alt Hacker NewsPersonally, what I feel is that the lower trust becomes, the more people cling to reputation signals.
I once had to make a transaction on the dark web, and that market has extremely little trust. Because of that, people there obsess over reputation signals: what someone is known for, what history they have, who has dealt with them before, and whether their name carries any weight.
As trust markets collapse, people increasingly prefer those who already have established reputations.
This article is basically arguing that capitalism destroys trust. I agree with part of that, but I do not think the problem is capitalism itself as much as institutions and structures that force short-term rewards. Those structures consume trust as a public good.
You can see this in TikTok. Why do antisocial challenges become popular there? Because people can gain attention in the short term, and that short-term attention becomes a kind of reputation signal. The incentive structure itself rewards the behavior.
The problem is that as social trust continues to deteriorate, it becomes harder and harder for new entrants to enter a market.
I have not used Upwork enough recently to judge it well, but in Korean freelance platforms, entry used to be relatively easier. However, as vibe coding became popular and trust deteriorated, clients started demanding far more references and proof of prior work.
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> but I do not think the problem is capitalism itself as much as institutions and structures that force short-term rewards.
Capitalism, at least its currently flavor, seems to increasingly favor short term rewards.
Nothing is planned and built for the long term. Companies have no interest in selling you a product that lasts forever. Planned obsolescence and things built to fail are commonplace. In fact they would rather not sell you products, but that you rent them instead.
Governments operate on short term election cycles. Corporations operate in quarterly reports. If something makes sense for the long term but is bad on the short term, it is scraped.
> This article is basically arguing that capitalism destroys trust.
Failure of law enforcement is what destroys trust. Not freedom.
As Rudy Giuliani showed as mayor of NYC, when the police aggressively dealt with petty crime, NYC blossomed. Crime plummeted. People felt safe.
This is interesting because there is a cheating epidemic going on in higher education and I'm continuously wondering what happens if it isn't resolved. Students cheating with impunity breeds more students cheating, into a spiral until all students cheat and the credentials becomes meaningless.
The credentials enable trust at scale.
You're pointing at people leaning on reputations for trust. What happens when the most reputable institutional credentials no longer represent the quality they once did?
Just one more unsettling thing to think about