Tim Berners-Lee’s “Oh, Yeah?” button could have changed the internet

I mean, just search for any $VPN_PROVIDER review. Almost all of them are boilerplate shit that ends with "Click on this affiliate link to get a $VPN_PROVIDER account for a discounted price!". How many "Oh yeah?"s up do you have to go?

Also, here's the pre-emptive "you can use blockchain for that trust network!" comment.

This sounds an awful lot like a Google search. The issue, like always, is who gets to decide what is credible? Is it algorithms, and are they public. I suspect long term you'd have OYO experts instead of SEO, and a lot of the same tricks would still apply.

Apart from the genuine OYO experts (that in itself is pathetic), you'd also end up with paid fake reviews and then again you end up with the situation where you can't trust the internet.

That's a fairly hard problem, especially for the late 90s.

Improved HTTP auth is (and was) a much easier problem that the world would have benefited widely from. Cookieless authentication would have meant a world with no loophole in browser cookie handling permitting ambient tracking cookies.