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

Small sites need...

[Anonymous Coward]

Small groups of the most active good posters doing the moderation. Find people that regularly share your views or at least make intelligent comments? Ask them if they'd be interesting in helping moderate. Spreading the load between a few people should make things easy to manage.

Problems with moderation/filtering

[iangoldby]

Several people have suggested moderation or filtering schemes, in which users can say, essentially, which posts they like and which they don't like. Depending on the approach, the system could even learn, either by user (e.g. the Bozo filter) or by content (e.g. Baysian filtering), etc. It then promotes the posts people like, and hides the ones they don't like. (Sounds familiar?)

There is a fundamental problem with this though, which is particularly acute for a site such as yours that exists for the sake of political debate.

If you do this, then users will tend to be presented with opinions that are most similar to their own, and have dissenting opinion hidden from them. That's going to stifle debate and make the site much less interesting.

The only real way to do it is to find a small team of dedicated moderators who are able to objectively rate content according to its intrinsic worth rather than according to the opinion expressed. That's hard.