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I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good. If enough people were willing to publi

by js8 2mo ago

I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good. If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy. I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.

mulmen 2mo ago
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new. If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation. I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
- js8 2mo ago
  I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms: - "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human." - "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B." The collection of these statements would be the public social graph. The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form: - "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X." Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement. So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - victorbjorklund 2mo ago
    Totally would not be abused. Don’t like politican/journalist/etc A? Let’s just mass report as fake person.
    - alt227 2mo ago
      Exactly, the 'social graph' is also a huge source of cancel culture.
    - js8 2mo ago
      Mass reporting means spending huge amount of reputation which doesn't really invalidate reputation of people who still certify that the person exists. The problem with the current systems is that reputation buying is not transparent. In my system, it would be a public record, who endorsed who. So you could go back and track the fake reputation. Also real people have some TTL with their accounts. Unlike links, "I am real person" is not nearly as fungible.
  - alt227 2mo ago
    This is exactly how bubbles of influence appear. Rarely do people from different leanings (social, political, economical etc) have spheres of opinion which intersect, and therefore get trapped in areas of general agreement. The social graph cannot be trusted to create a generally trusted source, because peoples innate distrust of things which differ from their own opinion skew this model heavily.
    - js8 2mo ago
      I should have noted, my comment is about facts. Opinion you can have, if you think it's beneficial for you not to trust (or trust) some nodes, do so! The public social graph would be about who is a human, that can certify facts. Their opinion wouldn't really matter until you chose it to matter for you. Them being a human witness would only add credence to the accounts of the facts they witnessed, nothing more. You can still choose to disbelief the event if you have a good reason to (for example, even if you might believe a guy from Russia is a real person based on his social graph, if he certifies an event in Michigan, you might be skeptical of that account and decide to lower your own trust in that person). So there is a difference between the shared social graph - which is about a collective belief of who is a person, and your own trust, which you can modify as you wish. Unlike with Google and other big tech providers, there is not a singular "algorithm for trust" that can be manipulated. You seem to be saying it will fail because people are tribal. I believe it will not fail, because the benefits of knowing the local social graph of each person will outweigh the tendency for opinion to split based on tribe. And the reason I think so is that trust evolved and exists in society; we do not only trust ourselves, and that's only possible if something like a social graph can work. The only issue is the scale, which can be solved by using a computer instead of computing it in our little heads.
zombot 2mo ago
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit. Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
- js8 2mo ago
  I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you. By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today. It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
  - zombot 2mo ago
    Then go and implement it. Either you make the world a better place or you learn how collision with reality impacts ideas.
    - js8 2mo ago
      Maybe.. too many other interesting things to work on.
  - alt227 2mo ago
    So what happens when people are paid or otherwise incentivised to 'trust'? This model was used in the beginning of the web, where links to your site from a well trusted website would increase the score and therefore SEO of your own site. This very quickly turned into a business of people selling hidden paid site links, and evolved into the paid editorial model we see on every news site today.
    - 2mo ago
frollogaston 2mo ago
They do. It's already like this with business recommendations, always use a personal reference before anything else. I've thought about making some digital reputation system that cannot be gamed. You can rep people you know and then query if there's any path of rep from you to a random person. The global number of reps you have doesn't matter, only paths. Problem is this only works if the target person can't tell that you repped them, which is impossible to hide because they can just rep you with a fake account then see if there's a path to their real account. But maybe with some fuzzing.

by js8 2mo ago

mulmen 2mo ago

The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new. If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation. I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.

js8 2mo ago
I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms: - "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human." - "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B." The collection of these statements would be the public social graph. The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form: - "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X." Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement. So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- victorbjorklund 2mo ago
  Totally would not be abused. Don’t like politican/journalist/etc A? Let’s just mass report as fake person.
  - alt227 2mo ago
    Exactly, the 'social graph' is also a huge source of cancel culture.
  - js8 2mo ago
    Mass reporting means spending huge amount of reputation which doesn't really invalidate reputation of people who still certify that the person exists. The problem with the current systems is that reputation buying is not transparent. In my system, it would be a public record, who endorsed who. So you could go back and track the fake reputation. Also real people have some TTL with their accounts. Unlike links, "I am real person" is not nearly as fungible.
- alt227 2mo ago
  This is exactly how bubbles of influence appear. Rarely do people from different leanings (social, political, economical etc) have spheres of opinion which intersect, and therefore get trapped in areas of general agreement. The social graph cannot be trusted to create a generally trusted source, because peoples innate distrust of things which differ from their own opinion skew this model heavily.
  - js8 2mo ago
    I should have noted, my comment is about facts. Opinion you can have, if you think it's beneficial for you not to trust (or trust) some nodes, do so! The public social graph would be about who is a human, that can certify facts. Their opinion wouldn't really matter until you chose it to matter for you. Them being a human witness would only add credence to the accounts of the facts they witnessed, nothing more. You can still choose to disbelief the event if you have a good reason to (for example, even if you might believe a guy from Russia is a real person based on his social graph, if he certifies an event in Michigan, you might be skeptical of that account and decide to lower your own trust in that person). So there is a difference between the shared social graph - which is about a collective belief of who is a person, and your own trust, which you can modify as you wish. Unlike with Google and other big tech providers, there is not a singular "algorithm for trust" that can be manipulated. You seem to be saying it will fail because people are tribal. I believe it will not fail, because the benefits of knowing the local social graph of each person will outweigh the tendency for opinion to split based on tribe. And the reason I think so is that trust evolved and exists in society; we do not only trust ourselves, and that's only possible if something like a social graph can work. The only issue is the scale, which can be solved by using a computer instead of computing it in our little heads.

zombot 2mo ago

It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit. Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"

js8 2mo ago
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you. By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today. It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
- zombot 2mo ago
  Then go and implement it. Either you make the world a better place or you learn how collision with reality impacts ideas.
  - js8 2mo ago
    Maybe.. too many other interesting things to work on.
- alt227 2mo ago
  So what happens when people are paid or otherwise incentivised to 'trust'? This model was used in the beginning of the web, where links to your site from a well trusted website would increase the score and therefore SEO of your own site. This very quickly turned into a business of people selling hidden paid site links, and evolved into the paid editorial model we see on every news site today.
  - 2mo ago

frollogaston 2mo ago

They do. It's already like this with business recommendations, always use a personal reference before anything else. I've thought about making some digital reputation system that cannot be gamed. You can rep people you know and then query if there's any path of rep from you to a random person. The global number of reps you have doesn't matter, only paths. Problem is this only works if the target person can't tell that you repped them, which is impossible to hide because they can just rep you with a fake account then see if there's a path to their real account. But maybe with some fuzzing.