Thesis: a web of trust based social network wouldn't have a reliable "global" follower / like / etc count -- it would only be the ones you've seen -- and this would be a feature.
Some of the most toxic behavior on Twitter comes from people trying to become "the most popular person in the room", which also leads to a lot of social messaging which isn't about being constructive, but differentiating yourself in a way that makes you look better than others.
@cwebber A web of trust that works would necessarily have to define what different types of trust relationship mean.
And for that, to work you would need to build a distributed ontology.
Which is why in past years I've been doing some thinking of how an "Ontological Web" should work.
The "semantic web" can't be semantic and doesn't mean anything if you don't have mutually intelligible ontologies.
@h The semantic web *is* mostly about mutually intelligible ontologies?
@cwebber I think the construction of a different kind of web will be necessary, based on the ontological, the semantic, and the epistemological.
Some authors have already explored the semantic and the epistemic, but there's very little written, and even less constructed that accounts for all three aspects.
Webs of trust will necessarily depend on understanding what is being trusted exactly, and to do what exactly. Meaningless semantics without ontologies we can agree on.