The idea that someone reputeable is always right and and expert in his domain could not be further fetched from the truth.
Just read the following sentence and tell me what you think about it: "oh yeah i get all my information about my religion directly from the pope in the vatican, because we decided EONS ago that he is the source for this kind of stuff".
Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason?
Only on the internet, where history can be distilled into a single-sentence quip.
In real life the truth is more complicated, but doesn't fit into a tweet.
It only changed over a hundred years later due to the opposition from the Protestants that his books became banned.
I assure you that all major search engines use the author name of articles and blog posts and even posts of forums like HN for all kinds of purposes that end up influencing ranking. It's primarily for anti-spam (a user account with good content on one page probably has good content on another page), but is used to rank quality/expertise too.
The mixing of random and "trusted" content is already what is being done with pagerank.
Truth is an agreement and trust is superficial. I know, I know there is truth in code, but that does not mean that the bigger concept aligns.
I mean damn, we went as far as defining math as the "universal truth" because its replicateable. I dont think anybody wanted to convert reality to numbers but here we are represeting them this way. But hey, if you can develop a mathematical formular why blogspost A about "how to setup your linux computer" is much more true that blogpost B im really all ears.
There’s no need, with this idea, for you to have to get your info directly from the Vatican. You can decide you trust someone different.
Because its really going to be different from the one your neighbour has.
How do you select turstworthy people on a new topic? Does every search start with "hmmm i found 6521 people blogging about this, please click on the trustworthy avatars you like"?
The concept you are trying to apply here, will just lead to your own bubble. Im not even going to go into detail of "orange men knows best" but this example alone should shock you.
This isn't about getting quick answers.
Now you’re arguing about implementation, which is different.
So how to vet people? Well, Paul Graham started a VC company and has seen a lot of startups, so my guess is that he knows a lot about the topic. More so than anyone who hasn't come close to any startup.
On (game) development, I would go for Carmack and the likes.
And of course just like PageRank, if they have vetted for certain people, those also get scored.
Does it lead to your own bubble? Of course! But if you're going to get a religious person to dump his own religion in favor for another, good luck to you. But that's not the kind of problem that I want or need to solve.
I just want reliable information. And I get to decide what "reliable" is. If you're a flat-earther, you can vet any crazy person you wish. I don't care, because it won't affect me at all.
I had a similar idea (also, please take it) for online comment systems. Seed of people and who they invite is who they vouch for. The new invitees get to invite more etc. Now, and keep OPs suggestion in mind as well, that's the easy part - here's where it needs to go... If someone messes up, account gets banned and upchain (two levels let's say) gets a notice. Upchain gets one more notice and the whole chain's banned. One notice clears out in half a year or so. Two never. Yellow/red cards for the teams on the internet. One's always at fault, but whole team suffers and is responsible.
You might say that would make you think thrice about inviting people, and yes it would - what incentivises anyone to invite anyone, ever? What makes your system different from a small group of friends making a private invite-only Discord/IRC channel/etc. and keeping it exclusive right now?
I trust PG for knowledge about startups. That's it.
I’ve come to realize that the people that “wrote the book” on a particular subject aren’t necessarily experts, they’re just the person who happened to be motivated to write a book on the subject.
Learning about a subject or an event comes from hearing many voices, across a broad spectrum of perspectives and opinions.
Then you can form your own conclusions out of all the possible truths.
Truth is not a democratic process and very hard to verify just by using data.
Not asking to rewrite the whole internet here, just an alternative search engine.
> The idea that someone reputeable is always right and and expert in his domain could not be further fetched from the truth.
The expert probably knows more than the non-expert. If you like to get your info from low-waged SEO writers, fine by me.
> Just read the following sentence and tell me what you think about it: "oh yeah i get all my information about my religion directly from the pope in the vatican, because we decided EONS ago that he is the source for this kind of stuff".
The pope, and everyone that he trusts, seems like credible sources for Catholics, no? Maybe you can throw in some theologist you like (and therefore also this persons trusted connections), and you can have a pretty good catalogue of trusted searchable information.
For me, personally, it’s been a long time since Google pointed me to new platforms or new writers. It is dominated by big outlets and seo articles now, and good mostly for finding basic factual info - not for finding individual writers or nlogs any more
E.g., suppose I tell the network that I'm 80% interested in William Gibson, and I set my "see posts by" threshold to 60%. I would then see all posts from William Gibson, as well as any posts from people he's at least 75% interested in. And of course I'd also see posts from more distant connections, if the chain multiplies out to more than my view threshold.
Have any networks ever done something like this before? Or with "interest" swapped for "trust" or some other stat?
They make money by tweaking those thresholds so that you'll be interested in what their paying customers (advertisers) actually want you to be interested in. Giving you back the power to change that, would be the end of their business model.
That's how they all worked in principle.
The "problem" for FB, Twitter, YouTube (and others) is that some people trust Alex Jones and since the 2016 election we've been in a moral panic around misinformation (Russian or otherwise). Our big idea right now is making sure that tech conglomerates choose for us the people we should trust.
Also that's not very far from sharing RSS feeds with friends. "I like this blog, so I add it to my feeds" is a way of "trusting" someone. But the reality is that people can't be bothered to use RSS, generally.
Besides, do not think about the problem as a techie with a long list of trusted internet personalities. Think about it as a normal user that barely gets technology. The most common outcome would be that they setup once these search sources with some random familiar sounding names (probably news outlet they trust) and never touch them again. It feels it could be a highly exploitable system.
I’m also not sure that i agree with your idea that the core principal of the internet should be in any way related to what information one might discover. The internet and the web provide means to disseminate and access information (amongst much else) but I don’t see how it should have anything to do with what you discover.
Current system is too easily gamed. If it means we need to sign everything with real name/ID let's be it. There is a place for anonymous Internet but life is too short to go through piles of trash every day to try to find a nugget. At least allow others who already found it to sign on "I found out and it's interesting" promise.
Reddit.
http://getoutfoxed.com/node/46
We raised several million dollars and ran for several years before we had to pivot. At least then, people weren’t too interested in having to select trusted experts. However, this was the golden era of Google so it was hard to see the need.
It began as a Firefox plugin and had a lot of buzz for a time in those early Web 2.0 days.
It's not like you have to do this with every article you read, but for those where you do care about the integrity of the information, you'd have this extra support.
Outsourcing the credibility assessment to the link graph was the whole point of PageRank, because most people wouldn't know where to start with whitelisting sources for their query (and if they did, a general web search engine wouldn't be where they started).
If I want pg's opinion on startups, I go to his blog. If I want to find a venue near me, or the web presence for a company somebody has mentioned, or a description of a particular phenomenon I'm not familiar with, or whether a particular error message has been seen by other people, or where to buy something, or some information on a place in a foreign country or what Foo means, I don't want to start off by specifying who I trust to provide this information. And even if I did, I suspect I'd be disappointed by how little information Paul Graham, my favourite YouTubers and the Pope had to offer on any of these subjects.
I look forward to seeing this on /r/agedlikemilk in 2 years when KonsoloSearch buys Google.
Expensive at the moment but is one way to solve source payment problem and as an end outcome seems preferrable to being being beholden to Trump, Biden, Pope, BBC, Fox, Musk, Xi, Putin or whatever flavoured bots for our "truth".
It'd be trivial for them to remove/derank 99% of spam by manually reviewing search results (still at negligible cost) possibly letting users flag results for them for guidance.
Example: Is a page copying lots of text from stack overflow? Then it's probably spam! Don't show it on the first page of the search results!
My proposed solution: People sign their articles with a key, and I specify for which topics I trust certain people.
I trust Paul Graham on the topic 'startups', so anything that he writes on the topic is considered a high pagerank for me. Paul can also trust other people on the 'startup' topic, and so they will automatically be ranked high on my pagerank (for that topic!). When I do a search, it takes into account the people that I trust on certain topics.
Please steal my idea and make millions!!!