
Show HN: Verifact - A decentralised platform for verifying facts - aantthony
https://verifact.io
======
aantthony
Hey everyone,

This is a project I'm working on to get more truth on the internet. If deemed
factual by the network, you gain more tokens from those who voted opposite to
you. It uses the logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR), and after one side
holds a majority for 7 days, that side is paid out (no real money is involved
yet, points are all free).

What do you think?

~~~
uniqueid
I applaud your effort, but, while there may actually be a single version of
truth in the universe, there is _effectively_ no good way to prove it.

I don't think a show of hands is helpful. I regularly encounter Reddit threads
with 95% of the comments agreeing on something that elsewhere in the thread is
clearly shown to be dis- or mis- information.

Cutting out political bias also fails to solve problems, because there are
plenty of gullible, but "unbiased", fools out there, whose fact-checking isn't
valuable. In fact, fools on the internet unwittingly do plenty of legwork for
clever propagandists.

In my opinion, what would be useful is to allow the user to choose other users
whom he or she trusts, and get a truth score based on _their_ opinions. Create
_that_ and I'll be the first to join.

~~~
aantthony
Thanks for your feedback.

Just to be clear, its more than a show of hands because you choose how many
tokens you want to stake. So in the Reddit example, if those 5% were willing
to stake more, they’d have majority.

I chose to not go with a choose your trust model because I think the
truthfulness information is a ‘what’ question, and checking ‘who’ only goes so
far. But once those trustworthy users earn more tokens, they should have a
larger influence on the system. Perhaps that would interest you?

~~~
uniqueid
Apologies if I sold your work short. I was sincere in my appreciation for your
efforts. The world badly needs more people to tackle issues like these.

Okay, that said. I still think the approach will prove not to satisfy your
goals...

    
    
       > I think the truthfulness information is a 
       > ‘what’ question, and checking ‘who’ only goes so far.
    

As a thought experiment, how often would a vote-based system, if our
prevailing moral code today were that of the Antebellum South or Nazi Germany,
clear up slander and lies against minorities? My guess is pretty much _never_
(see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism)).

Under a system where the user instead defers to authorities _of their own
choice_ , one could _easily_ choose more forward-thinking judges, and
consistently get answers akin to those we have today.

~~~
aantthony
> My guess is pretty much never

I'm not able to know how often it could prevent such slander in those times,
but we can look at the incentives. In those times, the authorities (church,
newspapers) had central control over the main narrative, which is still mostly
true today, but is beginning to fall. Back then, it seems you could slander
minorities and there was pretty much no way for minorities to defend against
it. In contrast, the upper classes had a means (duelling as an example) as an
incentive against slander, and that imposes a cost on it. On social media
there is no cost to publish lies. Verifact seeks to impose a cost on lies
because you need to have something at stake. So I think if it existed at the
time, Verifact would make it more costly to slander minorities, and it would
be more profitable to disprove all kinds of pseudoscientific beliefs such as
racial superiority and Nazi eugenics. Of course though, Verifact requires
access to communication channels and tokens and that wouldn't be viable in
those times.

> authorities of their own choice, one could easily choose more forward-
> thinking judges

Yeah could be interesting. I'd just want to make sure people don't create
echo-chambers or follow others based on political opinions rather than facts.
Perhaps letting people 'invest' in the judgment decisions of others would
help, and you'd get notified when they stake.

~~~
uniqueid
I want to avoid discussing "echo-chambers" as my views on that topic make me
sound like a knee-jerk contrarian. So I'll wish you success here, and thank
you for your efforts :)

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nnn1234
Have you looked at ideamarkets.org and whatever happenned with trustory? I
dont know why people want are building blockchain based fact
verifiers.something in the zeitgiest. Best of luck with this project.

~~~
aantthony
Hey, thanks. Yes I’ve seen them. Trustory was pretty cool. They started with
fact-based statements I think, but then transitioned to any kind of debate.
Ended up closing down though: [https://medium.com/trustory-app/why-trustory-
is-shutting-dow...](https://medium.com/trustory-app/why-trustory-is-shutting-
down-6d50175628eb)

