Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

True. Perhaps a collective vote past 2 degrees of freedom out where multiple parties need to vouch for the same person before you believe they aren't a bot. Then you're using the exponential number of people to provide diminishing weight instead of increasing likelihood of malfeasance.



But do we need an infinite and global web of trust?

How about restricting them to everyone-knows-everyone sized groups, of like a couple hundred people?

One can be a member of multiple groups so you're not actually limited. But the groups will be small enough to self regulate.


What’s that going to do about all of the top search results and a good percentage of social media traffic being generated by SEO bots? Nothing.

You want to chat with a Dunbar number of people get yourself a private discord or slack channel.


The Dunbar number of people could vouch for small web sites they come across. Or even for FB accounts if they choose to.


I suspect a lot of people here are the ones in their circle who bring in a lot of the cool info that their friends missed out on. This still sounds like Slack.


We're talking about webs of trust aren't we? Not about chat rooms.

I'm hypothesising that any such large scale structure will be perverted by commercial interests, while having multiple Dunbar sized such structures will have a chance to be useful.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: