[sharperguy]

I've been hearing talk for years about a "web of trust" system, that could filter spam simply by having users vouch for eachother and filtering out anyone not vouched for. However, I haven't seen a function system based on this model yet.

Personally I'd love to add in something like the old slashdot comment model, where people would mark content as "helpful", "funny", "insightful", "controversial" etc, and based on how much you trust the people labeling it, you could have things filtered out, or brought forward.

[wongarsu]

There is the simpler version that is approximately "you can only get in if someone vouches for you. If a person you vouch for misbehaves you get punished as well". That's effectively a "tree of trust" with skin in the game. And it's incredibly successful, used in lots of communities, crime rings, job recommendations, etc.

Any attempt to generalize this by allowing multiple weak vouches instead of a single strong one, or allowing people to join before getting vouched for, or removing the stakes in vouching for someone, etc. always end up failing for fairly predictable reasons. No matter how much cool cryptography you add

[berenddeperend]

Wouldn't that be easy to bypass by just adding one or two proxy accounts? Say person A invites me (a bad actor). I could invite a second throwaway account, with which I invite a third throwaway account. I do bad things on my third account. Could you reasonably punish person A for this? You'd first have to prove that the throwaway accounts all belong to me.

[pjc50]

I think the last one of those I saw was Advogato?

Some of the social media systems, including Bluesky, started as invite-only, but that was only ever really for rate-limiting and in particular there were no negative consequences for inviting someone who was subsequently banned.

[Gormo]

> However, I haven't seen a function system based on this model yet.

HN's mirror-universe counterpart, Lobste.rs, works basically this way.

[Obscurity4340]

I think Tildes and Lobste.rs does