[passthefist]

A distributed trust network is a really interesting hard problem but does seem solvable in some ways (as seen by blockchains, though they have their own issues).

I've wondered if a somewhat simplistic graph based solution could work, inspired by organizations like medieval guilds and the mafia, where you generally need to be invited to the trust network and promoted to be more trusted within the network as others vouch for your trustworthiness. Suspicious users are highly punished (in the real life examples, often violently) and quickly removed from the network.

Obviously can be gamed like any other system, but would be much harder to do so and you can leverage the vouch/invite graph to detect trusted users that are highly connected to suspicious ones.

Surely there's something like this out there, though? Or is this just not a valuable business problem to solve?

[tshaddox]

It sounds like you're describing a product review site implemented as a distributed trust network, and the plan to establish the trustworthiness of contributors is to bolt on a contributor review site implemented as a distributed trust network.

[dnautics]

maybe this works if you have to 1) be invited and 2) also pay to get in?

[lrem]

Isn't this how recommendations in social networks work?

[quantified]

How many people in a "friends" list are people you actually know?