Re: Meronymity

At the just concluded IIW, Dan Yamamoto showed us a cool example of using Verifiable Credentials to authenticate your conversations in a social network, using a chrome extension for verification. A great starting point.

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Mahesh Balan
CEO
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________________________________
From: Kim Hamilton <kimdhamilton@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2024 1:33:20 PM
To: Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com>
Cc: Steven Rowat <steven_rowat@sunshine.net>; Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>; Joe Andrieu <joe@legreq.com>; W3C Credentials CG (Public List) <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Meronymity

I believe the concept is the point, vs any specific implementation details.


On Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 10:54 AM Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com<mailto:agropper@healthurl.com>> wrote:
I don't see how this reputation system is resistant to Sybil attacks. Also, it's not clear if:

"LiTweeture then posts the query and meronyms to X and Mastodon."

implies some centralization.

Adrian

On Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 1:34 PM Kim Hamilton <kimdhamilton@gmail.com<mailto:kimdhamilton@gmail.com>> wrote:
I think this is a brilliant use of VCs and DIDs. And mailing lists like this are good examples of where social inhibitions/fear of judgment keep people from asking questions or engaging (at least anecdotally, as people report to me). How much more productive would we be collectively if this were less of a factor?

It would be fun to sketch this out more. Sounds like a great RWOT topic as well

On Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 9:47 AM Steven Rowat <steven_rowat@sunshine.net<mailto:steven_rowat@sunshine.net>> wrote:

Greetings CCG,

From my reading of a recent techxplore story, the 'meronymity' devised by "MIT researchers" (and apparently the Allen Institute) may be an innovation of interest to many in this group. It attempts to solve the problem that anonymity, desired for good reasons often, precludes knowing the credentials of the participants, and hence brings trust and accuracy problems.

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-04-equitable-discussions-social-media-meronymity.html


From the story:

"Meronymity (from the Greek words for "partial" and "name") allows people in a public discussion space to selectively reveal only relevant, verified aspects of their identity."

The story goes on to describe an implementation with academics, and the results. It does seem to have had a noticeable positive impact. They go on to say:

"Now that they have built a framework around academia, the researchers want to apply meronymity to other online communities and general social media conversations, especially those around issues where there is a lot of conflict, like politics."

It appears that some form of verifiable credentials is used, but whether these are W3C-compliant ones, and involved DIDs, I'm not sure. I did a quick scan through the pre-print paper the story is based on (available through the above link, at the end), and couldn't see any direct reference to them.

If not, IMO this might be a good place for W3C VCs and DIDs to be involved. Hence this post. :-)

Steven Rowat