E-Reputation

[sobrique]

Something mentioned on another source - about how anonimity makes being offensive consequence free - started me thinking.

What if there were some kind of way to assign reputation to internet identities?

You create a holding account website - maybe it's linked to <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID">OpenID</A>?

But the idea, pretty simply, is to allow basic feedback on post quality, and people would be able to +/- vote each post you make.

To extend beyond the limited realm of OpenID maybe some kind of forum signature embed? That does stand a risk of cloning, so you might need some kind of acceptance of accounts/referrers? (whilst referrers aren't secure, it is harder to subvert anyone elses referrers).

And maybe some kind of firefox/opera plugin for signed posting? (e.g. embeds public key signing?)

And then maybe include some plugins for popular forum software.

Maybe you skip the negative voting part - downvotes wouldn't actually do much more than promote exploitation of the system. Just track on postcount vs "good" posts perhaps?

So, what do you think? Has potential? Or it'll never work?

Comments

[jorune.livejournal.com]

I think that it is a difficult nut to crack because of the ability of special interest groups to up their vote in the face of general indifference. Looking at the high scoring articles on reddit, digg, youtube and others shows the inherent flaws and local heroes who get a group vote each time regardless of the objective quality of other posts at the same time.

[cbr-paul.livejournal.com]

What kind of data would be retained on each user and who would have access to it?

[crashbarrier.livejournal.com]

It has vague potential but like most things on tehinternet how would you stop it being open to abuse, you know Torlling and your basic Internet asshat who likes to make everyone elses life unhelpful.

[oftendistracted.livejournal.com]

Rife with problems. Either you'd have to:

a) leave negative feedback in - feedback bombing and general trolling destroys the validity of your metrics.

b) remove negative feedback - circlejerking neatly destroys the validity of your metrics as groups of people constantly favorite each other.

c) Tie it to a barrier to entry - this is the best route for making it actually valid (for instance, ebay only allowing you to provide feedback on someone once a sale is actively complete, rather than at any time at all) but is quite purposefully not a global system, which is kind of against your thoughts.

Plus, typically, d) those people who want a reputation score assigned to an anonymous account are, by and large, those people most likely to fall into the traps of a) and b). The vast majority of anonymous posters around the internet will be users who just want to post something quickly and be done with it, not worrying about reputation counts. Any given system would, in order to be adopted, require much less effort than signing up for an account (which could be deemed to be no longer being anonymous, also.)

[cthulahoops.livejournal.com]

Have you seen stackoverflow.com? It's a programming questions/answers site where you earn reputation for good questions and good answers. The higher your reputation, the more things you can do on the site.

It suffers from strange distortions because non-technical questions can be rewarded disproportionately (everyone can have an opinion), but overall it seems to work well.

I don't think it can work on a global scale but within interest groups it can.

[xarrion.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, I was considering online Whuffie implementations yesterday.

IMHO, linking 'net ID to openID would be a Good Thing for a number of purposes. Having an 'official' presence is slowly becoming more of a necessity now that Social Media is becoming increasingly pervasive. It wouldn't be suitable for everything, of course, and anonymity should remain an option as more employers regularly google (prospective) employees.

Reputation itself would be incredibly hard to balance - opinion is split on most things, and the only way to have a net positive would be to agree with the consensus on most topics - which would cripple the idea of it being a balanced rep system.

I'd trawl a few sites/debates on Whuffie - it's likely to have the greatest concentration of ideas on the subject.

[queex.livejournal.com]

I don't see any way it would be less exploitable or more reliable than ebay ratings. There will always be ways to game the system, and no means of differentiating between newbies and trolls that have had to open a new account because there last one had its reputation trashed.

[syntheticbrain.livejournal.com]

Maybe I look at the world ass-backwards, but it would seem to make more sense the other way round - instead of your reputation affecting how visible your opinion is online, who you assign rep bonuses to should affect your view of the world.

It's almost like page rank - say I like Stephen fry - his stuff is always interesting. Mt web search results/slashdot-like view of the internet should reflect his opinions a bit more.

Once you have a centralised ID (or even a website where you can link IDs from various sites through some form of crossposted proof) you could potentially implement this on some websites with a browser add-in - you could certainly build a personalised search engine around it.

The main problem I can see with it is a reinforcing of the echo-chamber effect (term for when like minded blogs etc only reference each other the crazy can grow unchecked). However, that would rather depend on the person clicking reps. If you want a balanced well written view of something make sure you give rep bonuses to people on both sides of an argument based on coherency rather than how much you agree with them. (In fact you could have two reps red vs blue or whatever, where one rep is for people you agree with and the other is for people you disagree with.)

Will stop now - I've been thinking about similar ideas for awhile : )