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I've heard the phrase "web of trust" and googled it, but found something very different to what I have in mind. There is a tradition, going back to The Well, o

I've heard the phrase "web of trust" and googled it, but found something very different to what I have in mind. There is a tradition, going back to The Well, of having a serious adult forum invaded by children and their poo, pee, belly, bum posts. The adult forum resists and is destroyed. My idea is that the different users are all legitimate and that success comes through coexistance. By coexistance I mean obliviousness. Chrome-Dome posts a cerebral contribution of great erudition. Chuckle-Head replies with vulgar mockery. In a traditional forum Chrome-Dome is driven away by this. The traditional response is to try to find a way to drive Chuckle-Head away instead. The problem is that it is Chuckle-Head who is the popular figure, read and admired by hundreds of lame brains. Chrome-Dome is read and admired by dozens. So systems of voting and karma end up reflecting the fact that the mob greatly out numbers the elite. The vision driving Outer Circle is that Chrome-Dome is happy with a white list of authors of some intellectual pedigree. If Outer Circle is a success, with millions involved, Chrome-Dome's, err, corner of the circle has thousands of authors, more than he can actually read, so he never gets round to expanding his white list to the point that he sees Chuckle-Head's post. Chrome-Dome is oblivious to the vulgar mockery around him and is not driven away by it. Simultaneously, no administrator is banning Chuckle-Head, and Chuckle-Head is not retaliating by organising a DDoS of the site. Why would he? He has white listed his mates and is larking about, mocking the occasion boring adult he stumbles across, and enjoying acting his age. The goal of Outer-Circle is the coexistance of incompatibles through invisibility. Suppose that Middle-Brow, whom Chrome-Dome reads, comes across Chuckle-Head's vulgar mockery and replies to it, complaining that it is rude. We don't want this making it visible to Chrome-Dome. That would be a failure of invisibility and might drive Chrome-Dome away. On the other hand, Chrome-Dome isn't reading all the replies to his posts. Ordinarily when Middle-Brow replies to a reply to one of Chrome-Dome's posts, the Outer-Circle software should promote the middle post to Chrome-Dome's attention, least there be a break in the threading. So the fine detail, of letting Middle-Brow control whether his replies do or do not implicitly endorse the comments to which they are attached, is actually essential to the overall plan.

JoachimSchipper 17y ago
I'm not convinced you understood what I was saying in the way I intended it to be understood, so let me clarify. PGP's web of trust is designed to answer the question "is john@example.org who he says he is". A user is "valid" (in the above sense) if you have marked it as such, or if a sufficient number of users of sound judgement vouch for it. (There are multiple levels of "vouching", and the meanings of "of sound judgement" and "sufficient number" are user-configurable; and "users" are really "keys".) By default, PGP believes that users who are vouched for as in the above model are valid but not of sound judgement (i.e. we don't let this users vouch for others), but you could easily change that. The point I was trying to make is that, if you replace "PGP" by "Outer Circle" and define "valid" to be "worth reading", the above sounds a lot like what you want to achieve. It has also been deployed in the real world for quite a while, so you can see to what extent it has worked (it's rather succesful in a very small part of the population). Additionally, PGP is effectively decentralized, even though day-to-day operation uses keyservers. This model is a lot easier than full peer-to-peer (which, in the presence of NAT, is probably not possible without centralized servers anyway), and a combination of clever crypto and fallback options means that PGP does not rely on keyservers. Look at the documentation for more details. Notwithstanding the above, which is honestly intended to be good advice, I don't see how your system is ever going to become sufficiently widespread to be worth learning for the average user, and I don't really see the value in keeping a medium that's 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users - just let them migrate.
- alan-crowe 17y ago
  Thank you for expanding on that. In trying see the relevance of PGP's web of trust to Outer Circle, two things throw me off the scent. First, identity in Outer Circle is simply a public key used to decode each signed post. When an identity is highly regarded, others will wish to impersonate it, in order to get their writing or advertisements read, but they are unable to do so because they do not know the private key. Prevention of passing off is the whole of identity in Outer Circle. We do not care if users have multiple accounts nor do we care whether group accounts are acknowledged or pretend to be an individual. Circle jerks, be they conspiracies or sock puppets, do not undermine the Outer Circle system because an identity, even in good standing, has no right of recommendation. If some-one on your direct list starts reading crap you "shallow" him or drop him, and that is part of the normal operation of the system as tastes change (his or yours) or time pressures squeeze. So it is confusing to me to read about web of trust because Outer Circle has no notion of who somebody really is. Ossian is welcome. Second is Outer Circles core concept of the coexistence of incompatible through invisibility. Whether somebody is who he says he is is a valid concept that is either true or false. I see the idea that a post is worth reading or not worth reading is a trap. There is no truth of the matter and that is the heart of the reason that traditional forums with moderation and meta-moderation collapse. They are trying to forge a consensus when they should be facilitating disagreement. You doubt the value in keeping a medium that is 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users. That foregrounds the issue of scaling. I picture Outer Circle growing from a thousand elite users to million users, 99% hoi polloi 1% elite. So the proportion of erudite users falls, but the absolute number rises tenfold. I see the endless migration of the nomadic elite as an important problem, preventing them reaching critical mass. Do you still think that PGP's web of trust is relevant? How do I relate "is john@example.org who he says he is", which has type boolean, to "john is worth readng", which has type function from users to boolean?

JoachimSchipper 17y ago

I'm not convinced you understood what I was saying in the way I intended it to be understood, so let me clarify. PGP's web of trust is designed to answer the question "is john@example.org who he says he is". A user is "valid" (in the above sense) if you have marked it as such, or if a sufficient number of users of sound judgement vouch for it. (There are multiple levels of "vouching", and the meanings of "of sound judgement" and "sufficient number" are user-configurable; and "users" are really "keys".) By default, PGP believes that users who are vouched for as in the above model are valid but not of sound judgement (i.e. we don't let this users vouch for others), but you could easily change that. The point I was trying to make is that, if you replace "PGP" by "Outer Circle" and define "valid" to be "worth reading", the above sounds a lot like what you want to achieve. It has also been deployed in the real world for quite a while, so you can see to what extent it has worked (it's rather succesful in a very small part of the population). Additionally, PGP is effectively decentralized, even though day-to-day operation uses keyservers. This model is a lot easier than full peer-to-peer (which, in the presence of NAT, is probably not possible without centralized servers anyway), and a combination of clever crypto and fallback options means that PGP does not rely on keyservers. Look at the documentation for more details. Notwithstanding the above, which is honestly intended to be good advice, I don't see how your system is ever going to become sufficiently widespread to be worth learning for the average user, and I don't really see the value in keeping a medium that's 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users - just let them migrate.

alan-crowe 17y ago
Thank you for expanding on that. In trying see the relevance of PGP's web of trust to Outer Circle, two things throw me off the scent. First, identity in Outer Circle is simply a public key used to decode each signed post. When an identity is highly regarded, others will wish to impersonate it, in order to get their writing or advertisements read, but they are unable to do so because they do not know the private key. Prevention of passing off is the whole of identity in Outer Circle. We do not care if users have multiple accounts nor do we care whether group accounts are acknowledged or pretend to be an individual. Circle jerks, be they conspiracies or sock puppets, do not undermine the Outer Circle system because an identity, even in good standing, has no right of recommendation. If some-one on your direct list starts reading crap you "shallow" him or drop him, and that is part of the normal operation of the system as tastes change (his or yours) or time pressures squeeze. So it is confusing to me to read about web of trust because Outer Circle has no notion of who somebody really is. Ossian is welcome. Second is Outer Circles core concept of the coexistence of incompatible through invisibility. Whether somebody is who he says he is is a valid concept that is either true or false. I see the idea that a post is worth reading or not worth reading is a trap. There is no truth of the matter and that is the heart of the reason that traditional forums with moderation and meta-moderation collapse. They are trying to forge a consensus when they should be facilitating disagreement. You doubt the value in keeping a medium that is 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users. That foregrounds the issue of scaling. I picture Outer Circle growing from a thousand elite users to million users, 99% hoi polloi 1% elite. So the proportion of erudite users falls, but the absolute number rises tenfold. I see the endless migration of the nomadic elite as an important problem, preventing them reaching critical mass. Do you still think that PGP's web of trust is relevant? How do I relate "is john@example.org who he says he is", which has type boolean, to "john is worth readng", which has type function from users to boolean?