“Oh yeah?”

Imagine having a button on your browser that you press to check the “gigantic accumulation of crowd-sourced credibility” around what it says or what you read on it? Sounds like something we could do with at the moment? What if you found out Tim Bernes-Lee was thinking this very thing over 25 years ago?

[Berners-Lee] suggested that every browser be equipped with what he called the “Oh, Yeah?” button. The idea was that we all would start building trust through signed metadata as we moved around the web. In a sense, our normal web browsing would create a gigantic accumulation of crowd-sourced credibility. “When we have this, we will be able to ask the computer not just for information, but why we should believe it,” he said.

…