I agree. Incentives are important. I imagine a system where people charge sats for access to their reviews, and you’ll be willing to pay them if the reviewer is trusted above some threshold by your web of trust. That will incentivize people to provide useful reviews, so they’re trusted more, so they get paid more.

I think you’re correct about it being computationally expensive. Strategies will have to be implemented to optimize the calculations. A challenging problem, but no reason for it to be an intractable one.

Web of trust based reputation, whether it’s called “social credit scores” or something else, is necessary and unavoidable. Just like money, it becomes dystopian when it’s controlled centrally, but not when it’s decentralized.

btc != the dystopia of fiat, and likewise: decentralized reputation != the dystopia of centralized reputation.

The challenge, therefore, is how to decentralize it.

Web of trust will do a better job than the legacy systems. I’ve built a proof of concept to show one strategy to build it. UI needs work, but it’s functional.

https://github.com/wds4/pretty-good/blob/main/appDescriptions/curatedLists/exampleListCuration.md

Great interview of nostr:npub1zuuajd7u3sx8xu92yav9jwxpr839cs0kc3q6t56vd5u9q033xmhsk6c2uc by nostr:npub1kuy0wwf0tzzqvgfv8zpw0vaupkds3430jhapwrgfjyn7ecnhpe0qj9kdj8 on Nostr Talks! I was particularly interested in the discussion of list curation on listr.lol and issues of decentralization at around the 45 min mark. Some good questions by David. A topic I (obviously, if you know me) think is a very important one! nostr:note1qf6q2kk60wp2xl7x6x7ulefcu2gu5uyuz3c2zckhjtzg8htjvkxqnntw89

Black holes are nature’s hash functions.

How so?

A black hole inputs a bunch of matter of arbitrary amount and characteristics. Through hawking radiation it eventually spits it all back out. The output looks like random noise but it’s not: it’s a digest of the input.

Replace matter with data, and you have a hash function.

How does decentralized reputation affect privacy? That’s a complicated question. But in the long run, in a good way, without a doubt.

For starters, think about what it’s going to replace. Just like bitcoin is going to be better at privacy-preservation than what it replaces (fiat), decentralized reputation is ultimately going to be better than things like CCP-style credit scores. But it’s more than that: the entire structure of surveillance capitalism will be replaced. The way I conceive of it, decentralized reputation is an inextricable part of a bigger picture: decentralized knowledge curation. If we want alternatives to centralized sources of news, we’re going to need tools to help us know where to get that information, from whom, on what topic, in what context. We won’t be able to do that without decentralized reputation.

It’s complicated, because with decentralized reputation and decentralized knowledge curation, you are going to be giving up some of your privacy, to some of the people, some of the time. The difference is that you’ll have exquisite control over which information, which people, under what circumstances, and why you give it up.

Reputation, whether it’s called “social credit scores” or something else, is necessary and unavoidable. Just like money, it becomes dystopian when it’s controlled centrally, but not when it’s decentralized.

btc != the dystopia of fiat, and likewise: decentralized reputation != the dystopia of centralized reputation.

The challenge, therefore, is how to decentralize it.

(I don’t know if you were implying otherwise. Just a point I felt was worth making. 😊)

Makes sense

Related question: is the use of a “client” tag in notes something that is encouraged / discouraged? Seems like I’ve seen it before, but it’s usually absent.

It would help track down an issue like this. Although perhaps cluttering up notes with anything unnecessary would be a bad habit to get into.

Imagine if your web of trust were to curate a list of Best Bitcoin Critics. Who do you think would belong on the list?

Imagine if your web of trust could curate a list of *steel-manned* arguments on any given issue. So whatever you believe on some topic, you have a tool to help you find the *strongest case* against your position.

Imagine if your web of trust could curate a list of all the lies (or putative lies) told by any given politician, with pointers to the actual statements.

Imagine allowing your web of trust to curate a list of nostr developers using the same method as this example: https://github.com/wds4/pretty-good/blob/main/appDescriptions/curatedLists/exampleListCuration.md

Now imagine assigning members of that list (of nostr devs) to be the curators of, for example, a list of NIPs.

So if GitHub goes down, it’ll matter just a tiny bit less.

In this way, decentralized list curation can be cascading: you can assign the members of list 1 to curate list 2, the members of list 2 to curate list 3, etc.

Who’s in charge of all this? YOU. Where’s the single point of failure (not counting you)? There is none.

Imagine having a list of moderators, managed by your web of trust, for each and every subreddit (or whatever they’ll be called in nostr).

Not selected by the dictator of that particular subreddit. Selected by YOUR web of trust.

I’m building something like this: Pretty Good Apps - Channels! Your web of trust will create/maintain/organize channels + a list of content creators for each channel.

Disclaimer: what I’m building will be a proof of concept. It will be buggy, held together with duct tape and chewing gum. But I think it’ll be something no one else has done. I’ll eventually need help to make something production ready. 🙏🏼 😊

Yes, bc I secretly paid him off, ofc! 😜

Imagine getting information on whatever you want, when you want, without having to wonder who filters the information before you see it. Or how, or why.

On the question of why we haven’t seen lots of controversial stuff on nostr:

One possibility is that it’s just too early, and the bad actors haven’t discovered it.

Another possibility is that centralized platforms like Twitter, Reddit, etc are hungry for ad revenue, so they end up promoting the controversial stuff that grabs attention. With nostr, there’s no ad revenue, so no profit in generating controversy.

Another is that the centralized platforms become captured by state actors with malevolent intent, unrelated to ad revenue. With nostr, there’s no one to capture.

The Curated Lists app within Pretty Good Apps is designed to be a proof of concept to show that decentralized curation of simple lists (DCoSL) is possible. To me, it is important to demonstrate that it is *theoretically possible* to curate lists (or anything, for that matter) in a genuinely decentralized fashion. And yet it’s not easy to communicate why this theoretical thing matters.

So the next app in PGA will be Channels, which is intended as proof of concept that decentralized curation not just of lists, but of *graphs* is possible. And hopefully take it one step closer to practical application.

The graph in question will be composed of nodes that are “topics” and edges that organize the topics into hierarchies. For each topic, a list of pubkeys that tend to post content relevant to that topic will also be subject to decentralized curation. The user will then be able to select a “channel” (a topic) and see a feed that is enriched for that topic. Should be a good way to discover new users to follow, among other things.

Without decentralized curation, the biggest challenge in building an app like this is to figure out the list of topics, their arrangement into hierarchies, and how to associate content creators with each topic. The easy (but naive) way to start would be for the app devs to make the graph of topics, but devs may not be aware of all the topics that are of interest to all their users. So the next strategy could be a Reddit-like approach: users can make their own topics (like subreddits), and the topic creator decides which users can post what on that topic. But as we see with subreddits, this would turn each topic into a little fiefdom, lorded over by the topic creator.

So what’s the next step? Decentralized curation. No single entity in charge of the topics tree. No single entity in charge of the list of pubkeys that will be the content creators for each topic. No censorship other than your ability to censor what shows up on your own feed; no fiefdoms other than the authority you exert over your own life.

What qualifies as “decentralized curation” may be considered a dry, boring, theoretical question. But we have to get the theory right before we can genuinely solve these problems.