Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D
I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc
Web of trust. The biggest thing missing from most attempts to build social networks so far. A few sites did very weak versions, like Slashdot/s friend/foe/fan/freak rating system.
Let me subscribe, upvote, downvote, filter, etc specific content. Let me trust (or negative-trust) other users (think of it like “friend” or “block”, in simple terms)
Then, and this is the key… let me apply filters based on the sub/up/down/filter/etc actions of the people I trust, and the people they trust, etc, with diminishing returns as it gets farther away and based on how much people trust each other.
Finally, when I see problematic content, let me see the chain of trust that exposed me to it. If I trust you and you trust a Nazi, I may or may not spend time trying to convince you to un-trust that person, but if you fail or refuse then I can un-trust you to get Nazi(s) out of my feed.
It’s a novel idea, I can certainly see the nice implications of it, but it also seems incredibly excessive. Would you really going around flagging every user you see on a trust system? Or even enough users for the system to be moderately effective? And then expect many other users to do the same?
I honestly don’t think I’d use it, blocking people is enough for me.
I maintained a substantial set of tags for problematic users of all types so I knew to avoid commenting or engaging with them. In an given community it’s common for there to be a tiny percentage of prolific posters who are a real problem and tags with res is how I managed that. It absolutely can work and arguably twitter’s block and mute functions do a similar thing as thevpy reduce a user’s presentation considerably.
I did the same once upon a time. Ultimately though, I decided that flagging them as annoying was a worse solution to just actively blocking them and never seeing anything else they post.
I think RES style tags would be great to implement, maybe even the up vote counter so you can track exactly how you’re engaging with a particular user’s content.
However as far as a web of trust goes, I’m not saying it can’t work, but a web of trust would require a substantial userbase trusting or distrusting eachother to work effectively. It really just depends on whether the userbase at large would actively engage with that system, which I don’t think it would but I’m also not representative of the userbase.
I also forsee some potential issues. Could highly trusted users become the next power users? Could pseudo “cliques” form depending on who trusts who? Could people be brigaded as untrustworthy, and receive whatever negative outcome that entails? What if you trusted someone years ago, later they come out with a lot of bad stuff, and that then reflects poorly on you? I know these are simply what-ifs, but these seem very possible to me with that kind of system.
I think a thing like this will even be required in the near future. Because we can no longer trust that we are talking to real humans, therefore some trust system (including physical interaction perhaps?) will be needed to not get social networks drown in AI dystopia. I have bookmarked this comment which describes the krass scenario we might find ourselves in soon: https://lemmy.ml/comment/878882
@[email protected]
Re “physical interaction”… Are you old and/or geeky enough to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party ?
Yes! :-)
I had no idea those existed… we should do one of them!
I found very interesting the concept of chain of trust :) What is the friend/foe/fan/freak?
Slashdot has a friend list and foe list. Fan and freak are the lists of people who name you as friend and foe respectively.
https://slashdot.org/faq/friends.shtml
Thanks for the reading! That is very interesting concept that I’d love to see implemented here 👌🏻