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Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

The web already provides this: people or groups can publish under semi-stable names, linked to their real identity or not, and people can hyperlink to each other's content. The link graph is the web of trust and Google famously uses it to rank content. What is it really missing?

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At the very least, people would need a reliable way of indicating whether the site they are linking to is one they are endorsing or criticising, and there would need to be some clever crawler that can calculate a trustworthiness score from this graph for each page you visit.

Presumably this would be implemented as a browser extension. It could also recommend similar pages with a higher score, and maybe highly scored pages that offer a different perspective on the same topic as the page you are reading.

Google let's you link to a page without transmitting PageRank. There's no notion of transmitting negative rank because of course that would be horribly abused by competitors trying to sink each others sites.

I think the web is pretty good as a decentralised systems for ideas. A lot of basic stuff isn't exploited though. For instance a simple way to set up networks of caching proxies and point browsers towards them, so sites can survive ddos attacks and be fully anonymised would be good. CDNs like cloudflare provide that today but tools for smaller scale equivalents would be great.

I guess theoretically and in some ways in practice. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “search through the web only returning results bookmarked with 2 degrees of trust” or something like that. Where each of the nodes are not documents but are identities- which may often tie 1:1 to a human

Isn't that basically newspapers? Journalists post articles and links to indicate they're at least interesting if not trustworthy, and usually under their own name. Webs of trust never worked for cryptography though.

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