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EstebanAbaroa@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

we plan on having as many “web of trust” like features as possible at some point, like for example you could get recommended content / communities that users you upvote participate in, this can be implemented easily, and it’s very open and P2P.

but in our opinion it’s not technically possible to have moderation/discovery that is fully web of trust for a few reasons:

you need to bootstrap from somewhere, you can’t just start “syncing/downloading” content. randomly, and then start manually liking/disliking stuff to build your personal web of trust from scratch. people dont want to download gbs of data and like/dislike stuff for hours to get started.
pure web of trust is easily gameable, you can make millions of bots that upvote each other to rank themselves to gain better rank in other people’s web of trust.
pure web of trust doesn’t have DDOS resistance, someone can completely DDOS the gossip network and prevent you from ever bootstrapping a real web of trust.

also assuming someone would develop a scalable, ux friendly and ddos resistant pure web of trust algorithm, it probably would have a UX that’s very different from reddit (and message boards in general), and our goal is to recreate the UX of reddit/message boards exactly, because we like them. The thing we don’t like about them is the centralization/commercialization/etc. For example we don’t like that reddit killed apollo/rif, we don’t like that they ban very popular subs that a lot of people enjoy, etc.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
bootstrap

Sure, so bake in a set of default “mods” whose influence goes away as people interact with the moderator system. Start with a CSAM bot, for example (fairly common on Reddit, so there’s plenty of prior art here), and allow users to manually opt-in to make those moderators permanent.

pure web of trust

I don’t think anyone wants a pure web of trust, since that relies on absolute trust of peers, and in a system like a message board, you won’t have that trust.

Instead, build it with transitive trust, weighting peers based on how much you align with them, and trust those they trust as bit less, and so on.

easily gameable

Maybe? That really depends on how you design it. If you require a lot of samples before trusting someone (e.g. samples where you align on votes), the bots would need to be pretty long-lived to build clout. And at some point, someone is bound to notice bot-like behaviour and report it, which would impact how much it impacts visible content.

DDOS

That can happen with any P2P system, yet it’s not that common of a problebut

it probably would have a UX that’s very different from reddit

I don’t see why it would. All you need is:

agree/disagree - by default, would have little impact on moderation

relevance up/down (this is your agree/disagree metric)

report for rules violation (users could tune how much they care about different report categories)

star/favorite - dramatically increases your trust of that user

Reddit/lemmy has everything but a distinction between agree/disagree and relevant/irrelevant. People tend to use votes as agree/disagree regardless, so having a distinction could lead to better moderation.

You’d need to tweak the weights, but the core algorithm doesn’t need to be super complex, just keep track of the N most aligned users and some number of “runners up” so you have a pool to swap the top group with when you start aligning more with someone else. Keep all of that local and drop posts/comments that don’t meet some threshold.

It’s way more complex than centralized moderation and will need lots of iteration to tune properly, but I think it can work reasonably well at scale since everything is local.
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