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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

#141

Post by adventured »

kerblang wrote: post #140

Maybe the problem is that ever since google the only metric anyone has bothered to devise is "popularity", which was never a particularly good indicator of truth to begin with.

Google was built heavily on authority, not just popularity.

Otherwise you could easily buy your way above Wikipedia, a non-profit organization (Wikimedia) - which ranks at or near the top for every query.

Quora, or some other VC backed knowledge service with a couple hundred million to vaporize, would overtake Wikipedia through the direct purchasing of popularity. Then others would quickly follow, entirely wiping Wikipedia from the first pages. That can't be done. If it could, private equity via Answers.com and other such very low quality sites would have already done it, seeking billions of dollars in return on such positioning.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#142

Post by bawana »

scale is indeed the problem. scale has perverted our capitalist society as well, long before the internet. Adam Smith wrote about capitalism but he never envisioned Amazon. Changing a system from a one-to-one interaction to a one-to-many interaction should not allow us to apply the same rules. In math for example, commutativity works for single numbers, but not matrices.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#143

Post by abathur »

raxxorrax wrote: post #123
abathur wrote: post #55

If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…

I think it is just a formalization of the thoughts of egoists of the 19th century. Trust is a resource and is (only) used up if exploited. There are countless examples how this happened on the net. Remember the latest disclaimer you agreed to and consequently had your data stolen or abused? Don't even get me started on penis enlargement spam. Then additionally, people pretending to have identified the abusers very fr…

> There is no intrinsic problem with trust. On the net you are potentially connected to everyone on the planet. Nobody can claim the trust of everyone. And I firmly believe achieving this is the wrong goal.

> People need to simple not let their trust be abused and that is very possible. For example not letting ad companies handle your biases or believing the next random spam mail you get.

> Anonymity is a tool to shield you from abuse. Not the only one, but for non-public personas, nobody has found something better yet.

I'm not sure it's possible to distinguish the world you describe from the one we already live in.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#144

Post by vinceguidry »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #45
gipp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article -- and the lobbying group "study" it is based on have been pretty roundly condemned even by other journalism organizations e.g. https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/nyt-google-media.php tl;dr the number is total fabrication

Which only cements the claim that no one is making serious money off of proper news media.

Has the news industry's economics ever been truly separate from entertainment industry economics? Is the only reason news ever made money was because it offered people a novel form of entertainment?

Did people ever buy news because it was news? Or was this decline inevitable as actual entertainment was always going to eventually be able to offer a better match for what people actually buy?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#145

Post by chongli »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #85
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.

Ideas follow from reality. Supply and demand would dictate that infinite supply should drive prices to zero. Isn't that what we're seeing?

The other problem is that most people can't tell good writing apart from bad, but that problem is far older than all technology (apart from writing itself, of course).

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#147

Post by moate »

DuskStar wrote: post #68
ikeyany wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provide some evidence then. What percentage of women could vote then? What percentage of blacks? If it's not a significant amount, your reply isn't much of a rebuttal.

The original requirements were the same for everyone - white or black, male or female - though thanks to the doctrine of coverture, married women would not have the assets to qualify. (Married women could generally not own property independent of their husband) Coverture was not applied universally however, and many married women still voted. See [0] > That all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth f…

Rolling back to the original point, that the US was High Trust right from the start, doesn't the point that there were major barrier's to entry for being part of the "democracy" for both men and women show that there was some inaccuracy to that statement?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#148

Post by DoreenMichele »

chongli wrote: post #145
DoreenMichele wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ideas follow from reality. Supply and demand would dictate that infinite supply should drive prices to zero. Isn't that what we're seeing? The other problem is that most people can't tell good writing apart from bad, but that problem is far older than all technology (apart from writing itself, of course).

That's a two-way street. Reality also follows from ideas.

Perhaps most people can't tell good writing from bad, but the HN crowd is more able than average to distinguish the two. Yet the attitude here boils down to "writing isn't a real job -- if you don't like working for peanuts, then STFU and get a real job!" HN members actively find ways around pay walls, more aggressively than most use ad blockers etc. Most people here are well heeled and can afford to pay for subscriptions, but the dominant attitude is "fuck no to that -- writing should be free!"

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#149

Post by buboard »

chongli wrote: post #138
buboard wrote: post #79

Can we trust the article that it is the internet that is becoming low trust, or is it reflecting society's trends? Trust has been fading in societies for decades [1] and apparently millenials are the most cynical [2] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us... https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/... First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were…

Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews Given that platforms earn a commission on every sale, why should they be trusted to procure specialists' reviews? Maybe they would prefer to hire professional charlatans to boost the reviews on everything, in order to drown out the legitimate opinions of aggrieved customers?

Sure that's a great recipe to lose your customers. Shops have an interest in having honest reviews, and if they are gaming them, someone else will provide more honest ones.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#150

Post by chongli »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #148
chongli wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas follow from reality. Supply and demand would dictate that infinite supply should drive prices to zero. Isn't that what we're seeing? The other problem is that most people can't tell good writing apart from bad, but that problem is far older than all technology (apart from writing itself, of course).

That's a two-way street. Reality also follows from ideas. Perhaps most people can't tell good writing from bad, but the HN crowd is more able than average to distinguish the two. Yet the attitude here boils down to "writing isn't a real job -- if you don't like working for peanuts, then STFU and get a real job !" HN members actively find ways around pay walls, more aggressively than most use ad blockers etc. Most peo…

It isn't just a dichotomy that bad writers produce bad writing and good writers produce good writing. Good writers are even better at producing bad writing, because they produce bad writing that masquerades as good. We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.
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