There's a belief among some distributed systems folk:
> If your system doesn't have an explicit hierarchy then it has an implicit one.
I think it's hogwash. There are plenty of distributed systems in nature that lack a hierarchy (mycorrhizal networks in the soil of a forest come to mind). Truly distributed systems are possible, we humans are just bad at it.
Or rather, we're bad at designing for it. We do it all the time in our personal lives, we've been doing it for thousands of years, but when we introduce systems that are designed to scale globally, it falls apart and you end up with gatekeepers and renteeism.
Another distributed systems thing: the CAP theorem:
> Consistent, Availability, Partition Tolerance... chose two.
Usually, the systems we design are at the expense of partition tolerance (blockchains, for instance, go to great lengths to assure consistency).
But those fungal networks that I mentioned, they put partition tolerance first, which gives the system a sense of locality that is lacking when you instead focus on consistency.
That same sense of locality is found in natural emergent human social networks, they don't even try to achieve global consistency: if you think Jimbob is an asshat, and your friends agree, that's enough.
So I think the key to sustainable webs of trust lies somewhere in that underexplored design space where we make partition tolerance primary. Rather than building tech to tell people who to trust (think of that padlock icon in your browser) we should respect their autonomy a bit more and make the user experience be a function of that user's explicitly defined trust settings.
One thing I like about this is that it removes the edgelord dynamic. There's no advantage to being the guy who posts the most outrageous stuff that just barely squeaks by the moderator. Instead, everybody can publish, but if you want to be heard as widely as possible you need to be trusted (in whatever domain you're publishing in) by people who are themselves well trusted in that domain.
Experts can be found not by listening to some authority that tells you who the experts are, but instead by following the directed graph of trust relationships until you find a cycle. That cycle is a community of experts in the "trust color" you're querying for. So expertise is more emergent and less top-down.
If you can't agree with somebody about a topic, you can follow this graph and either find a mediator (someone you both transitively trust) or find separate experts who presumably exemplify the disagreement more energetically than you do.
Instead of:
> Agree with us or be silent
It would be more of a:
> Here's how we can disagree as fruitfully as possible
Navigating the resulting dataset and deciding what to believe would be left as an exercise to the user, which it already is, but we'd hopefully have given them enough so that we can scale further than our unaugmented trust instincts allow for.
There's unfortunately not much money in building things like this. There's no guarantee that you stay in control of what you've built (the users could just revoke trust in you while still using the software that you wrote) and that tends to be a turn-off for investors.