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

[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.