“Like” at Your Own Risk

I seem to remember doing some prank-ish thing like this in the early days of Facebook.<p>Create an activity or whatever that you &quot;liked&quot; (ex: camping) and friends would see that &quot;soylentcola liked <i>camping</i>&quot;. They would also like <i>camping</i> and then eventually you would change the name of that tag&#x2F;activity&#x2F;whatever to something like <i>getting kicked in the nuts</i> so that now it tells people that &quot;John Smith likes <i>getting kicked in the nuts</i>&quot;.<p>I honestly don&#x27;t remember the specifics as it&#x27;s been years since we got our laughs out of this for a few minutes (hell, for all I know this was on MySpace and not Facebook. Really don&#x27;t remember).

There&#x27;s a lot of major challenges to creating decentralized, trustless systems, but this is very easy to solve in a trustless system. All you do is indicate &quot;Like&quot;s by signing an object like:<p><pre><code> {post:&quot;&lt;cryptographic hash of post&gt;&quot;,action:&quot;like&quot;} </code></pre> That way if the post changes, your signed &quot;like&quot; no longer applies.<p>This trustless-ness can be introduced in centralized systems too, but the tendency in a centralized system is to trust the central authority, which is the whole problem with such systems.

I had to go read the actual paper to figure out how it worked. It&#x27;s &quot;updating link previews without visible notifications while retaining social capital&quot;. So you do a redirect and then that changes what was originally liked.

I have thought about this before, even without the clever hack indicated here:<p>Likes ought to drop off after an edit, or be clearly pointing to the previous version after any edit. IE they need to reflect staleness, and posts must better reflect that there&#x27;s version history. In this day and age we ought to be able to differentiate between grammar&#x2F;spell checks and complete rewrites, and update ux accordingly.<p>Another one is the ability for someone to change privacy level of a post from private to public. So that risky like that you thought was a safe one among friends could then be opened for everyone to see.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2001.05668" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2001.05668</a>

You seed this kind of thing used by spammers on reddit from time to time. They&#x27;ll get an upvoted comment which is very visible to other users and then edit it to include a link to some shady website.

Ironically, sharing this link alone could constitute a risk in some situations

Scary o.O<p>But is it the author editing the post who change it or what?