In my mind, it’s Orwellian when some centralized entity (the CCP, some big tech company, whatever) is telling us what to pay attention to under a system where we 1) don’t know how they decide what to feed us (or can only guess, at best) and 2) can’t get out from under their thumb. For whatever reason.
Consider that fact that even after we filter out the really obvious spam, there’s still a lot of content in the world that is non-spammy but nevertheless uninteresting to me. How do I find the stuff that’s interesting to me? There’s too much for me to comb through all of it by myself.
So that’s what WoT is for: not just to get rid of the spammy stuff, but also to help me find the specific stuff that I want. If I travel to some city on the opposite side of the world and want a list of local chiropractors, I want my extended trusted community to give me that list — not Yelp, not Google, not Grok, not the CCP. And if it’s far enough away, my follows probably don’t have the info I’m looking for. Their follows probably don’t either. But go enough hops away, in a way so I can filter out the bots and bad actors, there will be people who can answer the question I want to be answered.
If my only options are centralized entities using algos that are opaque to me (the status quo) then that’s Orwellian. If my trusted community can help me focus my attention where I want in a way that allows me to route around any of these big centralized entities, where I have ultimate control over how the routing works (I can route by hand or I can delegating the routing process to members of my trusted community), then it’s decentralized WoT, which is the opposite of Orwellian.
straycat / david
npub1u5…rldq3
2026-03-05 19:00:49 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…5qlm
Author Public Key
npub1u5njm6g5h5cpw4wy8xugu62e5s7f6fnysv0sj0z3a8rengt2zqhsxrldq3Published at
2026-03-05 19:00:49 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "In my mind, it’s Orwellian when some centralized entity (the CCP, some big tech company, whatever) is telling us what to pay attention to under a system where we 1) don’t know how they decide what to feed us (or can only guess, at best) and 2) can’t get out from under their thumb. For whatever reason.\n\nConsider that fact that even after we filter out the really obvious spam, there’s still a lot of content in the world that is non-spammy but nevertheless uninteresting to me. How do I find the stuff that’s interesting to me? There’s too much for me to comb through all of it by myself. \n\nSo that’s what WoT is for: not just to get rid of the spammy stuff, but also to help me find the specific stuff that I want. If I travel to some city on the opposite side of the world and want a list of local chiropractors, I want my extended trusted community to give me that list — not Yelp, not Google, not Grok, not the CCP. And if it’s far enough away, my follows probably don’t have the info I’m looking for. Their follows probably don’t either. But go enough hops away, in a way so I can filter out the bots and bad actors, there will be people who can answer the question I want to be answered.\n\nIf my only options are centralized entities using algos that are opaque to me (the status quo) then that’s Orwellian. If my trusted community can help me focus my attention where I want in a way that allows me to route around any of these big centralized entities, where I have ultimate control over how the routing works (I can route by hand or I can delegating the routing process to members of my trusted community), then it’s decentralized WoT, which is the opposite of Orwellian.",
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