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Comment by caust1c | Hacker News Reader

Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology:

The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.

We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.

Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.

It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.

What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.

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Reputation is the usual solution. You build a community and you know who to trust, like humans have always done.

The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.

FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.

Reputation requires identity. I'd need to know people are who they say they are. This is still hard to do. You ain't getting reputation and privacy.

Pseudonyms are anonymous yet can still build trust. I appreciate anonymity when I want to talk about sensitive topics.

Anonymous reputation can turn on those who trust the reputable entity. Easy, though facile, examples are the romantic schemes used to defraud, more intricate are spies and so on.

In a small communities, newcomers are more scrutinized to prevent that. And the scammer can only have a single victim before being expelled.

HN, while being large, incentivizes that brilliantly, by highlighting new accounts in green.

You can't expel people without proper identity. If you kick out a scammer they can keep coming back with different names/identities.

If you can't put your real name on your opinion, what is it really worth?

If I can build reputation somewhere, I'm going to use the same account, but that account may not have my real name. Reputation incentivizes identity, but not necessarily association to a real identity.

I think trust and identity are fundamentally intertwined, for sure. I think it's also why trust can be easily gamed by posing as certain identity groups. It's a dark path taken to the extreme.

I just read supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg and one of the best take aways from it was to remind people that they have multiple identities that they hold dear, and some of them may be in conflict. It gets people to think more and not regress to knee-jerk beliefs they think they're supposed to hold based on their identity on a given topic.

>FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.

Alternatively: it's what users want.

People want cigarettes and fast food too. It's not good for them either, and legislation and education improved the situation.

Social media is to the 2020s what cigarettes were to the 50s

Agreed. I’m pretty sure future generations will look at our social media habits like we look at this https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7355737/amp/The-chi...

> Social media is to the 2020s what cigarettes were to the 50s

That is an interesting thought. Thanks!

And not a new one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498

Thanks. new to me anyway!

That remains to be seen. Studies purporting to show the harms of social media are shaky at best. It could very well turn out to be more benign like TVs or violent video games (remember the pearl clutching around those in the early 2000s?).

Who are you to decide for people that they cannot smoke and eat McDonald’s

I thoroughly despise the frankly Puritan attitude that society should prevent people from harming themselves

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chr...

The data supports your thesis, but in the same way a meth addict wants more meth imho. The algorithm is hitting a reward center (TikTok has put on a masterclass in this, for example).

I would be interested to see user preferences with regards to algorithm vs chronological feed when the cohort is on GLP-1 agonist of some sort (which inhibits malfunctioning reward center behavior, including alcohol, tobacco, and opioid addictions).

> Alternatively: it's what users want.

So why are they so opposed to adding some toggle in the options to allow chronological feed then?

It’s what users are addicted to. I did that with TikTok first time I installed it. Just swipe swipe watch swipe. Those like 15-30 seconds hits are addictive as hell. I deleted my account after an hour and haven’t touched it since, except the occasional video a friends sends a link to. Their algo is way better than Twitter or Meta algos.

You can market cocaine and sell it then make the same argument. “This is what people want, thats why it makes money” is not an argument in many cases.

>Reputation is the usual solution.

Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war

We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.

American's trust in media declined accordingly.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...

My point was about small communities though. For country scale organizations it's a much trickier problem indeed.

It's sad how a comment decrying the falsehoods of institutions is relaying it's own falsehoods right here...

Do tell what those are.

If Humans ever got their act together enough to organize, would they even have a clue what to do?

I think it's beyond current institutions. It's so easy to infiltrate and subvert any well-regarded institution, so it can't be institutions.

It has to be decentralised, i.e. you or an open source software agent that you control is what's doing the filtering and deciding what you see.

It has to be a moderatorless system where you end up with what you actually choose.

The algorithm has replaced following out of necessity. The following paradigm made sense when social media was something where you mainly connected with people you were friends with IRL and where media came from a small number of channels that could be browsed by one person (even this was already overwheling by the time cable hit hundreds of channels). There is simply no way to navigate the billions of pieces of content generated daily without an algorithm. There could be the exact thing you want out there, but how would you ever discover it?

Search for it?

True trust is earned. "Default trust" is not the same thing. But the two are often confused.

When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.

Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.

These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.

From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.

And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.

I think earning trust often requires significant personal sacrifice. Institutions are made up of people, and I think that one of the outcomes of the web era is that it seems that fewer high talented folks find the motivation to do unglamorous, lower-remuneration jobs.

No pain. No gain. That too applies in the earned / sacrifice sense.

Trust is one of now corrupted words. It's current meaning is a Frankenstein knock off of the true meaning of the word. Other examples include journalism, and leadership (which have also fallen due to lack of sacrafic).

Yes, it's Orwellian. Normalized. But still Orwellian.

I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?

A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power.

That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.

It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.

Exacerbated witch hunting, for one[1]. Enabled the Protestant reformation which led to the 30 years war, among others[2].

[1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

The scarcity of printing presses and costs associated in running them by definition made distribution a calculated financial endeavor. Cultivating a positive reputation would therefore be a valuable asset in order to reliably recoup costs via sales and/or retain patrons.

This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."

In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."

I've thought about this a lot too and I think about a few things:

- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).

- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.

I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.

I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).

> The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher.

The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.

In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.

We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.

We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.

Maybe Elon Musk should enter the education game too.

Doesn't really undermine your point, but as a fun aside: Trusting Trust style attacks on compilers were (theoretically) solved by David Wheeler with "diverse double compiling".

Yes, good point. That's pretty similar to scientific falsifiability at least!

I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.

There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.

A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.

I think of how I lost trust and it's more along the lines of: "Wow, with all of this new information, I can see how institutions/experts/officials have been lying to me all along."

In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.

The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.

There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.

Hope I'm making sense...

Unpopular opinion: It's exhausting to be under the illusion I can fact check the world. There's so much freedom in having the faith to say "I trust you that I need those brake pads". If I get screwed for $200 it just means I have $200 less to spend on some other junk I don't need. The scammer won't survive in the long run.

> It's exhausting to be under the illusion I can fact check the world.

Oh, I agree. It is tiring.

> If I get screwed for $200...

Some scams do far more damage than $200.00.

> The scammer won't survive in the long run.

Not really true. Some entire industries are built on scams and last decades or indefinitely.

Maybe the Amish are on to something.

> We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce.

They do.

> You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.

Would you be pissed if you got penalized for this comment?

I don't really see how that's related to the article (not trying to be a dick about it or anything; probably I'm just dense).

...you can make rules to stop this? The Dominion election fraud was more or less cast out of mainstream discourse with commercial damages law. If you expand this a bit (ONLY A BIT) farther, you'd expect a roughly linear scale of results.

There was no fraud. That was debunked.

Yes, that's my whole point? Dominion election fraud was cast out because of court cases.

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