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Comment by arnaudsm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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?

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.

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