[balasan]

We are experience trust scarcity in online media because trust hasn't been part of social media's business model. By extension it stopped being part of the news publication's business model (everyone is forced to compete for clicks). That and because on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

Ironically we are increasingly willing to get into stranger's cars and allow strangers stay at our homes because a few corporations like Uber and Airbnb were able to quantify, materialize and monetize trust. So it's not that much of a stretch to imagine an internet where trust plays a role in the way we distribute, consume and exchange information online. Hacker News is a case in point.

Ready for the shill?

We're building Relevant to make it easy to set up communities similar to HN, each with its own trust/reputation metric (based on personalized pagerank algorithm). So instead of using clicks / votes, all users and content get a trust/reputation score. The result is that rankings don't represent popularity, but relevance, resulting in better feeds and making communities easier to moderate. These trust metrics are much more resistant to sybil/sock-puppet attacks and can be used to build healthier business models, from prediction markets to advertising.

https://relevant.community/relevant/top

[blackflame7000]

I think the issue is too much trust. Too many people believe that because a Network, Publication, Author, or Anchor published quality work in the past, therefore, they can be trusted to reliably deliver news in the future. People's sources, access, knowledge, agenda, and effort vary wildly and each story needs to be judged on its own merit.

[balasan]

Right, so maybe scarcity of trustworthiness, or trust metrics/signals is more accurate. Plenty of popularity/click metrics, but how often do we really want to know what the masses think about complex nuanced topics?