Re:Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
by 2sk21 on Monday November 04, 2019 @06:49PM
(#21448071)
This was in the book Anathem and I agree that it was one of the most intriguing ideas (and there were many in Anathem!).
An earlier comment I made about this very point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554592
Re:Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
by RandallBrown on Monday November 04, 2019 @07:02PM
(#21448168)
I had totally forgotten about that part of Anathem!
Stephenson has done a pretty amazing job at extrapolating the near future. I'm not sure if the idea of a crypto currency existed before he wrote Cryptonomicon, but that was 10 years before Bitcoin launched.
Re:Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
by satori99 on Monday November 04, 2019 @05:26PM
(#21447277)
I found that idea to be fascinating also.
He expressed the idea of editors being a two-way service. They not only curated your feeds, but also monitored the data you make available to others.
Wealthy people could afford human editors to look after their personal 'brand', and ensure the quality of their consumed media, whereas poorer people had to make do with AI editors run by the likes of Google, or Facebook.
One way the characters in the book got around the huge signal to noise problem was by using editors who were paid to filter it out. Different people could afford different qualities of editors and that had effects on society.
It's a pretty small part of the book, but it's very interesting.