Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dontcarethrow2 on Monday July 20, 2020 @08:54AM (#23897276)

I would've agreed with this a bit more if we hadn't started banning content we don't like from the internet. Here I am without a link, but chasing away groups we don't agree with to the dark side of the web makes it very convenient for the current political saints to shape our views. I take any claim with URIs or without, try to think about who gains from such perspectives, weigh it with past experiences. I'd hate to just see a URI and go "OK, I am convinced ty" and automatically pick up the pitchforks against those without. I doubt even newspapers did this. It sounds like a good idea but only on an open internet and not what we have today.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by ceejayoz on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:35AM (#23897654)

Virtually all of the "banned from the Internet" folks are still accessible via the Internet just fine. Infowars is a click or a Google away; it's just not on YouTube or Facebook.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Aerroon on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:35AM (#23897648)

>I'd hate to just see a URI and go "OK, I am convinced ty" and automatically pick up the pitchforks against those without.

Something to particularly consider are circular references. If you make the reference graph large enough then it's easy to fool people into thinking that there is a valid source for a claim when there actually isn't one. All you have are references that refer to one another. It gets particularly bad when some of those references end up as dead links, because then you can't even find out whether the chain ended up at a valid source or not.

Related to this are long reference chains that end up on a shaky source. A poorly done study (or simply a bought one) can end up being referenced in a long chain. The links in the chain might end up giving more credibility to the source.

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Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by jakelazaroff on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:57AM (#23897865)

I don't think you even need a large graph! People have observed this happening with just two nodes, where one of the nodes is Wikipedia [1] — some website states information they learned on (or copied from) Wikipedia, and then Wikipedia cites that website as a primary source.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/wikipedia-citogenesis-c...

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Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Can_Not on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @08:16AM (#23916138)

Then hundreds of websites cite the wikipedia article, some without revealing their source, then become additional citations for the Wikipedia article.

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Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by greggyb on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:41AM (#23897694)

I don't read the article as saying:

URI == trust claims of content

Rather, it is saying that:

URI provides strong evidence that the content legitimately comes from the named source.

And more specifically:

If the content does not have a URI, you should put little weight on the attribution.

Evaluating the validity of the claims is always left as an exercise for the reader.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dontcarethrow2 on Monday July 20, 2020 @10:14AM (#23898052)

I didn't want to imply we automatically trust it more, but just skimming through a thread I realize that thats what usually happens. It is likely because I don't consume content in such a way (I am guilty of just reading the headline sometime and jumping to personal conclusions) but to even go through a normal thread it will feel very tiring to go and validate all claims.

It sounds very lazy of me but I usually just don't trust the web in general. I don't really have anything valuable on my computer but I still get scared some site will serve me malware. So now to get through a normal discussion we will have linked sources and discussions about the sources (with more required sources ofc). When do we get to the meat of the content? I realize HNers are more capable in digging through sources, but I'd like to think the rest of the users are more lazy-scared like me, so I am going off of that experience.

And ofcourse wild claims without any sources will always be ringing bells for me, I just want to hear the same amount of bells with the sourced claims as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by cmiles74 on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:41AM (#23897695)

I agree that there's a real push-and-pull between people trying to be responsive to content that is in some way damaging to other people (props up stereotypes, promotes some kind of violence, false information that sounds plausible but could get someone hurt, etc.) and those who would prefer leave content as it is and turn up the volume on some other type of corrective measure, like annotating clearly untrue content or information that has been proven false.

That said, I'm not convinced that one side is winning such that we'll end up losing primary sources. I was disappointed see episodes of "Community" pulled from Netflix and Hulu (one recent example) but the episode remains on DVD, saving it from the proverbial "memory hole".

I don't think anyone should be convinced of the veracity of information simply from seeing it linked to another page. Surely we have to click the link and then judge the source for ourselves.

[ Parent | on HN ]