Distributed Trust Metrics?

rw2 asks: "So I run a little political website and have had problems for years with users basically trolling the place. This is a problem that sites like Slashdot deal with through the familiar moderation scheme. Unfortunately that doesn't scale well to smaller sites. There are a couple reasons for this: a smaller sample size makes it easy to mess with the system; and with only several hundreds of people visiting everyday, it's hard to get regular enough moderation. So the question goes back to one of trust metrics. Advogato has a neat hack to deal with this, but even they have barely enough users to make it Work. Surely I'm not the first to desire this. I can think of several stumbling blocks sociologically. But technologically this is a dead simple idea. Has someone looked into developing such a system?"

"I've done some googling for systems that might work in a distributed fashion but turned up nothing. I'd happily register a key with an authority (ideally a distributed one, think supernodes rather than centralized structure) and have it verify my identity. Then, at each website participating in the trust network, I can provide my identity upon registration. As people moderate me and my comments, this feedback is applied to my profile both locally and network wide. The idea is that I may be all wet when it comes to tractors, but relatively well read on politics and technology (i.e.: my overall trustworthiness would be a 7, with a 3 on misc.rural, a 8 on slashdot.org and a 10 on poliglut.org). Now readers of my commentary have a more reasonable way of judging my trustworthiness on both a local and a global scale."

Comments

use reputation propagation

[DrEasy]

- Let each user decide who some of his friends/foes are, just like in Slashdot. Rate them accordingly, say on a scale of 0-1.

- that will filter posts by the people you've rated.

- as for the users you haven't rated:
- if there is a "path of trust" between you and that user, i.e. if there is a friend/foe of yours who has rated a friend/foe who has rated (...*x) this user, calculate a rate. You can try to multiply the rates, or use the average, whatever works best for you.
- if there isn't, or if the user is new, give him an initial rating, again, just like in slashdot.

At least that's the main idea... There are some complications when there are multiple path and so on. I have published a paper on this, so if you're interested, leave me a message and I'll send you the paper. I'm also curious about how the system can work in a non simulated setting.