
The End of “Someone” - cryptozeus
https://seths.blog/2020/01/the-end-of-someone/
======
salsadip
I don't think the situation is as dramatic as the article suggests. Trust
online is at an all time low anyways: 1. youtube reviews are sponsored 2.
online discussions (reddit etc) are influenced by manufactures.When I search
online I still depend on those sources - I just filter information critically,
pay attention to FACTS, verify them with other reviews again over and over.

So i guess this is only news for people who still believe other people's
opinion only because they are able to publish online, alas people who got used
to it being different/better before.

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alxhill
Doesn't the example of a florida company just using real pictures suggest this
isn't such a big change? "We can't trust that the picture represents a real
person's opinion" was true before, and it's true now - it's just that the
barrier to creating fake people is a little lower.

~~~
salsadip
Exactly my thought. It has been like that for a long time and will continue to
be. Maybe the author's thought would be better phrased as: Trust online is
continuing to decline due to new and better imitation techniques (DeepFake
etc)

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pjc50
It's clear that the internet is now a "low trust society". Unfortunately this
is now leaking like a superfund side into the wider society in which it is
embedded. High-trust societies are much more efficient because much less
effort has to be wasted on security. But they also present an opportunity to
"defect" by defrauding people, and can only remain high-trust so long as the
ability to punish frauds can keep up.

This is bad for internet freedom as people demand greater ability to make
reprisals against the frauds. I sometimes think that what people miss about
the "old internet" was it being a high-trust society because almost everyone
allowed on it was through an institutional connection where they had to be on
their best behavior. We can see landmarks like the Morris Worm, and the
posting of goatse and GNAA on Slashdot forcing them into more active
moderation.

(References:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155)
; [https://blog.dshr.org/2019/07/the-web-is-low-trust-
society.h...](https://blog.dshr.org/2019/07/the-web-is-low-trust-society.html)
; [https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-in-the-low-trust-
society](https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-in-the-low-trust-society)

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samdung
Human eyes are amazing. By the second or third visit to any website, they
start skipping over the unwanted parts like ad boxes.

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switch007
> In 2019, and perhaps forever, we’re now at a new level, one where the polish
> of photography or video is no longer any clue at all about the provenance of
> what we’re encountering.

> ... how disruptive this shift is going to be.

> There are people and organizations that are racing to break the fabric of
> community...

An interesting article but it irks me when authors downplay the bad things
that have already happened and are going on right now.

To write in the future tense seems to against the general tone of such
articles or their headings (see also articles on privacy). Perhaps they're
trying to stay positive? Shrug.

~~~
swiley
> one where the polish of photography or video is no longer any clue at all
> about the provenance of what we’re encountering.

At least with software I’ve pretty much _always_ felt uneasy when there was
lots of polish. When I was a kid and I saw the web pages auto generated from
texinfo I’d get this reflexive “oh this is written by a programmer and not
some PR person” feeling even though I had no idea what texinfo or GNU was.

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mcphage
One of my favorite long-running gags from the Onion is that, for their
"American Voices" / people on the street articles, they use the _exact same
photos_ every time. Sometimes I wonder who those people actually are, since
we've been seeing their same faces for so many years.

~~~
dv35z
I actually looked that up last year, came across this article which goes into
some depth: [https://triviahappy.com/articles/who-are-the-people-in-
the-o...](https://triviahappy.com/articles/who-are-the-people-in-the-onions-
american-voices-the-top-10-questions)

“ Most of the crew were just strangers or friends in Madison, Wisconsin, where
The Onion used to be based.”

“ The brown-haired caucasian man is Bill Harris. He was The Onion’s Madison
UPS truck driver”

~~~
mcphage
Awesome find—thanks!

