> The Web of Trust failed for PGP 30 years ago. Why will it work here?

It didn't work for links as reputation for search once "SEO" people started creating link farms. It's worse now. With LLMs, you can create fake identities with plausible backstories.

This idea won't work with anonymity. It's been tried.

Web of Trust failed? If you saw that a close friend had signed someone else's PGP key, you would be pretty sure it was really that person.

I'm not convinced that just because something didn't work 30 years ago, there's no point in revisiting it.

There's likely no perfect solution, only layers and data points. Even if one of the layers only provides a level of trust as high as the most lax person in the network, it's still a signal of something. The internet will continue to evolve and fracture into segments with different requirements IMHO.