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.