Web rings.

Think about it - some human element of trust and vouching for someone being added to the ring.

Till you find out that most human will sell out ring links for a bit of cash with no problems.

Sure. It's a problem with peer-reviewed science journals even. There are no perfect solutions to monied interests bribing the curators.

Perhaps that is one additional layer of friction that will make human moderation / social voting feasible. The fire hose of AI trash content will come too rapidly for it to work at layer 1 (all content), but if the barrier to entry is a financial transaction to take over placement in a human-curated webring or directory it becomes easier to moderate / vote away the trash.

Add a trust metric and chains of provenance. Bad ring link -> bad trust percolating up that chain. Little trust, your site isn't always shown as part of the ring. Too much loss of trust, you're out.

(Ultimately, this is a bad facsimile of human group behavior - all the way up to shunning people who deeply violate group norms. And I don't think it'll scale super-well. )

That's pagerank, right? The trust was built from href votes.

Except there's no provenance or root of trust. There is (IIUC) no back-propagation of a penalty if sites violate trust, just an overall observational measure.

And I'd still say pagerank did work really well in an Internet where there was overwhelmingly trust. But in a world where default-trust is a bad stance, I believe there needs to be an equivalent of what "You can trust X" does in small in-person groups. (Or, alternatively "Sheesh, X went off and just destroyed all trust")

I do think it'll need to be more than a single metric, too. Trust is multidimensional by topic(E.g. "I trust the NYTs data science folks, I have zero trust for the OpEds"), and it is somewhat personal. (E.g. I might have experienced X lying to me, while they've been 100% honest to you - maybe in/outgroup, maybe political alignment, maybe differing beliefs, etc. Ultimately, what we call trust in an indirect situation is "most of my directly trusted folk vouch for that person)

Keyservers. You decide which keyservers to register with and to trust for verifying others. Browsers would handle en-decryption automatically and allow you to flag, filter, or finger (in the Unix sense).

No, they can't. Or at least, they don't. I see the same trash-fire sites on Google all the time. Google just DGAF.