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Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem, doing that, is that you increase the pressure from bad actors to websites that are trusted by lots of people.

So, for instance, the more weight you give to sites that are quoted by Wikipedia in your search rankings, the more content farms will have incentives to sneak edits that link to their sites.

There are ways to counter that (eg moderation), but in general, defense is more expensive than offense.

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Right but the idea is that you don’t use sites as sources of trust, you use people. Content farms won’t be paying your friends and family to shill websites to you.

"Like us on Facebook and get this 10 cent coupon or even the chance of winning something real!"

Works suprisingly well already, sadly. So yes - at some point companies would pay people to vote for them.

But I still would prefer that system (with some differences) over the default. Because the people I would trust, would not fall for the common scams.

I mean, of course they will?

A large fraction of facebook content is MLMs and mobile game ads from one's own contacts.

Then you just stop trusting them for your search results, it's not like you are unfriending them.

I think you are applying a solution that would work in a cooperative game. The problem is that this situation, like spam, is an inherently adversarial one - and one where one's adversaries are very motivated and have substantial (substantially more?) resources than you at the outset.

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