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The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformatio

by mulmen 1mo ago

The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new. If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation. I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.

js8 1mo ago
I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms: - "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human." - "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B." The collection of these statements would be the public social graph. The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form: - "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X." Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement. So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- victorbjorklund 29d ago
  Totally would not be abused. Don’t like politican/journalist/etc A? Let’s just mass report as fake person.
  - alt227 29d ago
    Exactly, the 'social graph' is also a huge source of cancel culture.
  - js8 29d ago
    Mass reporting means spending huge amount of reputation which doesn't really invalidate reputation of people who still certify that the person exists. The problem with the current systems is that reputation buying is not transparent. In my system, it would be a public record, who endorsed who. So you could go back and track the fake reputation. Also real people have some TTL with their accounts. Unlike links, "I am real person" is not nearly as fungible.
- alt227 29d ago
  This is exactly how bubbles of influence appear. Rarely do people from different leanings (social, political, economical etc) have spheres of opinion which intersect, and therefore get trapped in areas of general agreement. The social graph cannot be trusted to create a generally trusted source, because peoples innate distrust of things which differ from their own opinion skew this model heavily.
  - js8 29d ago
    I should have noted, my comment is about facts. Opinion you can have, if you think it's beneficial for you not to trust (or trust) some nodes, do so! The public social graph would be about who is a human, that can certify facts. Their opinion wouldn't really matter until you chose it to matter for you. Them being a human witness would only add credence to the accounts of the facts they witnessed, nothing more. You can still choose to disbelief the event if you have a good reason to (for example, even if you might believe a guy from Russia is a real person based on his social graph, if he certifies an event in Michigan, you might be skeptical of that account and decide to lower your own trust in that person). So there is a difference between the shared social graph - which is about a collective belief of who is a person, and your own trust, which you can modify as you wish. Unlike with Google and other big tech providers, there is not a singular "algorithm for trust" that can be manipulated. You seem to be saying it will fail because people are tribal. I believe it will not fail, because the benefits of knowing the local social graph of each person will outweigh the tendency for opinion to split based on tribe. And the reason I think so is that trust evolved and exists in society; we do not only trust ourselves, and that's only possible if something like a social graph can work. The only issue is the scale, which can be solved by using a computer instead of computing it in our little heads.

by mulmen 1mo ago

js8 1mo ago

I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms: - "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human." - "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B." The collection of these statements would be the public social graph. The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form: - "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X." Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement. So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
victorbjorklund 29d ago
Totally would not be abused. Don’t like politican/journalist/etc A? Let’s just mass report as fake person.
- alt227 29d ago
  Exactly, the 'social graph' is also a huge source of cancel culture.
- js8 29d ago
  Mass reporting means spending huge amount of reputation which doesn't really invalidate reputation of people who still certify that the person exists. The problem with the current systems is that reputation buying is not transparent. In my system, it would be a public record, who endorsed who. So you could go back and track the fake reputation. Also real people have some TTL with their accounts. Unlike links, "I am real person" is not nearly as fungible.
alt227 29d ago
This is exactly how bubbles of influence appear. Rarely do people from different leanings (social, political, economical etc) have spheres of opinion which intersect, and therefore get trapped in areas of general agreement. The social graph cannot be trusted to create a generally trusted source, because peoples innate distrust of things which differ from their own opinion skew this model heavily.
- js8 29d ago
  I should have noted, my comment is about facts. Opinion you can have, if you think it's beneficial for you not to trust (or trust) some nodes, do so! The public social graph would be about who is a human, that can certify facts. Their opinion wouldn't really matter until you chose it to matter for you. Them being a human witness would only add credence to the accounts of the facts they witnessed, nothing more. You can still choose to disbelief the event if you have a good reason to (for example, even if you might believe a guy from Russia is a real person based on his social graph, if he certifies an event in Michigan, you might be skeptical of that account and decide to lower your own trust in that person). So there is a difference between the shared social graph - which is about a collective belief of who is a person, and your own trust, which you can modify as you wish. Unlike with Google and other big tech providers, there is not a singular "algorithm for trust" that can be manipulated. You seem to be saying it will fail because people are tribal. I believe it will not fail, because the benefits of knowing the local social graph of each person will outweigh the tendency for opinion to split based on tribe. And the reason I think so is that trust evolved and exists in society; we do not only trust ourselves, and that's only possible if something like a social graph can work. The only issue is the scale, which can be solved by using a computer instead of computing it in our little heads.