The End of “Someone”

I don't think the situation is as dramatic as the article suggests. Trust online is at an all time low anyways: 1. youtube reviews are sponsored 2. online discussions (reddit etc) are influenced by manufactures.When I search online I still depend on those sources - I just filter information critically, pay attention to FACTS, verify them with other reviews again over and over.

So i guess this is only news for people who still believe other people's opinion only because they are able to publish online, alas people who got used to it being different/better before.

Doesn't the example of a florida company just using real pictures suggest this isn't such a big change? "We can't trust that the picture represents a real person's opinion" was true before, and it's true now - it's just that the barrier to creating fake people is a little lower.

It's clear that the internet is now a "low trust society". Unfortunately this is now leaking like a superfund side into the wider society in which it is embedded. High-trust societies are much more efficient because much less effort has to be wasted on security. But they also present an opportunity to "defect" by defrauding people, and can only remain high-trust so long as the ability to punish frauds can keep up.

This is bad for internet freedom as people demand greater ability to make reprisals against the frauds. I sometimes think that what people miss about the "old internet" was it being a high-trust society because almost everyone allowed on it was through an institutional connection where they had to be on their best behavior. We can see landmarks like the Morris Worm, and the posting of goatse and GNAA on Slashdot forcing them into more active moderation.

(References: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155 ; https://blog.dshr.org/2019/07/the-web-is-low-trust-society.h... ; https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-in-the-low-trust-society

Human eyes are amazing. By the second or third visit to any website, they start skipping over the unwanted parts like ad boxes.

> In 2019, and perhaps forever, we’re now at a new level, one where the polish of photography or video is no longer any clue at all about the provenance of what we’re encountering.

> ... how disruptive this shift is going to be.

> There are people and organizations that are racing to break the fabric of community...

An interesting article but it irks me when authors downplay the bad things that have already happened and are going on right now.

To write in the future tense seems to against the general tone of such articles or their headings (see also articles on privacy). Perhaps they're trying to stay positive? Shrug.

One of my favorite long-running gags from the Onion is that, for their "American Voices" / people on the street articles, they use the exact same photos every time. Sometimes I wonder who those people actually are, since we've been seeing their same faces for so many years.