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Comment by mosura | Hacker News Reader

I have long believed that whatever comes along to replace the reddit/HN etc type site will be based almost entirely on trust networks.

i.e. only surface stories posted by or upvoted by those you trust, and the inverse with those you distrust.

Then exponentially drop off trust transitively and it could be almost workable.

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The return of Advogato. If you weren't around for it, it had a certification system like what you describe, so the stuff on it was pretty good. After a while, spammers figured out that it had very high search engine placement because of its quality, and that pretty much ruined it. It's gone now.

For historical context, the Advogato site in question: https://web.archive.org/web/20170715120119/http://advogato.o...

Background on the "trust metric" implemented on the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304000542/https://advogato....

Apparently my account on the site is/was now more than a quarter of a century old... Gonna try to avoid thinking on that too deeply. :D

There's been a non-zero number of occasions since that time where I've observed situations that mirror the trust-based challenges Advogato sought to solve.

It is perhaps telling that as prescient as Raph's work on trust metrics was he later moved on to the notoriously challenging realm of font rendering--presumably because it seemed more tractable. :D

I sometimes feel like a paid newsletter that's curated by users would be fun. I'd happily pay €5 a month for a weekly/daily digest where the comments are en par with HN.

A few paid and unpaid newsletters have quietly become very big. Traffic from them completely eclipses this place, and because everyone gets the email at once it is a really sudden and painful spike.

Most I have encountered (generally via referral tracking) are heavily curated centrally though, and not by users.

The risk is to build very good echo chambers. One shouldn’t have to read AI slop or despicable opinions during their free time, but some exposure to alternative respectable and not idiotic views should be part of the design.

Our starting position is the status quo, where site level echo chambers are near total.

X vs BlueSky is a thing after all. Reddit, wikipedia etc. are just farcical.

>will be based almost entirely on trust networks

Like Facebook/Linkedin?

Not close. Both those mistake knowing for trusting.

I'd say that they don't make trust decisions, rather they give information to the user so that they can decide whether to trust and for what purpose.

Linkedin more so than facebook, facebook shows list of common contacts, linkedin shows that plus a literal resume.

Maybe, but that just pushes that load on to the user that defeats the point.

Computers are about automation.

No software can do everything, Good software makes concessions.

More concretely the ideal software would require a volume and speed of user input that is unfeasible, and the size and complexity of such software would balloon such that development and maintenance costs would be unfeasible, furthermore the more features, the more customization users want, so customization is an additional dimension.

But sure, go make a system that reads my mind and decides whether I want to trust a USER to do SOMETHING.

This comment may yet motivate me to actually build the system in question so I can avoid having to read ones like it in future.

You definitely need better motivations so build something of that scale.

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