Slashdot Mirror

Chris Allen writes pretty regularly on reputation systems (from a game designers point of view usually). I have read through a few academic papers on the topic, and I find the writing at lifewithalacrity to be of unusual breadth, clarity and brevity...

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/

$0.02

If you read it you'll find a mistake that showed up in the Wired piece. People in their experiments didn't have the a 50/50 chance of detecting emotional tone -- instead, the chance of picking correctly the intent was no better then random chance. A much more interesting interpretation than 50/50.

There is a long history of academic research substantiating Eply/Kruger thesis that we don't interpret the emotional content (or as they call it, para-linguistic content) of text very well. The first academic paper that I've found that deals with this topic goes back to:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/1589611/0 Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. 1988. Reducing Social Context Clues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication. Readings in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 684--712. Los Altos, California: Morgan Kaufmann.

I've written more about this topic and other sources for the cycle of flames in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.

If you read my article on the Rating Systems you'll see that 5 point rating systems are a poor way to do ratings. In our analysis, only 10% of raters use the bottom two star in a 5-point scale, and only 2% use the lowest rating of 1 star. The median of the 5-point scale is actually the fourth star, with a neat bell curve arranged around it. In my own personal use of iTunes, I've forced myself to be much more consistent and lower with my ratings. 1 star means that it has been rated, but in general I don't like it and don't play it. 2 stars means average, which means play it some of the time. 3 stars is above average, and play it more often, but I can get bored with these. 4 is good, and can basically listen to these regularly without getting tired. 5 stars are exemplars -- I try to find more songs like these.

Stronger in the number and strength of bonds between people. I'm not going to go into extensive detail about social networking, but people in smaller communities often form stronger bonds. Essentially, you run into the same people more often and you get to know them, for better or for worse.

A good offline comparison would be a small town vs. a large city. In general, "everyone knows everyone" in a small town, and it's harder for secrets to remain secrets within the community. In a larger city, you tend to interact with the same number of people but less frequently. The bonds between people tend to be much weaker, especially if there's a chance you'll won't see that other person again anytime soon.

If you're interested in more information, you might want to start reading up on the Dunbar number as a starting point. It's instructive to see why a smaller game of 150 people feels a lot more cozy than a larger game with thousands of people: the larger game segments into smaller groups and there's more "us vs. them" competition.

That good enough validation? ;)

Have fun,

A data point on ELO cheating for you: Yahoo! Games uses ELO rankings for several their two-player games. Before recent abuse mitigation changes, some people used robot to accumulate scores in excess of 6,000,000 points. The abuse-the-ranking game had become a totally seperate competition.

For now, Yahoo! has capped the ELO scores at 3,000 (I think.) This removed most of the cheating incentive.

Here are some links to get you started:

• Mapping Google
• Google Suggest Dissected
• Gmail Agent API