Goodman

Thanks for your comments. I agree with everything you said especially that these traits are desirable for broader life IRL. In a way the web culture is a reflection of our own cultures just more mixed, extreme, amplified and with a good dose of parasociallity. I desperately want people to break free of their cycles. Think, talk, discuss, empathize and form communities, use your free will for good damit. These are the real antidotes that will enable the cultural shift that will allow us to reject the smothering of the human spirit in the current way of life.

Anyways, it is a terrible thing that there is an armsrace to be authentic. This really ought to be solved on the user registration side. And also yes, saying something profound with hidden meaning through creative intuition is great, I write poems sometimes. But its not the solution to authenticity online.

Haha you did not answer my questions, but you are clearly passiinate about this vision and I like that. As I understand it you describe a sort of moral credit that has value within the community that hands it out. So I imagine that a board would mint these tokens? What would these tokens buy you?

We will grant that most in the community will be commited to the cause so they will want to participate, but other than respect, why and what should I grant/sell you (you having some credit) for helping the cause. Couldn’t I just grant my effort to the cause directly? I get the renown aspect, but we also have commemorative mission patches pins and stickers for that.

So in short, I am not questioning the renown/trust mechanism of a moral credit system, but I am questioning the monetary function.

Don’t take this a rejection of the idea, the rebirth of the internet has to start somewhere and that might be here by visionaries.

Thanks for the elaborate write-up, it’s good to engage in discussion about these things. An electoral system seems quite elaborate, but I would love to see it work. It would require quite active participation by the users, and I am not convinced that smaller instances would have the active user base for this. Even so, the idea is quite appealing.

Vetting good faith users is indeed one of the difficult problems. We could make better captchas maybe. For example taking some pictures of household objects in certain orientations. You could also check the exif flags to check if they line up with known cameras or something. Just an idea.

I like your idea of social credit/karma, but I have some questions. So imagine that an instance can hand out these social points and so can another instance. How would we equate the value of one system to another? What is stopping my instance from minting a bunch of social points and giving them to me to elevate my “trustworthiness” in your instance?

I also had an idea for a trust system based on belief systems. So as per Decartes I know that I am (real), and I have met some people IRL that are also real, so whenever they message me, I have a high degree of trust that they are not bots. I would also feel relatively inclined to trust the friends of my friends, with that trust decaying as we move down the friend chain. You could sort of make a “trust tree” where you would be able to see how many trust steps you are removed from IRL validation. You could even weigh the scores and downgrade someones trust score in the tree if it turned out that one of their contacts turned out to be a bot or something like that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Genuine discussion and meaningful interactions make this a better place.

How would we defend ourselves from such a bot flood though?

Let’s say that we start to become competitive with one of these big tech companies user wise. What is stopping them from destroying the fediverse with bots by sewing dissent, hate and slop?

Perhaps the answer to such a scenario would just be to splinter, defederate and sort out the bot issue with better user registration.

Happy to hear your thoughts.

We are the web. There is no web without the we.

It is ultimately humans who add value to the internet. We can make decisions, take action, have bank accounts, bots for the most part still can’t. If we keep growing, there will come a time where swaying opinions, impressing advertisements or driving dissent will reach that value/effort threshold, especially with the effort term shrinking more everyday

I think that we are genuinely witnessing the end of the internet as we know it and if we want meaningful online contact to persist after this death, then we should come up with ways that communities can weather the storm.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I want to talk and think about it with others that care.

On the individual level we can maybe fortify against the reasons that might make someone want to extract that value.

• Being a principled conscious consumer makes you a less likely target for advertisement
• Avoid ragebait and clickbait, and develop a good epistemic bullshit filter along with media literacy, this makes it more difficult to lie to you, or to provoke outrage.
• Unfortunately, be selective with your trust. How old is the user account? are the posting hours normal? does the user come across as a genuine human being that values discussion and meaningful online contact?
• Be authentic and genuine. I don’t know how else to signify that I am real (shoutout to the þorn users)

I would love to hear what others think.

I used to do a ton with Processing and P5. This guy https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain did wonders for my skill and enjoyment a few years ago. I owe him a lot