proto powered book review site like https://bookhive.buzz https://bookhive.buzz and started trying to post nonsense reviews, or started running bots, it would be much more transparent what was afoot. More explicit trust signalling would be very fun to add.
dizhn 9mo ago
Trust and do what with it though. I trust Chomsky but I can mark his interviews "Don't show" because I'm sick of them. Or like Facebook lets your follow 'friend' but ignore them. So trust and do what with that trust? A network of people who'll let each other move on short notice ? Something like that?
solaire_oa 9mo ago
I've been thinking this exact thing! But it's too abstract a thought for me to try creating anything yet. A curation network, one which uses SSL-style chain-of-trust (and RSS-style feeds maybe?) seems like it could be a solution, but I'm not able to advance the thought from just being an amorphous idea.
1718627440 9mo ago
The problem is that even the people I would happily take advise from when meeting in real life, occasionally mindlessly copy AI-output about subjects they don't know about. And they see nothing wrong with it.

embedding-shape 9mo ago

> global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life I don't think it's coming to an end. It's getting more difficult, yes, but not impossible. Currently I'm working on a game, and since I'm not an artist, I pay artists to create the art. The person I'm working closest with I have basically no idea who they are, except their name, email and the country they live in. Otherwise it's basically "they send me a draft > I review/provide feedback > Iterate until done > I send them money", and both of us know basically nothing of the other. I agree that trust in the individual is becoming more important, but it's always been one of the most important thing for collaborations or anything that involves other human beings. We've tried to move that trust to other system, but seems instead we're only able to move the trust to the people building and maintaining those systems, instead of getting rid of it completely. Maybe, "trust" is just here to stay, and we all be better off as soon as we start to realize this, and reconnect with the people around us and connect with the people on the other side of the world.

contrast 9mo ago
Your tone is disagreement, but it's not clear why? There is an individual who you trust to do good work, and who works well with you. They're not anonymous. Addressing the topic of this thread, you know (or should know) that it is not AI slop. That is a significant amount of knowledge and trust in an individual, and the very point I thought the GP was making.
willis936 9mo ago
How do you know it's a person on the other end? Would you even see a difference if you had a computer generate that art? These are very important questions that cut to the heart of "what is art".
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > How do you know it's a person on the other end? Would you even see a difference if you had a computer generate that art? Unless AI companies already developed and launched plugins/extensions for people to do something that looks like hand drawn sketches inside of Clip Studio, and suddenly got a lot better at understanding prompts (including having inspiration of their own), then I'm pretty sure it's a human. I don't think I'd get to see in-progress sketches and it wouldn't be as good at understanding what I wanted to have had changes then. I've used various generative AI image generators (latest one Qwen Image 2511 and a whole bunch of others) and none of them, including with "prompt enhancements" can take very vague descriptions of "I want it to feel like X" or "I'm not sure about Y but something like Z" and turn it into something that looks acceptable. At least not yet. And because I've spent a lot of time with various generative image making processes and models, I'm fairly confident I'd recognize if that was what was happening.

agumonkey 9mo ago

trust in trust.. as programmer would say the web brought instant infinite 'data', we used to have limits, limits that would kinda ensure the reality of what is communicated.. we should go back to that it's efficient

globular-toast 9mo ago

Some projects, like Linux (the kernel) have always been developed that way. Linus has described the trust model in the kernel to be very much "web of trust". You don't just submit patches directly to Linus, you submit them to module maintainers who are trusted by subsystem maintainers and who are all ultimately, indirectly trusted by the branch maintainer (Linus).

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

jruohonen 9mo ago

> Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews. I'd add science here too.