Oddbean new post about | logout
 I’m wondering how one might go about making a nostr version of LinkedIn. You’d generate a dedicated npub — not the one you use for shitposting 😅 — and you’d have things like name, photo, location, education, whatever personal info you’d put on a LinkedIn account. The question is: how do you social proof those bits of info? Ideally you’d have more than one person to verify any given piece of info. 

One way to do it would be for one person to issue some piece of info, like a badge, and others to attest to the badge’s veracity. 

Or another way would simply be for multiple people to issue the same badge. For example: AKA Profiles issues Alice a GEO Location badge for Germany, and then Bob, who knows her irl, issues her the exact same badge. Every additional person who issues her the same badge (AKA Profiles, Bob, etc) makes me more confident that Alice is a real person in Germany. 

Which of course is useful in lots of ways. Suppose aliens land in Germany. Alice posts a video of the aliens to nostr. I’ll be more inclined to believe her video if I have the aforementioned social proof. 👽 
 When it comes to belief and trust, generally trusted authorities are efficient, but create centralization.  Web of trust solutions with no barriers to participation are decentralized but are susceptible to tampering or collusion.  I think for Nostr there should be a machinist where a person earns trust with their locally community authorities  (like mods) that then becomes verifiable and this transferable to other communities. 
 Here’s how a grapevine worldview might be put together to achieve what you’re describing. 

I use follows & mutes (and reports and zaps and maybe more) to curate a list of pubkeys-who-are-not-bots.

I trust the not-bots list to use NIP-58 badges or NIP-32 labels to curate pubkeys who take on the “community authority” roles.

I trust the not-bots list & the comm-auth lists to endorse credentials, but I give relatively more weight to anyone on the comm-auth list.