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The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

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Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#81

Post by scarejunba »

rosterface wrote: post #7

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... 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 tha…

The truth is the opposite. They always lied. Then we did not know they lied. Now we know. It is not they who changed, but us.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#82

Post by kabwj »

Merrill wrote: post #72

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.

That’s back when those systems could only be used by wealthy, educated people. Like usenet before the eternal September.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#83

Post by darkpuma »

rchaud wrote: post #22
rosterface wrote: post #7

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... 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 tha…

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 r…

Most newspaper articles don't have or need a photograph. Did the Chicago Sun Times really have a 1:1 ratio of journalists and photographers?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#84

Post by mikekchar »

jaspax wrote: post #32
lmm wrote: post #3

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…

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 n…

Careful. Soon you'll be arguing for the dictatorship of the proletariat. "Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition of democracy (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised." -- Lenin.

I'm not being completely serious, but I do find it extremely interesting that this whole idea of high-coercion at the start followed by a gradual easing off as people accept the new culture is one that has been tried explicitly. Or... at least claimed to have been tried ;-). Marx and Engels split no hairs about the authoritarian nature of revolution and when Lenin and Stalin later tried (presumably) to manage the situation they found it necessary to maintain that dictatorship in order to combat the ever present trend toward bourgeoisie and capitalism. But it was all supposed to end eventually.

For me, I see parallels between that and the current air of "It's a scary world out there. Trust your government to take care of you. Give us more powers so that we can make our communities whole." No authoritarian revolution, but a very real reach towards cracking down on bad people in the name of the community. And once utopia (though not a communist one) is reached, the power will simply not be necessary.

Having said all that, it was Confucius who said that if you are lax at the beginning and then become more strict, you will be seen as a tyrant. However, if you are very strict at the beginning and become more liberal over time, people will see you as magnanimous. When I used to teach at a high school, I used that idea and it did, indeed, work very well.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#85

Post by DoreenMichele »

rosterface wrote: post #7

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... 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 tha…

It's a totally self inflicted wound too.

No, it's really not. In a nutshell, the root cause is the currently pervasive idea that good writing should be available completely for free.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#86

Post by ravenstine »

chmod775 wrote: post #77

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 pseudony…

I think it's more that the perception of it is being twisted. The media twists the way that the internet has worked since time immemorial as something that's suddenly gotten a lot worse, that all trolls are on par with criminals, and that we need to take drastic measures.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#87

Post by petermcneeley »

abathur wrote: post #67
Sushi-san wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, should we just try to ignore the larger-scale exploitation of trust?

No, we shouldn't ignore it. But I think there's a risk of sending a lot of bright, productive people off to tilt at technological/interface/regulatory windmills in a way that leaves fundamental trust issues out of scope. Even if Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could wave a magic wand and remove every fake review, counterfeit product, scam, personal threat, or piece of false/fraudulent media, there would still be a tr…

These networks would be scalable by using derived trust values. In simple terms you trust others to provide you with the trust value of people you have never met. I'm sure one could mathematically prove certain implementations to be unexploitable.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#89

Post by dsfyu404ed »

ehmish wrote: post #59
yborg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ruling part of the early United States were English settlers, so they brought their high trust society with them.

Eh. Reality is more complicated.

Some of the English settlers were decent people with functional societies.

Some of them were basically the christian Taliban.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#90

Post by chmod775 »

ravenstine wrote: post #86
chmod775 wrote: post #77

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 pseudony…

I think it's more that the perception of it is being twisted. The media twists the way that the internet has worked since time immemorial as something that's suddenly gotten a lot worse, that all trolls are on par with criminals, and that we need to take drastic measures.

I wholly agree. But.

The people who write those kinds of articles are mostly just your average Joe who uses the internet exclusively to browse Facebook and the like. Of course this gives them a twisted understanding of the medium.

And then there's those who are just lying I guess (duh!). Plenty of reason for that with the whole fake news hysteria. If you don't want to risk ending up on the wrong end of that debate, your article is already written for you. Risky to defend the free(-er) internet nowadays or even just to refrain from attacking it. Further there's the fact that "a war on fake news" might give the established media an edge, but I'm unconvinced any reputable journalist would consciously consider that when deciding on the tone of his article.

In any case you can also find plenty of articles displaying a better understanding of the matter. It's not like there's some secret global conspiracy against the free internet.

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