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@ Constant
2025-06-04 11:18:24Ofcourse do we want our big open world cake, and eat it with a side of stability and order. I love the spammers, because all they do is press our noses on the grim reality we are facing: Everything is going to turn to absolute shit. The fact that we are all interconnected is meaningless because the communication lines contain too much noise.
Look, some spambot posting silly things that might waste your attention for a tiny bit before you figure out its not worth your time, or clutter your feed, is not the end of the world. But the point is that that post could be anything, and with a bit of AI effort more convincing. We all sense this, in fact we even see it, and there is no indication to think it wont get worse.
Important to note is, that the big platforms are struggling with this crap as well. Their set up is by their nature a ‘have a cake and eat it’ proposition: Yes we are the worlds public square that everyone visits in this particular domain, and we will keep you safe from spammers and fraudsters. But we ran out of captchas, and they are forced to heighten their walls, reinforce their gates and increase the amount of guards that are on patrol; slowly but surely, you as a user will be forced to subjugate yourself to more and more scrutiny, restrictions and punishment if you want to be active there. At some point the only reason they would be considered ‘the worlds public square’, is because they are the only vestiges of order left without any existing alternatives.
If we seriously want to introduce that alternative, we would have to approach the issue in a fundamentally different manner. That issue, is one of reputation, i.e. consistent behavior over time. Now to be clear, there is no full proof system for reputation, it does not exist for two reasons: One, anyone at any time can decide to break their consistent behavior simply because they feel like it. And two, because you you never have perfect information and can therefor not interpret the consistency of their behavior perfectly; think of a spy for example, where them consistently lying to you and eventually betraying you actually makes them a consistent spy.
Reputation is always a game of who knows who, but ‘social’ reputation is hard to scale: the longer the ties become, the less they can be relied upon. To scale reputation went the route of formalization via institutions: these are your certificates, badges, uniforms whatever, as a testament you went through certain predefined hoops in a controlled environment. As a result, whatever reputation the institution might have rubs off on you. It also stacks in the fact that one certificate can only be obtained when other certificates were acquired prior. So these certificates are pieces of reputational capital, defined in records. This system allowed us to create globe spanning organizations.
That system does work, but it is rigid, and the moment it becomes corrupt you are very, very screwed, because on what basis are you going to put it back together again? In any event, that is what we have anyway and as noted it has other issues, so what other option is there? Scaling ‘social’ reputation. The whole idea behind Nostr’s ‘Web of Trust’, is that bottom-up connections and relations, that are (partly) based on existing relations in meat-space can form a globally meaningful reputational pillar on which we can start identifying each other again.
If seven handshakes connects you with everyone, four will get you pretty far. Three is even less risk, whilst five might open up interesting doors for you. The point is, its gradual, and according to your risk appetite you can play around with it. Secondly, the better well connected you are, how more of a reputation you gained, the less risk you need to run to begin with. Obviously this requires some bootstrapping, but you live in meatspace; if there really is no-one out there willing to give you a leg up you might want to do some soul searching.
But the result of this strategy, will be that everyone will pull back behind their own little moats first. At first, we will all lose connections to defend ourselves against the massive onslaught of ‘the Fake’: The big estrangement. But that is ok, with a bit of effort, I am sure that eventually, after enough reputational capital is build over time, we will find each other again in this global village.