Show HN: Verifact - A decentralised platform for verifying facts
verifact.io
verifact.io
This is a project I'm working on to get more truth on the internet. If deemed factual by the network, you gain more tokens from those who voted opposite to you. It uses the logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR), and after one side holds a majority for 7 days, that side is paid out (no real money is involved yet, points are all free).
What do you think?
I don't think a show of hands is helpful. I regularly encounter Reddit threads with 95% of the comments agreeing on something that elsewhere in the thread is clearly shown to be dis- or mis- information.
Cutting out political bias also fails to solve problems, because there are plenty of gullible, but "unbiased", fools out there, whose fact-checking isn't valuable. In fact, fools on the internet unwittingly do plenty of legwork for clever propagandists.
In my opinion, what would be useful is to allow the user to choose other users whom he or she trusts, and get a truth score based on their opinions. Create that and I'll be the first to join.
Just to be clear, its more than a show of hands because you choose how many tokens you want to stake. So in the Reddit example, if those 5% were willing to stake more, they’d have majority.
I chose to not go with a choose your trust model because I think the truthfulness information is a ‘what’ question, and checking ‘who’ only goes so far. But once those trustworthy users earn more tokens, they should have a larger influence on the system. Perhaps that would interest you?
Okay, that said. I still think the approach will prove not to satisfy your goals...
> I think the truthfulness information is a
> ‘what’ question, and checking ‘who’ only goes so far.
Under a system where the user instead defers to authorities of their own choice, one could easily choose more forward-thinking judges, and consistently get answers akin to those we have today.
I'm not able to know how often it could prevent such slander in those times, but we can look at the incentives. In those times, the authorities (church, newspapers) had central control over the main narrative, which is still mostly true today, but is beginning to fall. Back then, it seems you could slander minorities and there was pretty much no way for minorities to defend against it. In contrast, the upper classes had a means (duelling as an example) as an incentive against slander, and that imposes a cost on it. On social media there is no cost to publish lies. Verifact seeks to impose a cost on lies because you need to have something at stake. So I think if it existed at the time, Verifact would make it more costly to slander minorities, and it would be more profitable to disprove all kinds of pseudoscientific beliefs such as racial superiority and Nazi eugenics. Of course though, Verifact requires access to communication channels and tokens and that wouldn't be viable in those times.
> authorities of their own choice, one could easily choose more forward-thinking judges
Yeah could be interesting. I'd just want to make sure people don't create echo-chambers or follow others based on political opinions rather than facts. Perhaps letting people 'invest' in the judgment decisions of others would help, and you'd get notified when they stake.
The most important thing you can do right now, if you want people to invest their energy in this app, is to convince people that you understand the human relationship with truth-seeking well enough to optimize the process with technology. That will take some thoughtful writing.
> What is the process for overturning a ruling?
The staking is open for 7 days, so discussion and adding more stakes is fine during that phase. But after 7 days, since it's tokens, it cannot reverse the transaction. However, I plan to allow "re-posting" the Tweet, and then it will show the new updated consensus (with a button to view the old one).
> ... to convince people that you understand the human relationship with truth-seeking well enough to optimize the process with technology. That will take some thoughtful writing.
Yeah, exactly right. That has been very challenging so far, but I'm making some progress, and working on this. Is there anything on the subject that has made a difference for you personally, perhaps for ideas and inspiration?
Thanks
A vote should be binary. I can or can't vote. Summary: The main idea is kinda ok, but the system to solve it isn't something I would trust.
Correct me, if I misunderstood something.