
The internet is increasingly a low-trust society - Balgair
https://www.wired.com/story/internet-made-dupes-cynics-of-us-all/
======
abathur
If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The
Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort
of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that
accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly:

Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is
excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale well. The exploiter can skate
on anonymity if the community is large enough to continually prey on someone
new. Spreading news of an exploiter's behavior to others can greatly improve
how well this scales, but this behavior also requires trust.

I think the more direct problem is with scale, and that the internet is at the
nexus of many trust issues only because it has ramped up the scale and scope
of many interactions.

I'm not super optimistic on solving this intrinsic problem of trust in social
exchanges, but I do see this framing as a silver lining. It seems at least
plausible to iterate offline at significantly smaller scales on mechanisms for
building and maintaining trust--and rectifying its breaches--in ways that do
actually scale.

~~~
schaefer
It's true that "The Selfish Gene" has been a science-based classic of
evolutionary biology for over 40 years. But it's also true that in those 40
years a _lot_ of studies have taken aim at the central arguments of the book
and in my opinion cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the books conclusions
(Or perhaps limit the scope of those views as being a projection of western
culture - but _not_ of all cultures on earth, particularly not eastern
philosophy, and not the animal kingdom at large)

If you have never read any of these counterpoints, but find that the
conclusions of Selfish Gene have shaped your world view, please consider
reading some of these counterpoints and seeing if they persuade you to
consider new perspectives.

A particularly thorough book detailing these counterpoints is Matthieu
Ricard's book:

Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World

~~~
crazygringo
The book you're recommending seems to be about psychological and spiritual
relationships between human beings, from what I can gather from a quick skim
on Amazon. But not a single one of the reviews actually describes a single
argument the book is making (strange), so it's hard to judge.

Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" is a scientific work about evolutionary selection
at the gene level -- I don't recall him touching on psychology at all. (He
provides evolutionary explanations for certain altruistic behaviors, but I
don't recall him even starting on how they might be expressed via a
psychological mechanism or at any conscious level.)

I can't quite imagine what either have to do with each other -- they seem to
be such different topics. Or what Dawkins' work has to do with "western
culture", or culture at all. At heart it's a quite mathematical/statistical
argument.

I'm curious, what exactly do you see being refuted?

~~~
schaefer
The author is definitely a "spiritual person", he's a Buddhist monk and the
french translator for the Dalai Lama. But he is also very scientifically
minded. He has a PHD in cellular genetics from the institute pasteur[1].

One of the central themes of the book, and motivators for the author to write,
is to address the contrast between other oriented (altruistic) and self
oriented (selfish) societies. The author asserts that in the western fields of
psychology, theories of evolution, and economics, it's often taken for granted
that an individual's deeds, words, and thoughts are motivated by selfishness.
To the extent that this assumption has nearly become dogma. The 868 page book,
including a massive 160+ pages of notes, and bibliographies systematically lay
out the scientific arguments against "the hypothesis of human selfishness".

You can read the sections of the book that specifically address "the selfish
gene" with the following google search [2].

[1]: [https://www.pasteur.fr/en/education/programs-and-
courses/doc...](https://www.pasteur.fr/en/education/programs-and-
courses/doctoral-and-post-doctoral-programs)

[2]:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=altruism+matthiew+rickard&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisx7al6ITjAhWBqp4KHfqfDfIQ6wEIKzAA#v=onepage&q=selfish%20gene&f=false)

~~~
crazygringo
From the links, it seems like his main criticism of Dawkins is actually merely
the word "selfish" in the title of his book, and that the CEO of Enron liked
it?

Yes, Dawkins is saying that "universal love" does not have an evolutionary
component, which seems like a fairly uncontroversial claim.

It seems like your criticism of Dawkins is more a criticism of how other
people have misunderstood him, rather than any criticism of the arguments in
_The Selfish Gene_ itself?

If you haven't, I highly suggest you read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous
Mind". While it's at a popular level, it does a fairly good job at presenting
a plausible framework for how moral behavior (like altruism) can emerge from
evolutionary principles. [1] Haidt is probably one of the most influential
moral psychologists today.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-
Relig...](https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-
Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=the+righteous+mind&qid=1561476127&s=gateway&sr=8-2)

~~~
schaefer
Thank you, I'm familiar with the book you are recommending - the righteous
mind. It is discussed in Altruism and cited in its bibliography. [1]

I get the impression you've decided to take a stance on the book Altruism
without reading it. The summary you provide for Rightous mind could work just
as well as a summary for Altruism too. At this point, we aren't even
disagreeing, we're just citing different sources, and I'm content to just drop
it.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=altruism&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjerY-Z-4TjAhXGup4KHT-
gAP0Q6wEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%22The%20Righteous%20Mind%22&f=false)

------
chmod775
This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else
already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could.

If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it
used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain
corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself.

Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudonymously is now
the norm for many people. This changed how people interact online, but it also
changed their expectations.

A full name however doesn't make a person or their opinions any more real than
a pseudonym will. People will lie to you with a fake name just as shamelessly
as they would hiding behind a pseudonym.

~~~
arugulum
This goes beyond trust, I think. The social structures of Internet communities
are very different from those those in real life, and I'm highly disturbed
when people try to transplant IRL social norms to the Internet thoughtlessly.
This is where we get bone-headed ideas like the real-names policy for "the
Internet".

Now, I am not discounting that there is actually toxic, horrific harassment
that goes on the Internet. Doxxing and things like it are terrible and should
never happen.

Rather, I'm arguing that people need to acquire a sort of "street smarts" when
navigating the Internet. Much like when you travel to a foreign country, you
may expect a different culture with different norms, so it is the same with
the Internet. What's rude in one culture is simply social convention in
another. What is casual conversation in one is taboo in another. I spent a lot
of time on the Internet growing up and I feel like I have been inoculated
against the worst parts of the Internet, but at times it feels like many
people haven't.

A good example of this is how a lot of people and media take 4chan posts at
face value, without realizing that a lot of it is completely self-aware and
that the worst posts are almost always a game of who can post the most
needlessly offensive thing possible. A lot of 4chan is an exercise is
communication with no names and no filter. And yet some of my most informative
conversations have been on 4chan precisely because there is no politeness
filter, and posters can be as devastating critical as they want. But a reader
also needs to learn how to tune in and out, correspondingly discount and read
between the lines to get the most out of 4chan conversation, otherwise you
simply come away with the idea that the community hates everything and
everyone.

For a more tame example, I follow a couple of Twitch streamers. For example,
for streamer A, most communication with their chat is saccharine and
supportive. But for streamer B, the chat makes fun off and insults him the
whole way especially he makes a mistake, and the streamer, and the streamer
gives as good as he gets and makes fun of the chat the whole time too. And
this is normal and fun engagement for all parties. From afar, streamer B's
community looks extremely toxic, but that's the furthest thing from the truth.
(What is abhorrent is when you take streamer B's chat behavior into streamer
A's chat, and that is frowned upon by _all_ parties.)

I believe that Internet activity _should_ be diverse. There should be places
where communication is an extension of real life (Facebook, emails), places of
semi-anonymous and professional communication (Hacker News, certain
subreddits/slack communitiees/GitHub), and then places where you should be
able to go hogwild with whatever you want to say (fun subreddits, discord).

Twitter is unfortunately one of those places that has had all of these mixed
together, which is why I decided to have multiple Twitter accounts targeting
professional/personal hobby communication. From what I hear, kids are already
tuning to this idea, with things like public/private instagram accounts.

The Internet is not all the same, and that's great. The Internet is not just
real life, and that's great.

~~~
clhodapp
A serious problem with the "let the people live in their own worlds" attitude
is that many communities do not stay in their realms. You allude to this a
little but, in my opinion, it's not a minor problem to be glossed over, it's
the core of the trust issue: any online community that doesn't keep itself
small and insular (and enforce this with sufficient opsec) is at risk of being
invaded and exploited (for lulz, for cash, or for political manipulation).

~~~
arugulum
I absolutely agree. Invasions are bad, crossing "community" boundaries is. I
think that's also part of the "Internet Etiquette" to be learnt: what happens
in one domain of the Internet should stay in that domain of the Internet. You
don't bring your mischievous trolling behavior from Discord to Facebook, but
you also don't bring your "comfortable-space" standards from a support group
forum to a video game forum.

I acknowledge your argument that "diverse worlds" system may not be
sustainable over time because it is unstable, particularly to new entrants who
do have to learn the local lingo. I personally disagree, and would argue
instead that that's something Internet users should learn to deal with. We've
long had the solution for this: good moderation. You can have hyper-extensive
moderation like r/askhistorians or Facebook support groups, you can have
moderate moderation for spam and the like for things like generic hobby
groups, and then you can have light moderation for spaces deliberately made
for that. From heavy to light moderation, the burden shifts from the moderator
to the user. Different Internet spaces should have different arrangements like
this. While this solution may not be perfect, I argue that this _is what
works_. I put this in contrast to another prevailing idea that all spaces
should be like IRL (because that has maximal accountability and requires no
context switching), and I argue that that's what will diminish the diversity
and dynamism of the Internet.

I would further add a key ingredient to making this world is the tools
provided by the platform to perform this moderation. That's one reason why
Twitter, for all the good content it has, is also a mess, because there's no
limit of cross-pollination of communities. Contrast this to, say, Reddit,
which gives subreddit moderators significant powers to curate and protect
their communities.

------
danShumway
In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of
fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not
figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out
whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy.

If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to
use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans themselves are
relatively cheap to buy.

~~~
wincy
Amazon is weird, I bought a product in the mail the other day and they offered
me a $20 coupon (the product only cost $25) if I wrote a five star review. So
I wrote a one star review talking about how I don’t want to be bribed and they
can’t make me be dishonest and to warn people. But amazon didn’t allow my
review. So that sucks, and makes me not trust any reviews on Amazon.

~~~
didibus
I mean, how could they trust you weren't a fraudster from a competing product?

~~~
pixl97
Because they actually purchased the product?

~~~
didibus
I don't think that's a great deterrent. Especially for a low cost item, I'm
pretty sure it happens a lot that competitors would buy a few products of
yours and then leave negative reviews as "Verified Purchase".

~~~
chongli
Amazon is not a neutral referee though. They have an incentive to block (both
fraudulent and legitimate) one star reviews but keep (even fraudulent) five
star reviews: better reviews lead to more sales.

------
lmm
This is the most intelligent take on internet trust issues that I've seen. The
conclusion is overly glib though: it took centuries for high-trust societies
to develop the mechanisms that allow them to function as such, and even small
changes can upset that balance (as we've been seeing in the real world over
the last couple of years). We shouldn't assume it will be trivial to bootstrap
those kinds of institutions on the internet.

~~~
jaspax
People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that
high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is
high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion.
First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you
can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the
individual actors get used to the new normal.

This is exactly how the liberal societies of the west evolved. But don't
remember that any more, though.

~~~
yborg
This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the
experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions
that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.

~~~
ikeyany
There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply _begged_
to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to
travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776
without any strife or suffering.

Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.

~~~
jjoonathan
We're talking about whether or not coercion is necessary to bootstrap a high-
trust society. Are you arguing that those types of coercion were fundamentally
necessary to establish the United States? Or are you forgetting this context
in order to have something to be upset about?

~~~
ikeyany
Yes, I am arguing that. There is no way the US is the world power it was
through the late 1800s and beyond, without centuries of coercion [0].

[0] [https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-
eco...](https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy)

~~~
philwelch
One of the key arguments against slavery was that it help the South back from
being able to have a modern, industrial economy. If slavery was the key
ingredient to being a world power, the slave states would not have had their
asses thoroughly handed to them by the free states in the Civil War.

------
buboard
Can we trust the article that it is the internet that is becoming low trust,
or is it reflecting society's trends? Trust has been fading in societies for
decades [1] and apparently millenials are the most cynical [2]

[https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-
us...](https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-
us_v2_850x600.svg)

[https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-
cage/files/2014/...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-
cage/files/2014/03/pew-millennial-trust.png)

First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were
always predominantly american-culture oriented) are now global and thus
reflect low trust cultures as well. Second, Goodhart's law, the internet
metrics exist mainly to be gamed, thats why they should change. Reviews worked
for a while, when the internet had a very different audience , they no longer
work, that's normal wear and tear. Third, it's time platforms start paying
specialists for crucial things like product reviews. Crowdsourcing no longer
works. (Which explains why wikipedia should maintain a very conservatiove
editing policy from now on)

~~~
chongli
_Third, it 's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like
product reviews_

Given that platforms earn a commission on every sale, why should they be
trusted to procure specialists' reviews? Maybe they would prefer to hire
professional charlatans to boost the reviews on everything, in order to drown
out the legitimate opinions of aggrieved customers?

~~~
buboard
Sure that's a great recipe to lose your customers. Shops have an interest in
having honest reviews, and if they are gaming them, someone else will provide
more honest ones.

~~~
chongli
Classically, you're right, but Amazon seems to operate by a different set of
rules. Prices, availability, and recommendations change constantly according
to some internal algorithm. In effect, no two users are shopping in the same
store. This disrupts the ability for users to communicate about what's going
on at Amazon. The whole thing is a big mystery and most people just see what
they think is a good deal and snap it up before it's gone.

------
Merrill
It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society.

Back in the day, when you placed a long distance call, an operator would come
on to ask you what your number was so the call could be billed to you. A
single call might be a dollar or a few dollars, which would be ten to several
tens of dollars in today's money.

No one would imagine that such a system would work today.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society._

And that's probably rooted in people being fundamentally devalued and taken
advantage of.

We are seeing worse income inequality than in The Gilded Age and people act
like it's a natural and unavoidable side effect of the existence of tech, the
internet, whatever. That's BS. People created these things. If these things
exploit people, it's because people designed them to exploit people.

If people want people to be treated better, then people need to stop blaming
machines for our social values. Tech merely magnifies those values. It doesn't
cause them to exist.

Bill Gates said that automating an efficient system amplifies the efficiency
and automating an inefficient system amplifies the inefficiency. I propose
that you can similarly amplify whatever underlying social values you have,
whether that's something good -- pro education! -- or something bad -- racism
and misogyny!

And classism. We are using technology to amplify extractive economic
practices, then blaming the robots as if Judgement Day had already arrived and
Skynet is now in charge of our lives. (A la the _Terminator_ movies.)

~~~
coding123
I'd almost rather society just admit it's classist so it can be handled
appropriately. Instead we're just in denial and no policies (for better or
worse) will ever go towards what we need. I might sound conservative but I'm
definitely democrat/liberal in most of my values. I just don't want to live
near someone that is thuggish and may steal from my house.

------
ex3xu
I'm a bit surprised this article has zero reference to any interdisciplinary
work on trust metrics, and stuff like trust propagation algorithms. I'm even
more surprised, with the blockchain having becoming such a buzzword these
days, that Bitcoin's proof-of-work approach was not even mentioned, let alone
evaluated for effectiveness. And where's the love for Bruce Schneier [0]?

I think the article's approach of referencing historic stragies from
government and social infrastructure is a bit useless in this context because
how much the problem changes when scarce information becomes abundant light-
speed communication. I understand that they are trying to make the point that
corporate overlords are bad, but maybe it would serve the purposes of the
article better to just focus on the variables that matter, now that there's
new capacities for transparency and accountability metrics based on some
combination of historic behavior, web of trust node size, and other
situational variables based on the medium -- like users that spend a lot of
money, or consistently downvote known bad actors. Forcing users to have skin
in the game with strict enforcement of transgressions is of course a
reasonably effective, if coercive, strategy as well, and you can take the edge
off this authoritarian approach if you pair it with some variant of
restorative justice.

My approach is perhaps not rigorously useful, but for my personal conceptions
of trust in a world of bad actors, I like looking at strategies from Axelrod's
iterated prisoner's dilemma[1]. Tit for Tat is famously a good strategy, and
there's also a good strategy where you forgive on multiple cooperations but
gradually increase the punishment of defectors to n times for their nth
defection [2]. Though I should mention that tribalist collusion with other bad
actors is unfortunately a very viable approach as well.

[0]:
[https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/](https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/)

[1]: [https://axelrod.readthedocs.io](https://axelrod.readthedocs.io)

[2]:
[http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html](http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html)

------
rosterface
There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on
trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low:

[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-
secrets/trust...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-
secrets/trust-in-media-hits-bottom-60-percent-say-sources-pay-for-stories)

It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant
political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting
mobs...

Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to that.

~~~
rchaud
What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes
to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this.

Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014).
This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0].
In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked
journalists to take photos as well as provide the research and writing [1].
How would the quality of your work be affected if you had to do the job of 2
people?

The classifieds ads business is dead, and subscriptions have been declining
for years because "news on the Internet is free". The only "media" that makes
serious money is talk radio, which isn't journalism so much as diatribes of
political invective.

As it turns out, that's what people are willing to pay for, or at least sit
through ads for. If anything, "the media" is giving the people what they want.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performance_in_the_market_\(2000%E2%80%93present\))

[1][https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-
su...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-sun-times-
lays-off-all-its-full-time-photographers.html)

~~~
blueboo
> The only “media” that makes serious money is

...

> Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-
new...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-news-
industry-antitrust.html)

Hmm

~~~
lotsofpulp
Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case,
the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this
conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other
people's work.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and
filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with
this picture.

------
apoph3nia
> In low-trust societies, you never know. You expect to be cheated, often
> without recourse. You expect things not to be what they seem and for
> promises to be broken, and you don’t expect a reasonable and transparent
> process for recourse. It’s harder for markets to function and economies to
> develop in low-trust societies. It’s harder to find or extend credit, and
> it’s risky to pay in advance.

'Bout sums it up.

------
okjustgo
Maybe I missed something, but when was the internet ever high-trust?

I feel like since it's inception savvy users always applied a healthy amount
of skepticism and made thier own choice whether or not they believed something
"on the internet". This included both facts on websites and conversing with
other humans on chat.

~~~
buboard
> but when was the internet ever high-trust?

Exactly. It started when big corp tried to lure in more users by giving them
free cheese, making them believe that the internet is a safe place to post
your name, address, work life and sex habits. Everyone at the time thought it
was crazy that people did that, and yeah they were right.

------
kerblang
Maybe the problem is that ever since google the only metric anyone has
bothered to devise is "popularity", which was never a particularly good
indicator of truth to begin with.

~~~
adventured
Google was built heavily on authority, not just popularity.

Otherwise you could easily buy your way above Wikipedia, a non-profit
organization (Wikimedia) - which ranks at or near the top for every query.

Quora, or some other VC backed knowledge service with a couple hundred million
to vaporize, would overtake Wikipedia through the direct purchasing of
popularity. Then others would quickly follow, entirely wiping Wikipedia from
the first pages. That can't be done. If it could, private equity via
Answers.com and other such very low quality sites would have already done it,
seeking billions of dollars in return on such positioning.

~~~
buboard
Yeah google isn't built on popularity, but everything else is. And it's partly
our fault for using aggregators.

------
galkk
As it should be, I think. You don't inherently trust stranger on a street, you
shouldn't do that on the internet as well.

~~~
pferde
Not quite.

While I wouldn't trust a random stranger on the street with e.g. my money or
private data. However, I have no problem trusting them to honestly and
truthfully answer questions like "how do I get to X from here?" or "here, can
you please mark my bus ticket in that marking machine over there and hand it
back to me? I can't quite reach it in this crowded bus".

On the internet, however, I don't trust a random stranger (e.g. a youtube
commenter, or a reddit user) with answering "2+2" correctly, let alone with
something that involves my possessions, no matter how low-value they might be.

------
taneq
> Things are increasingly getting worse

General purpose headline for attracting views, tying into the seductiveness of
a general perception of doom and gloom.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-
the...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the-world-is-
getting-better-why-hardly-anyone-knows-it/)

------
0xfeba
At probably a naive glance it seems related to anonymity. Would tying identity
to online posts increase this trust? What if you had to insert your National
ID Card to comment in some feedback forums?

I remember YouTube tried this and failed due to pushback.

What's the driver of this clickbait/instant gratification/hot take culture
that's developing? Is it just ads?

~~~
pjc50
Some of the worst clickbait is published in national newspapers under a byline
and photograph of the author.

The Boris Johnson fiasco has got journalists openly saying "who are the people
who called the police when they heard shouting and screaming next door? We
need to find and expose them".

Requiring ID means the culture war side with the best harassment capability
can take over the space and decide who becomes the story and who gets made
unsafe.

~~~
josinalvo
> Boris Johnson fiasco

Could you provide some context?

> who are the people who called the police when they heard shouting and
> screaming next door? We need to find and expose them".

Could you provide some links?

(sorry, not doubt, truly uninformed)

------
dschuetz
That is not really surprising, is it? 20 years ago the Internet was populated
with different people, because the subscriptions were expensive. And besides
that, there was no mobile Internet, the user demographic was completely
different. Now that literally everybody on this planet has access to the
Internet, and, well, there are some rather unpleasant people out there, I
think we've reached a new historical period with these "low-trust societies".

~~~
buboard
Things were worse 20 years ago for the general internet , with few "trustable"
brand names anyway. Piracy, viruses and scams were all over the place. If
anything it's cleaner today, thanks to investments in security/antispam, but
the mode of operation for scammers has changed.

------
ggggtez
>Better rules and technologies that authenticate online transactions; a
different ad-tech infrastructure that resists fraud and preserves privacy;

I don't disagree with the premise, but this solution seems vague at best.
Authentication and privacy? Great things to be sure, but where is the
connection? As it said, even "verified" purchases could be (and sometimes are)
done by paid shills.

I guess the proposal is to create laws that prohibit lying on the internet?
This person has clearly fallen on the wrong side of the authoritarian argument
if that's the solution they came up with to prevent power consolidation in big
business.

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ChainOfFools
In Trust We Trust

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mensetmanusman
The less trust there is, the more hardship there is.

We are due for tough times ahead.

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bawana
scale is indeed the problem. scale has perverted our capitalist society as
well, long before the internet. Adam Smith wrote about capitalism but he never
envisioned Amazon. Changing a system from a one-to-one interaction to a one-
to-many interaction should not allow us to apply the same rules. In math for
example, commutativity works for single numbers, but not matrices.

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macawfish
Funny title change

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aantix
Welcome to digital socialism. It always ends with long lines for a few blocks
of cheese.

