Like others said either the site has no users or self marketing/review bombing destroys the site.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
90 points (97.9% liked)
Showerthoughts
30017 readers
1008 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics
- 3.1) NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out
- 3.2) Political posts often end up being circle jerks (not offering unique perspective) or enflaming (too much work for mods).
- 3.3) Try c/politicaldiscussion, volunteer as a mod here, or start your own community.
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Well I mean 2 problems.
-
Same problem every social network has... without intense marketing, budget etc... Usage will be low. Same reason why say you don't see, a bunch of lemmy groups for niche or local topics. Because it's mostly nerds etc, and the only topics that are going to have enough people to be useful are ones with national/international appeal because likely there's on average one lemmy user per several cities.
-
Review sites need intense moderation and verification to be useful. Problem is of course going to be either companies themselves posting swarms of reviews to make themselves look great, or competitors or people with personal grudges posting to make them look bad.
Neither of those seem like complete dealbreakers if there were some form of verification using DID’s and homomorphic encryption for example.
Marketing, to me, is a non-issue if the technology has evolved enough. We can start with nerds only and iterate upon it until the normies can’t deny the superiority of the platform and move over in droves. We are not there yet on the fediverse, IMO. Here’s Hoskinson doing a thought experiment about what would need to be done to truly achieve a decentralized Twitter.
For one, NOSTR’s tech would make this fairly easy for someone just a tad smarter than myself to implement. Of course it wouldn’t be foolproof but it would be FAR better than say Yelp or Google or GlassDoor reviews are on their own.
I’m under no impression that my idea is rock solid and infallible. In fact, I don’t imagine it would work in the current server client relationship. Full stop.
I’m hoping that our acute sensitivity to enshittification will eventually drive us to innovate around these (admittedly major) issues. One truth I can’t find a way to refute, though: A decentralized web is coming whether we like it or not;
There’s all kinds of interesting discussions to be had here:
-
The EU’s right to be forgotten, for example, seems to be an attempt to reverse the laws of nature, IMO. Information is a Pandora’s box. Once it is out, it is cached EVERYWHERE. Especially with AI scrapers in full effect, boiling our oceans.
-
Perhaps (probably?), the traditional server-client model of the web will someday give way to a decentralized model that is (IMO inevitably) censorship resistant.
Literally every company would be review-bombed, because as soon as Company X gets a few bad reviews, they will bomb Competitor Y, and it snowballs from there. The best companies will be the ones that have the most employees paid to post reviews.
But yeah, let's do that. Users should learn to separate fact from fiction.
All W2s should come with an anonymous review sheet, but you still need a centralized validator.
The problem is validating someone's review without revealing who wrote it. Reviewers can be pressured or paid to lie if they are not anonymous, but anyone can leave any review if they are anonymous.
I believe it should be possible to use cryptography to have the validator provide a key to the reviewer, and for the reviewer to sign the review with their key and the validator key, in such a way that a validator can validate a signed message used their key so is valid, but cannot know which reviewer it was. See Yang et. al. 2006 anonymous signature schemes in public key cryptography journal.
Of course that's possible, but it wouldn't be free. At some point, the person would need to be validated and assigned a private key that's tied to their identity. That's the hard part, the time consuming step. And the more automated it is, the easier it would be to spoof and lie.
God please let this happen
One of the greatest problems, IMO, is that there's little incentive for people to leave good reviews of their company. I'm relatively happy at my job, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go info a website to say why I like working for them. Sure, some people will, but you go onto these types of websites either cuz you wanna complain or because HR is going around with donuts offering one to everyone who leaves a review.
Make people leave a review before they're allowed to view a review. Or, something along those lines. A few reviews for free, then you gotta contribute
Ofc there's an incentive. I want good candidates to apply to my team