Comment by nurettin
What prevents you from creating an island of fake endorsers?
What prevents you from creating an island of fake endorsers?
> Unless you can be fooled into trusting a fake endorser
Wouldn’t most people subscribe to a default set of trusted citers?
> there has to be somebody who decides what the default is
Sure. This happens with ad blockers, for example. I imagine Elsevier or Wikipedia would wind up creating these lists. And then you’d have the same incentives as you have now for fooling that authority.
> or people just don't care very much
This is my hypothesis. If you’re an expert, you have your web of trust. If you’re not, it isn’t that hard to start from a source of repute.
A web of trust is transitive, meaning that the endorsers are known. It would be trivial to add negative weight to all endorsers of a known-fake paper, and only sightly less trivial to do the same for all endorsers of real papers artificially boosted by such a ring.
Maybe getting caught causes the island to be shut out and papers automatically invalidated if there aren't sufficient real endorsers.