This is a great line of thought to come back to.
Pip and Vitor are right to question whether users will pay for personalized trust metrics. The initial WoT use case is to get rid of the super obvious bad actors, and for this use case, most users will be content to use trust metrics personalized to someone else: an influencer, one of their friends, etc. At this stage, “personalization” of trust metrics would mean adjusting the parameters to case a wider or a narrower net. Brainstorm already does this. But will users pay for that? Maybe a few, but it’s not a must-have.
Once the bots are gone, we turn our attention to contextual trust. This is where personalization gets more interesting. Suppose Alice is interested in sports, Bob in the latest developments in AI. They’ll want their personalized Brainstorm to keep track of everything having to do with that field — including an ever-changing ontology — and to stay up to date, which will be a complicated matter. Will users be willing to pay for this? I think some will. But what if I can piggyback on my friend’s personalized WoT for free for topics like these? Might still be a tricky sell.
And then we come to the next level of complexity: privacy. This might be the hook that starts to bring in a lot of users. Maybe I want personalization of interests, AND privacy regarding who/what I’m following and why, AND I want *inviolable control over the curation* because otherwise I won’t trust the slop content being fed to me.
The trick is going to be to make personalization a must-have. And not for ideologues, but for normies. A combo of personalization of interests, inviolable control that keeps out the slop, and privacy may be required to make personalized trust a must have. Which is not an intractable problem, but it will take a lot of work.