Slashdot Mirror
Online Reputation Is Hard To Do
Symblized writes "A new article from InformationWeek argues that not only does the Web need ways to verify identity, it also needs better ways to measure reputation . The article uses Digg, Wikipedia, and eBay as examples and muses whether their models could be applied more widely. There's also a profile of Opinity, a company that tried to introduce a reputation system and didn't make it. Choice quote from a source in the article: 'The idea of a transferable, semantic reputation is identity nirvana.'"
"Trust is the currency of the participation age." -Jonathan Schwartz
This is the $64,000 question. Building a reputation/trust system is very difficult. Honestly, Slashdot is one of the better examples of this (Slashdot's moderation system does alter the flow of the discussion but it does get a downright reasonable signal-to-noise ratio vs other online communities).
I'm volunteering at Citizendium, which is another possible datapoint. We're assuming that real names and respecting verifiable expertise will allow us to benefit in some fashion from existing scholarly reputation systems, and to build a more cohesive community.
Eventually, I think it'll be feasible to layer reputation and credentials (for sites that care) on top of a system like OpenID. People will be able to choose what reputation/credentials to share with which site. Information that you want to follow you (e.g., "I have a BA in Math from UCLA" or "I have excellent karma on Slashdot") will follow you across sites.
But yeah, it's a very difficult problem. Figuring it out is a big, potentially very lucrative issue.
Why is The article uses Digg, Wikipedia, and eBay as examples and muses whether their models could be applied more widely in a different colour to the rest of the text?
I like muppets.
Maybe in your opinion, but not in the eyes of a lot of people. The only reputations tat matter ar ehte handfull that created the system. The rest is semi random.
Maybe somebody like Google can use their search engine technology to develop an improved algorithm that would perform multiple searches across multiple websites and databases to come up with some type of score rating an individual's credibility. But even this has drawbacks; do we really want to give Google that kind of power?
I think Wikipedia is a site that really needs to somehow integrate the reputation of it's contributors into the articles. I haven't kept up with the structural changes they've made in the past couple years, but a lot of the editing work seems to be undoing trolling and vandalism, and also participating in edit and revision wars. I could be wrong at this point.
But if wikipedia had a reputation system ( other than just being banned or allowed ), they might automate contributions from reputable authors ( and check on the actual contributions later), while authors who are less reputable may have their contributions queued for review before they are published.
Furthermore, a casual user would be able to have a more savvy understanding of the reputability of any article or section of an article if it is tagged with the reputation of its' author.
Reputable authors might be able to also tag the contributions of others, such that the text or information itself gets a reputation. That would help users make a judgement about the validity of information on Wikipedia.
Instead of pushing the mechanics of the actual editing of articles behind the scenes, and just presenting a 'final' article to the end-user, let's formalize the process and enfranchise users into the process of judging the validity of articles.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Which of the three passages below is the authentic excerpt from Wikipedia?
Conan Christopher O'Brien, 44, is the comedian and the host of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. He is Scottish, as were his parents, as well as his three brothers and two siblings. He has no relation to CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien.
O'Brien, who is 43, is commonly thought by television audiences to be of diminutive stature, though some journalists and alternative biographers dispute this claim.
As of 2007, O'Brien has been confirmed dead of tuberculosis. His hair color was red. He was 45.
—
{This page is currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved.}
[Image:KarlMarx.jpg]
United States President Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States during the Revolutionary War, and a well-known Libertarian.[1] Though some historians see Objectivist tendencies in his greatness.[2][3] Many of his most generous qualities can be traced back to the philosophy of Ayn Rand.[4]
Lincoln is now known to have suffered a mild form of Autism known as Asperger's Syndrome.[5][6][7]
Assassinated at 54 by a vandal known as Jon Harvey Booth,[8] or some say by political crony Edwin Stanton, Lincoln would have been 187 years old today (as of 2005)[original research?] had he not been assassinated in the prime of his life at the age of 45 by unemployed actor Juliette Lewis Botch.[9]
—
The Pokédex (Pokemon Zukan[?], lit. "Pokémon Encyclopedia") is an electronic device designed to catalogue and provide information regarding the various species of Pokémon featured in the Pokémon video game and anime series. The name Pokédex is a neologism including Pokémon (which itself is a portmanteau of pocket and monster) and index. The Japanese name is simply "Pokémon Encyclopedia" in Japanese.
In the video games, whenever a Pokémon is first captured, its data will be added to a player's Pokédex. In the anime the Pokédex is a comprehensive electronic reference encyclopedia, usually referred to in order to deliver exposition. There are four differently numbered Pokédex modes to date: the Kanto Pokedex, introduced in Pokémon Red and Blue; the Johto Pokédex, introduced in Pokémon Gold and Silver; the Hoenn Pokédex, introduced in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire and expanded upon in Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen; and the Sinnoh Pokédex, introduced in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl.
Online reputation has one very important requirement: syndicated identity. That's one of the reasons why OpenID, Passport, etc are so important. Before these systems were available, people wanting to do online reputation had to invent their own syndicated identity system as well as actually build the reputation system.
Now that OpenID is starting to take off, with decent toolset support, I expect the number of people working on reputation systems to skyrocket. This is what has been holding things back, not because of any innate difficulty.
Yeah, right. This is the same project currently struggling with a huge sockpuppetry problem.
The only reason online reputation is hard is because online identification is hard. Once you're past the identification and privacy issues you could go Google: your single/central/one point rated identity, linked with all your accounts from all over the place which should give you some sort of a global and more specified ranking (karma on ./, trustworthiness on ebay, whatever rating/googlerank on google/amazon) for people to search for.
Companies will often try to maintain "reputation" by using a rigid, non-interactive web design. With Flash, for example, a website becomes just a commercial to sell the perception of quality, or the illusion of branding.
(Isn't that right, all you "Hubsters"?)
I suggest you read Slashdot
LinkedIn has a reputation model that works in a limited sense. It tells you the people on the chain between yourself and an individual, up to a certain length.
Since you know (by definition) the first person on the chain you can ask them to make enquiries along the chain about the person you want to know about. It lists up to 3rd degree associations, ie your friend knows them or your friend knows a friend of theirs. Surprisingly effective for finding out about someone you want to hire, in a general sense at least.
I'm still waiting for a P2P system that works the same way - you create encrypted connections to your friends, and can pass requests for content that are spidered out across the network automatically.
Because you only ever talk to your friends, and because no ultimate destination information is passed on, it should be very good at preserving anonymity - in exactly the same way as Freenet is, in fact.
The difference would be that because you manually tell it which nodes to locally connect to there is no danger of encountering a poisoned node... as long as none of your friends are spies for the MAFIAA.
Beep beep.
Even still, it is hard to rank someones reputation based on a numbers system. In alot of forums I post on, I am a regular poster with a high rank. However, alot of people have an issue with me because of my free speech (the beauty of the internet). Is there really a standardized way to determine reputation? It really has to do with the context. If you are on a programming forum, you may rank someone based on their aptitude for a specific language, or their problem-solving skills. Conversely, if you are on a political debate forum, ones reputation may be based on how fluently their opinions are expressed.
One of the solutions Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger suggests is using "credentialed" experts who have college degrees or an institutional email address. This not only smacks of arrogance, it is completely fallacious. It is like suggesting that a person with a drivers license is a good driver.
This process also effectively eliminates the diligent amateur who may very well have good very good methodologies of investigation.
Expertise can be got by many methods. Certifications merely prove that you paid the price, and passed the tests. After that it's all tenure.
The problem is that everyone wants to know right now who is trustworthy and who is not.
Building a reputation takes time, often a lot of time. Amazon's reputation is built on several years of good service, good web design, and overwhelmingly positive customer experiences.
Facebook and Digg don't have that track record, and until they do will not enjoy the same level of trust.
Any system designed to give a stamp of approval needs only one mistake to become untrustworthy. Unless it can be nearly 100% foolproof it won't be effective. And given the number of supposedly trustworthy businesses who are anything but, I'd say that rating reputation is not likely to happen soon.
Three Squirrels
It seems that everyone trying to "solve" this "problem" doesn't know what they're trying to achieve.
So what if you can make a perfect pseudonym identification system? What does that achieve for you? What do you accomplish beyond that?
Does it really matter to anyone else if your Slashdot 'nym can be verified to match your 'nym's on a dozen other boards? Who really cares if you have excellent karma on Slashdot?
As Digg has demonstrated, often people who espouse the "common belief" over the correct one are given the upvote or digg credit. This is reputation by popularity, NOT by accuracy or correct viewpoint. Science, for example, is about verifiable and testable results; there is little room for arguing over the basics. However, sites like Digg and (sometimes) Slashdot will upvote the incorrect information on a given topic.
So the question then becomes: is the public qualified, as a lowest-common denomintator, to do determine who should have the reputation points?
I would suggest not. I would guess even this post will probably sink down because it challenges the internet reputation rating systems... self-proof of the system at work.
I don't align politics-wise/religion-wise on this site, so while I have excellent Slashdot karma (built up over a very looong period of time commenting on non-sensitive topics for this audience), I wouldn't otherwise be considered having a very good reputation here.
There's that plus many sites like these are mostly just kids playing around and/or just mouthing off saying any ridiculous thing because they can. And practicing to be good little enforcers of Political Correctness for when they get older.
So, an online reputation based on sites like this at least, is valueless. The value of a reputation is only as good as the people who judge it are worthy to judge.
There is no such thing as negative trust.
(Once you accept that, the rest isn't so hard.)
As demonstrated by Digg, the popular diggs (and for that matter, the top Slashdotters) often are those who espouse the community view, not the accurate one. This is especially true on scientific or factual posts where inaccurate information or theory is dugg up. The general readership is not qualified in these cases to rate reputation when we care about accuracy or truth.
This is the partner to GroupThink on social discussions. Reputation serves very little value, except to make you feel like you are in a community of like-minded zombies. Scientists are often quite at odds with each other until the issue is later investigated, but on a discussion board, one viewpoint will win.
Case in point: the "In soviet russia, Y X's you!" (where X and Y are the inverse propositions) will gain karma. Arguably humor is valuable, but they will crush someone who writes a technically accurate scientific discussion that runs contrary to the layman view.
Moderate down if you like, but the truth hurts.
Heatware Most frequently trusted on many For Sale/For Trade forums because of their strong stance on scammers.
I haven't used my name for posting on the Internet since 1997 when I realized that dejanews.com would keep my newsgroup postings forever (even that was with a somewhat random e-mail address). I literally don't have any internet presence with my real name unless it's inadvertent (ie. a news release from my employer) but the good thing is that my name is so common I would be hard to find anyway.
So in it's place, I created a whole shitload of false identities that I post under, one of them about 10 years old now. Mainly on forums and newsgroups for work purposes, etc. If you searched for this particular identity, you would probably fine hundreds of posts (including many on slashdot) some of them truthful, some of them fake, with various opinions of topics.
Every few years I will discard an identity or create a new one, for various reasons. I even have a fake lj blog that I've created just for the purpose of having that sense of "credibility", just in case I need it. I usually update that every few weeks, with something that I read on someone else's blog, but changing the words around just enough so that I can't be googled and exposed as a fake. I make sure each identity has a different way of typing, different levels of typos or capitalization, etc. I don't think you would be able to properly gauge the "credibility" of this person at all.
I doubt I'm unique and there are probably scores of people doing the same thing. As internet users get more and more sophisticated, how will internet credibility really be gauged unless you actually meet someone face-to-face? I was even contemplating getting a pay-as-you-go cellphone with no traceability (paid with cash at a store in a different city than where I live) just in case I needed to talk with someone offline. I'm doubtful you can really establish credibility to the point where it's better to just assume that everyone is lying and be on the guard all the time.
What about RapLeaf? Although it's centered around ratings for conducting transations, I have to believe their system would be pretty effective across a broad spectrum of reputation and ratings needs. Plus, they offer a set of APIs, which is always handy.
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
Well, there's Advogato's Trust Metric system.
I've been of the opinion for a while that a similar system could be devised using PGP or S/MIME certificates to combine identity verification with "web of trust" reputation evaluation. Under such a model, every user would import the public certificate of authorities that they trust. For example, consider a consumer review web site, where I decide to trust the site's admin. The admin trusts its editorial staff, and their certificates are signed by the admin. Any of the editorial staff may trust one of the site's frequent contributors, based on the quality of their work. That editor may sign the contributor's certificate. Now, my level of trust for that contributor can be established as a function of the proximity of that user to the admin in whom I placed trust. This differs from Advogato's system in that the "Master" certificates are simply those whom I've decided to trust.
The same thing can be applied to social networking sites, as well. I can trust my friends by accepting their certificates, and gain insight into social relationships by examining the signatures in their keys.
Online, and in real life, we reward bullying and punish honesty. How do you make a reputation in that environment?
What?
I fight the enemy in my Sopwith Camel...and the enemy is the RIAA--er, Red Baron.
Indeed! Here's my own anecdote on that: I recently tried editing an article on a certain Posada Carriles, a man whom the Cuban government and Wikipedia call a "terrorist".
I was browsing the Cuban government site Granma where they had a list of what they called evidence against Posada. One item was an AK-47 rifle, another item was a box of 5.56mm ammo for that rifle. It doesn't take much of gun expertise to know that NATO ammo doesn't go into an AK-47, and I tried to put that in a paragraph criticizing the accusations against Posada. I don't know the guy, for all I know he could really be a terrorist, but you aren't going to convict anyone in a civilized court of law with that kind of "evidence".
I was thoroughly flamed by someone about that. It seems that Cuban government sympathizers are carefully patrolling any critical statements about the dictatorship. If Wikipedia had a reputation system, the commies would mod me down for presenting a balanced view in their rant against Posada, but I would recover my karma through my other contributions. OTOH, fanatics would find it too troublesome to fake an interest in subjects other than their favorite and their karma would suffer from that.
The article claims to be about reputation but mostly talks about the various "identity" efforts out there. Yes, a reputation is associated with an identity, but most of the identity systems being promoted focus on real identity rather than pseudonyms which you can choose to associate with yourself or not.
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There is a paradox to those systems -- the easier they are to use, the more they will get used -- and demanded. We'll go from a web where most web sites can be used casually, with no "sign on" (single or otherwise) to a web where far more sites demand you use the single sign on and thus have an account, because it's easy for them to ask.
This paradox is described at http://ideas.4brad.com/paradox-identity-managemen
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
So you're saying that it would help filter out a majority of the "complete mumpty".
That's a possibility. But it would be even easier to just use Slashdot's reputation/moderation system on your own site. That would solve the "complete mumpty" problem while also solving the problem of someone with excellent karma for his programming knowledge posting his conspiracy theories on your site.
And it automatically tunes itself to your audience.
Not really. Check back on the "creationism vs evolution" stories here.
What would be considered "good stuff" on one site (or even by one moderator) would be considered ignorant drivel on another site (or by a different moderator).
You achieve all the same benefits without the problems just by having your own reputation/moderation system.
It's why we have exams, professional organisations, CVs, brands, social networking etc etc etc.
We use reputation all the time and no-one has come up with a single reliable, coherent way of measuring it. You just try to get a decent builder.
Deleted
There is access via the web to some sources of information which exist independently and so are fairly spoof proof. For instance, someone wanting to research me could look for publications with my name on them in PubMed. Sources like that would be valid, web or no.
e t.jpg).
a y98/POST-X-DAY/X-DayPhotos/portraitsTN/_dynasoar.h tml but from the same stage show). I never heard another word from them.
But as long as the web remains a place where anyone can say anything, rightly or not, anyone who relies on it for supposedly objective information that they can use to measure a person's reputation is coming in dead last in the old "Arguing on the internet" poster (http://www.argaste.com/img/arguing_on_the_intern
And that's exactly what should happen. The web *should* remain open to anyone for anything. An individual has no better defense against boneheads that would take whatever they find on the web seriously than to prove their faith in all things computerish as truthful misplaced by pointing out absurdities in what's available. In my last position a colleague came to me with the breathless warning that someone in the department had found some less than flattering stuff about me on the net. I responded by posting a picture of me from the net on my office door (not the same as http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/fun/devivals/X-D
That being said, as long as anyone can post anything, a person's best defense against misinformation is disinformation. The latter invalidates the former in any rational mind. If someone still can't see the joke, that's not someone whose opinion matters to me anyway, even if it's a potential employer. I want to know when they're so informationally inbred so as to take this garbage seriously, as I want to steer clear of them. These are the same people, in spirit if not in truth, that would believe anything they read on paper if it was green and white lined line printer paper printed with dot matrix, since it obviously "came from a computer" and so must be right.
There's a real world, and the web does not reflect it any more than what's printed on that green and white lined paper.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
From the Advogato FAQ: "All the trust metric guarantees is that they really are who they say they are."
:)
It's not a reputation system per se, but just a more reliable identification system. That is a prerequisite for having a reputation system, of course, but it's not the whole thing.
The next step would be some way to figure if the person identified is known to be beneficial or harmful to the community. That is a much, much harder problem, not the least of which is because we probably don't all agree on which is which.
I think Slashdot, for all our whining, has done a pretty great job addressing such an intractable problem. Of course, as someone who has been stamped by the system with relatively good Karma that's very easy for me to say
Cheers.
I've been doing some research on OpenID, which seems to be considered as a possible substrate for building trusted identities (OpenID, as its proponents are quick to point out, only establishes an identity token, not trust). However, I hope that trust does not get built on the OpenID model because the OpenID protocol for identification is very poor from a security standpoint, a blindness to which the OpenID proponents have (I think) because of the vocabulary used.
Basically, the way OpenID works is that you connect to some site, give it your OpenID, which is just a URL, and the site you connected to (in the initial 1.0 standard of OpenID), gets the content at the URL. From the URL, it finds the URL of an identity server and redirects your browser to that server. Here's where the problem lies: In OpenID terms the site that you connected to is called the 'relying party'. However, you are really the 'relying' party because you are relying on the site you just connected to to send you the correct URL of your identity server. If instead they send you to a machine that merely proxies your identity server, they get your identity server password as you authenticate and your identity is compromised.
Now, there are various ways that OpenID proponents say this can be handled, but it's a fundamentally dangerous security model when you rely on an untrusted site to direct you to your identity system. The use of encrypted keychains (keyword bing encrypted here) with browser autofill, albeit not perfect, is much more secure system and works well enough that I'm not sure what the real savings of OpenID are (OpenID proponents will point to all kinds of other uses that OpenID could *potentially* be used for, but the process it was designed for and only practical purpose to date is to log into web sites using a URL instead of a username and password). Is saving having to fill in a password really worth this much complexity: http://openid.net/pres/protocolflow-1.1.png ?
When it comes to trust, we need to figure out a less complex methodology for identity before we can start establishing trusted identities. We also need to make an identity valuable, and right now an OpenID identity doesn't really represent something of value to general users who already have keychains and autofill. In fact, OpenID proponents often defend OpenID by saying that it should be used for low risk logins like blogs and the like. In that case, non-encrypted browser auto-complete is already superior from an end user perspective, and generally enabled by default or by clicking yes on one dialog window with first use of browser.
Most people don't like to be identified or even their synonyms used on different websites to be linked; otherwise you would see more people registering with their real name in the first place and OpenID would be pretty common too by now. I guess the next newsitem on this topic will probably be filed under YRO.
/. is trolling on some other website. It's the content of that one particular comment that matters and not what he wrote a year ago on some other website. Next thing will be that people don't even read comments anymore because everyone gets automodded based on his karma anyway? ;)
Imaging logging into your workaccount from home and your boss looking up the IP in Google Identity Search or something and seeing every website you visited and every comment you made. Google could probably really do something like that, since they know every website using Adsense you visit anyway and that's a lot.
Also, I couldn't care less if someone writing informative and insightful comments here on
We need some system to keep the discussion fair to both sides.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it" --Thomas Jefferson.
And so what? Is all of this really so important? I find it fascinating that so many people on so many sites care more about their "reputations" than what they post.
Does it? Sometimes I don't WANT my "good" reputation to follow me. I like acting like a goon on something awful and like a lolcat-loving ding-dong on fark and like a...well...never-you-mind-like-what on consumptionjunction and 4chan.
When (and where) I want to be serious, I am. Others see it quickly enough too. It doesn't take long at each site I join for people to realize that I'm a "good poster". Honestly, it isn't complicated. Stay on topic, write well, be helpful, and the rest follows. Such has been my pattern over the years at sitepoint, namepros, webhostingtalk, and even here.
\Perhaps it's because I'm old
\\And still use slashies
\\\(reversed because slashdot doesn't like 'em forward for some reason)
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Well, let's see how all this happened, step-by-step.
I was browsing Granma, looking for news about Castro's health when I saw this link to evidence against "the terrorist". I had never heard about this guy, but the so-called evidence was very obviously fake. I looked in Wikipedia. The opening sentence in that article today, 2007/06/03, says "Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles (born February 15, 1928) is a Cuban-born Venezuelan anti-Castro militant". At the time I first read it, the word "terrorist" was where "anti-Castro militant" is today. There's obviously an edit war going on.
I re-checked the photograph in Granma. I looked in a book, "An Illustrated Guide to Weapons of the Modern Soviet Ground Forces", Ray Bonds ed., Salamander Books, 1981, ISBN 086101 115 5. There in pages 136, 137 was a photograph of an original soviet AK-47 which was identical, to the last rivet, to the rifle pictured in Granma. The rifle in the photograph wasn't modified, it does not fire 5.56mm cartridges, the Cuban evidence against Posada Carriles was fake.
I linked my criticism to the photograph in Granma and cited my Salamander Books reference. This is, in no way at all, an "original idea", it's a carefully constructed criticism with sources fully cited. As I said in my other post, this is a crude attempt at framing, based on that evidence alone, Posada Carriles would be acquitted in any civilized court of justice.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't work as a scientific publication or as a court of law either. In any of those cases, the evidence I submitted would be examined and weighted. The way Wikipedia edit wars work is that the one who is most persistent wins. I don't care so much for Posada Carriles that I would stand watch and change what others have written about him. I just found this guy who was obviously the victim of a frame-up. Perhaps he is a terrorist after all, I don't know, but it's a certain fact that the Cuban government forged evidence against him and i tried to point that out.
When I first saw the title, I thought this was about reputations for web sites or online businesses, but no, it's about reputations for, well, bloggers. Where it doesn't really matter all that much. It matters for eBay, but most of the sellers on eBay are businesses. It's been a long time since eBay was individual to individual.
Dating sites have struggled with this. True wants to see an image of your driver's license. With the controversy over Myspace, we may see them going that way, at least for parents.
Wikipedia doesn't care much about identity, except as regards vandal blocking. Even admins and ArbComm members are anonymous. All Wikipedia needs is some way to slow down unlimited generation of new identities. I once suggested that one way to do that would be to require some easily available, no-cost, unique, verifiable physical token to register. Like an AOL disk.
One approach to identity verification, which I'd like to see used for domain registration, is simply mailing out a card by postal mail. When you register a domain, a letter should be sent to the address listed for the domain. When you get the letter, you type in the password printed in the letter postcard, and the domain registration completes. That would really improve WHOIS data quality and cut down on scams. The cost of sending out customized mailing pieces is under about US$0.50 each when you have a bulk mailing house do it, so it's quite feasible at current domain prices.
Reputations are relative. They depend on the person making the recommendation. If the person doing so is a numpty, the information the recommendation is based on isn't worth much. Expanding this to everyone would be what, an N^2 problem? Where N is potentially the population of the planet. Thankfully not everyone knows everyone.
It would require a centralised registry though rather than distributed in order to calculate the effect of the relationship to the person making the recommendation. And it would of course all have to be based on a reliable identity system.
Good luck with that.
Deleted
Look into my posts above, you'll find the sources I cited, one from a Cuban government source stating that a box of 5.56mm cartridges were to be used in an AK-47 rifle, and another source stating that the AK-47 uses 7.62mm ammunition. Now, with bold font, is it clear to you that I cited two independent sources which are in contradiction? It's perfectly in the spirit of an encyclopedia to point out that there are conflicting views on a subject.
If Wikipedia doesn't have a method for verifying facts, that's a ***MAJOR FAULT***. Some sort of merit, or "karma" as it's known in
Reputation and anonymity are mutually competing goals. Early in the history of the 'net, anonymity was something that people at first exploited for a wide range of reasons; honesty without repercussions, viciousness without repercussions, etc. Eventually, technology caught up an much of the anonymity has become relative. If they want to find out how you are, they usually can.
I think that much of the recent alarm about loss of privacy is the result of us becoming accustomed to thinking we had anonymity and that loss of thinking we were 'safe'. I'm getting used to the idea that I'm being watched, at work, in public, on the internet.
I have changed my behavior to avoid activities that might be unflattering. Big Brother, I know, but I don't really have much to hide. I'm willing to become more public if it means my 'reputation' does not get damaged. In some respects, my 'reputation' is already a matter of 'public' record; my credit record. I'm ok with that, especially because it helps me with lower interest rates and better job prospects.
There are other reasons to tolerate this linking of reputation with your real identity. Terrorists, criminals, and other bad actors are rapidly running out of places to hide. Considering the fact that technology has enabled bad actors to strike from around the globe, this ability to identify people becomes something of a deterrent to bad behavior of all sorts; terrorists, criminals, politicians.
I just hope that when reputation gets unfairly damaged, it is quickly restored.
Best regards.
This is a problem with real life. There's a truism along the lines of "you never really know who another person is, you only know what they've shown you." This goes hand in glove with another truism: "perception is reality." Every one of us creates models of people in our life to better understand what makes them tick, how they operate. Once we feel comfortable enough in our understanding of that person we can say things like "Oh, X is going to love this!" or "Just wait until Y hears about this, I know he's going to flip!" But do we really know the person? Not really. We only know what we see. And if we like someone, we tend to gloss over the negatives. After shit happens, you'll get an earful from friends as to why it should have been obvious but they kept their mouths shut beforehand for fear of alienating you. And they were right. Would you have listene to them? Of course, not. Bad relationships, can I get an amen in here?
I tend to classify people into the following categories: good to have a beer with, someone I would introduce to other people I know, someone I can trust with something semi-important and people I can trust with things that are very fucking heavy. Most of the social drama I see comes down to someone mistaking a casual friend for someone that can be trusted with something heavy. "What, you're upset that Weasel slept in and forgot to drive you to the airport? Why are you so surprised? This is Weasel, the guy with the reputation as the heaviest drinker in the city. He's fun at a party but you actually thought you could rely on him for something more than a laugh? You made the mistake here, not him." Of course, that's exactly the sort of thing you don't say or the drama will shift to you.
So this is all normal human social dynamics, web doesn't have anything to do with it. People were doing long-distance business with people they didn't know personally for thousands and thousands of years before computers were invented. It all comes down to trust. Does the person have a reputation? Can someone else vouch for him? Someone using a fake or young ID on the net is no different from someone using an alias in the past. And what does it come down to in real life and on the web? One simple question: "Is there enough incentive to fuck me over in this deal for the guy to throw away his reputation?" Because it takes time to earn a reputation, get seller feedback on Ebay, etc. Do people put time into pulling off a proper con? Of course. Just look at the con men who go after little old ladies. This isn't just scamming someone one the net, this is full on interaction, romancing, sleeping with, trying to convince the mark you're legit so you can get the means of fucking her over for the inheritance. But do you think that the high stakes con man is going to try fucking over your grandma for her social security check? I don't think so.
Even when someone has good reputation, you don't know what he has going on in his life. Maybe something has come up that means something is more important. I've seen businesses with formerly stellar reputations go to pot because the owner has other things on his mind.
Figure out a way to fix this problem in real life and you'll have a model for how to do it online.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Was part of panel at SXSW 2007 "Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Reputation and Presence" - Quite an interesting topic.p utation-20 ... The internet is still more infantile than infinite.
My presentation here: http://www.slideshare.net/ted.nadeau/sxsw-2007-re
Seuss - I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
At the end of the day, "reputation" is just "what other people say", not necessarily what they even think. I see other people making a reference to work-related reputation, such as behaviors in the office and resumes. Well, what about the catty office gossip queen or the boss who was a complete dick?
Character is what you have; you carry it with you. A person with a good enough character can win your trust no matter what some unscrupulous bystander does to discredit them; similarly if someone fails to win your trust, then you shouldn't trust them, no matter how many friends they have bought.
What if some of history's greater underdog heroes were judged by their earlier reputations? In fact, one of the common traits of genius is that they buck the status quo and ignore conventional wisdom.
Microsoft's "Windows Cardspace" probably solves this problem already.
Granted, Microsoft is envisioning a system where an "identity provider" like a bank could look at your card and come up with a credit rating and whatnot, but using it for something less lofty, like a universal karma score, isn't that much of a stretch. Not much of a .NET guy myself, but it seems reasonable.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Wikipedia already has a sort of informal reputation system where moderators and select users form groups to keep control of articles and squash dissent.
I'm trying to make a social networking site in my spare time and the idea of community reputation is a lot harder than it seems. If we use reddit as an example it's had a problem for awhile now where a core group of very vocal users organize to have any anti-bush/republican links modded up to the front page no matter how crackpot crazy they are. Redditors are generally pretty left wing so you get stuck in this situation of apathy where the average user doesn't disagree enough to mod it down.
Fanatics are a willing to put a lot more time and effort into gaming a system than your average user. I haven't yet seen a reputation system that solves this problem well.
eBay's system of who you can trust and who you cannot doesn't work. Generally, even theives have a good feedback rating on ebay, and worst of all, the average joe who isn't an eBay powerseller or doesn't have his own ebay "store" is likely to get shafted because eBay only cares about fees, not feedback.
For example, a user with a feedback of 1 can buy something from a seller with a feedback of 450, and then complain to ebay. The user of with the feeback of 1 can have the seller's account suspended despite the vast chasm of difference between the seller's feedback and the buyers, and ebay makes NO distinction over which party has the better reputation.
It all comes down to who files the dispute first. Either that or eBay just assumes the seller is always at fault.
Ebay's dirty little secret is that you can create an account, buy something, and essentially get it for free from the seller because the only way the seller has to resolve the suspended account is to refund the payment. There is NO other recourse.
And "reputation" means nothing to ebay. You could have created the buyer's account a week ago, and take down a seller who has been a good seller on ebay for years.
And when Ebay gets wise to you, create a new email account on yahoo, start again, buy something, register a complaint and get it for free, because the seller has to refund your money.
So; how exactly does eBay's system "work"?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Is that no one wants to hand anyone person all of the neccessary things to verify your identity. think about it. Do you really want to give the company an SS#, address, email, phone, birth cert, etc. To get a digital certificate of some sort?
Especially in light of the TJMAX and credit card company break in, as much as I personally have faith in Verisign and such, no one wants to give someone ultimate identification power. And I don't think the solution will ever be a "one stop shop" thing.
Basically we are going to have to expand upon the key signing initiatives that exist currently through digital certs, and make them less expensive. Then you could have your bank sign your cert, your employer sign it, your friends sign it, etc. Each additional signature adds more "trust" but trust will never be 100% absolute I don't think. Just as we have fake id's in the real world, they will exist here to.
The problem is how to hide the big red button from the idiot; because inevitbaly there will be a button, and as we all know there are plenty of idiots out there.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Some of us have posted under nothing but our real names for years, knowing that every post was only adding to our online metaprofile, and if the bulk of what we posted was helpful or useful or at least sensible, we were building up years of easily accessed credentials to help people understand they could rely on information from us a little more than Joe Q. Internet.
Why you would choose to be anon in a world where reputation is growing in importantance every day has always been beyond me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Kendall - and that's close enough. Superkendall is actually a takeoff on "Super Grover"...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was going to post much the same thing, so it's refreshing to see someone else thinking that way.
The thing about Slashdot's karma is that it creates groupthink. As you've said, too many people care about it instead of just posting what they think. So they post what they perceive to be the popular opinion, even if that's not what they really think, or even if it's contrary to what they really think.
Frankly, I think groupthink is a bigger problem than even the goatse links. Groupthink is where rational information exchange dies. If you look at the worst bible-thumping communities, or at rabid theocracies, or at the worst excesses of history, and some of its biggest mistakes too, almost all were based on groupthink. Take a million people who individually think "jeez, X is stupid and evil" and put them in a big group where they think that everyone else is fundamentally and rabidly pro-X... and watch them all start chest-thumping for the very thing they secretly despise. Just to get brownie points with the rest of the gang.
When a whole village went and cheered about one of them being burned at the stake as a witch (for bonus points when everyone knew it's a bogus charge and the real reason is something like: widow without sons inherits some land, some rich guy wants her land), that was groupthink. "OMG, I can't let the other ones even think I'm not a rabid fundie. Why, my popularity would go down."
At the risk of tempting Goodwin's law (although it's not a comparison): when a few million Germans cheered about invading the USSR, that was groupthink too. "OMG, I can't let the others think I'm not patriotic."
And in our own times, when you look at such things as bible-thumping communities, or at the broken high-school culture where being smart is uncool and being an airhead is the apex of fashion... guess what? That's groupthink too. Once the ball got rolling, even kids who do understand that their future job does depend on it... still go and insult the nerd, because that's what brings them karma points with the rest of the group.
So, to cut a long story short, I actually _don't_ want that kind of global karma. I actually _want_ people to come forth and say what they think, and not what they think would be popular in that community. I want people to actually come forth and say stuff like "this war is bogus" or "the PATRIOT act is unconstitutional" and not devolve into sheep thinking "OMG, I can't have it follow me for the rest of my life that I'm not patriotic or that maybe I have something to hide". Even if it's something as unimportant as a games forum, I actually want people to come forth and tell me the bad parts about it, so I can make an informed decision. I don't want more of them to think "OMG, if I say anything bad, I'll come out as a troll." Etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bullshit. Good karma on Slashdot just means you fit the views of the other guys _here_. It doesn't mean you automatically are right, or that you have anything useful to contribute to any other community.
The world is really divided into groups like that. The same guy can be the most popular guy on an "omg, we love kittens" board, and a total plonker on a dog lovers' board. The same guy can be the most popular guy on a fundamentalist christian "OMG, science is evil, let's teach kids Intelligent Design" message board, but I can think of a lot of sites (probably even Slashdot) where he'd get modded down. The same guy can be the #1 community idol on a white supremacist board by just posting "omg, it's us who's the oppressed minority" drivel, but, let's just say, I doubt that the blacks and asians will find him equally enlightening. Someone could get to be the apex of popularity on some libertarian board by just promoting the view that everyone should fend for themselves already, give us the wild west days back, but try to preach that to the Amish and you'll find that that's the very thing they are _against_. And try preaching that to some real economists, and you'll get your economic pseudo-science based on novels laughed at. Etc.
Even the style of the discourse can diverge massively. The kind of "I'm right and everyone else is an idiot, because I can go on and on for 5 pages about it" message that gets +5 Insightful on
Basically karma on
All your achievement here is that you found a group who thinks along the same lines. No more, no less. It's _not_ validation and proof that you're right about everything and should get people on all boards, on all topics, to listen to your enlightening views.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Employers search Google about their candidates, partners about their potential dates. Who needs a centralized database - or even a format convention - for online reputation when it is already possible to get a good first impression of any person by the web trail they leave?
If anything, leaving this without a formal standard or central authority heads off problems with privacy or manipulation.
Formal reputation systems are useful at a local level. It works on Ebay, where there is only one type of transaction (a sale), and all reputation and references stems from how the party behaves on either end of the transaction. When transactions and relations become more complex, it might be best just to provide the raw information and let people make up their own minds about each other.
This is a good article, although it only touches on the topic in one section late in the text:
A Group is its own worst enemy, by Clay Shirky
It's also worth noting that the identities of
I used to have a
Compare this to sites like Fark where rivalries and stereotypes rule. Hey, time for Bevets to post how we're all going to hell! Time for Wild_Bluebonnet to post about how Texas is the best and Liberals should all be shot with silver bullets! Time for Dancin_in_Anson to foam at the mouth!
This is WHY
The question is, why? What is it about
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
This is just a random Monday morning thought... I used to work for one of the major credit reference agencies. When I told people who I worked for, they would almost inevitably say 'oh, can you sort out my credit rating then?', and of course the answer was 'no, it's an immediate sacking offence to do anything with live data' and 'what the agency says about doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get a loan or a credit card or whatever. That decision is down to how the querying party chooses to interpret the data that the agency returns.' By then they had normally got bored and gone away.
It strikes me that reputation could also be a similar agglomeration of data, from which it would be down to a site or an individual to make a decision on how much to trust a poster/seller/relationship/whatever. Of course, the difficulty would be getting the key services such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, LiveJournal etc to provide data, and indeed give a metric by which to report (number of posts with more than 2 karma on Slashdot?). This would be presented as bit of XML/RSS (depending on how corporate the application needed to be) and would be then presented to a site's user either based on preset conditions, or on the user's own conditions. The user would not see the raw data. This type of system does add a level of complexity to web interaction but it's going to be essential soon, and far more than 'just for blogging'.
Don't worry about Godwin in the context. Any sentence with "Germans" and "invading the USSR" says more about not learning from history in the military strategy sense than the nationalism & racism are bad sense.
Seriously, did nobody translate any books on Napoleon to German or something?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Same as everyone else, then? :P
;)
I mean the French also had translations of "Achtung: Panzer", and were nevertheless genuinely surprised when they got hit upside the head with a verbatim implementation of that.
Learning from history also doesn't always save you from doing the same mistake, or a brand new and original mistake.
E.g., WW2 was based on the idea that you can still just invade someone for resources, and that super-powers will just side with whoever happens to be the enemy of their enemy. Hitler bet on the fact that the UK would still be stuck on the enmity with France that had last since the 100 year war, and that the alliance between the two in WW1 was only a fluke. If history just repeat itself, the UK _should_ have joined the Axis and helped gain some colonial territory at the expense of France. Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for everyone else) the times had changed.
E.g., the plan to invade Russia was based on the idea that any country will just throw the hands up when it lost half its army and the enemy is at the doorstep of their capital. Napoleon in Russia was an exception indeed, but that's just the thing: it was an exception. Everyone else, including France and Denmark right in WW2 just threw their hands up in that situation. Denmark, for example, didn't even fight as much as France, and more or less just pulled an "ok, ok, we surrender, just don't bomb our civilians!" Historically, Russia _should_ have capitulated there, but somehow it didn't. It came as a genuine surprise to Germany that, contrary to all expectations and history, the USSR just kept on fighting even after it lost a million soldiers in the first sucker-punch. Then it lost another million and it still kept on fighting. And so on.
E.g., historically noone should have given a damn about Japan attacking China or, as Hitler hoped, the USSR. Throughout the 19'th century and early 20'th century, noone gave a damn about China, other than as a captive market to be carved up between the great powers. Japan had actually gained the status of civilized nation, and then of great power, based on... you guess, being aggressive enough in Asia _and_ beating the seven shades of shit out of tsarist Russia's fleet. The 19'th century powers actually respected an aggressive imperialist, and Japan had passed that test with flying colours: it had shown the whole world that it has just as much ruthlessness, balls and military might as any European power.
So historically, everyone should have just nodded, smiled and maybe sent some congratulations notes as Japan went and carved yet another slice of China for itself. (It had already taken Manchukuo in 1931, and noone gave a damn.) Unfortunately for them, though, again, the times had changed, and the western world had gotten tired of eternal warfare. Noone appreciated Japanese aggression any more, and appreciated stuff like the Nanking massacre a lot less. That course of action eventually put them in conflict with everyone else. Worse yet, with the guys which controlled Japan's oil supply.
For that matter, historically, Japan should have continued the historical trend of trying to grab more power at the expense of Russia. That was how they had gotten their great power status in the first place, after all. Which should have tied enough of Stalin's army in the east, so Germany can go for the throat. Unfortunately Japan made an early try and, other than maybe managing to help convince Stalin to sign the Ribentropp-Molotov pact so he can move more army there, only managed to get smacked hard. So they focused their attention to the south instead, effectively helping set the Axis on the course to fighting the USA too.
Etc.
History is a fun thing. You can always find enough examples of why something should work, and then enough other examples of why it didn't
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Identity is really the easiest part of the problem.
But reputation is easy as well. The problem with most proposals is that they are focused on organizational reputation rather than personal reputation.
Reputation, however, is relative and contextual. We don't need Slashdot vouching for us, we need people in our own address book / social network. Then we can vouch for our friends/family in various ways ("this person isn't a spammer", "this person knows a lot about cars", etc.).
But the real power of a personal reputation system is that it is transitive. If I trust that Alice is not a spammer, and Alice trusts that Bob is not a spammer, I can to some degree also trust Bob, and so can my friends, etc. A few degrees of Kevin Bacon there and you've got a real system.
Such a system allows for anonymity as well. I don't need to use my real name if I can generate some other identity and foster trust in some other community. As long as the identity token itself is secure, they don't need to know my name, they just need to know I'm not a troll, I'm insightful (hint hint), etc.
My vision of such a system would use SMTP as the transport mechanism for requesting and relaying trust between parties. Mail agents would handle the requests automatically, like calendar-enabled mail programs do now, and it is a fully-distributed system. Mail clients would also cache trust from their own "friends," like DNS, to better respond to requests.
This degrades well, since the emails can contain manual instructions for those whose mail clients don't have this feature. Or their Internet providers can help with server-based responses, so the mail client doesn't even need to be involved in most cases.
With such a system, spam would mostly be a thing of the past. I can limit incoming email to only people in my Address Book, people in theirs, etc. out to some limit of degree. Chances are, that will quickly encompass everyone likely to want to send me a legitimate email, and bounce away people with no legitimate friends (spammers). The system would self-correct when accounts are compromised or people unwittingly trust spammers, and if a friend of mine is too naive and adds spammers to his list constantly, I can stop trusting his list.
We really do need a ubiquitous identity-trust system, something that uses existing protocols to share trust and integrates with IM, email, online forums, auction sites, etc. But the problem itself isn't that hard.
Heh. Dude, relax, I didn't say that _everyone_ is a SFV. (Stupid Fashion Victim.) I just said that the phenomenon does exist, some people _do_ care more about whether they'll get positive "karma" than about what they really want to say.
/. is a karma-whore? Good grief, no. Or I should hope not.
/. specific problem? No, certainly not. It's a much more general problem. You'll notice that I gave examples dating well before the existence of /. or the Internet.
Occasionally you don't even have to guess. Occasionally you run into messages making an outright fuss over "why did I get modded down when this other guy got modded up?" or spelling out the ever popular "if you disaggree with me, I'll mod you down Overrated!" impotent's revenge. You don't even have to guess, those people are very overt about their actually caring how their post was perceived, rather than whether it was accurate, or actually thinking that some childish mod-revenge is actually some form of punishment. In their little prom-queen mind, yeah, they taught someone a lesson by modding them down. That'll teach him. It's not just silly, it's outright comical.
That's the phenomenon I'm railing against.
And I consider such people to be just the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio. They rarely offer some new signal, they just parrot whatever point of view they perceive as popular.
That's my "problem" with the moderation system. For each goatse link or genuine troll that got modded down (although I've seen goatse links modded up too), they created 2-3 guys adding noise just for instant popularity reasons. It's nothing but a new kind of troll, in the end. The classic troll gets attention by posting some baiting and counting the response, the new troll posts something just for the karma boost and counts his attention by the mod score. But both are in the end just noise in the rational conversation.
And having more than one camp doesn't really solve the underlying problem that much. Having the choice between camps A, B and C, sure, it's a bit more diverse and flexible than having just one. But it still straightjackets the choices between A, B and C, when sometimes the real answer is "none of the above."
At any rate:
- do I say that everyone on
- do I claim that it's a
- does anyone accuse you personally? No, not really. I can't be arsed to read your message history and judge if you're a groupthink victim or not. And it's none of my business anyway. So no need to preemptively go on the defensive.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I believe needing to have a reputation to conduct yourself online is in violation of general human good nature and a promotion of paranoia and all things evil. I will always believe this with stubborn tenacity til the day I am in the grave! I would fight for it.
We have created an authentication system, "Trusted Node Authentication", that answers many of the questions raised in this article. We we can answer the most fundamental question, "How can trust be established over the Internet?"
i esWeb/trustedNodeAuthentication.do?ref=109401245
http://www.forbintechnologies.com/forbinTechnolog
This system has has now been reviewed by several academics and authors with an expertise in security. While most have pointed out the challenge of convincing ISPs to join the consortium, no one has found a conceptual flaw in the "Trusted Node Authentication(TM)" system.
Here is a brief overview:
A major consolidation of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) over the last five years provides the opportunity to create a new authentication system. (In the U.S., twenty-two of the major ISPs now control 75% of the market.)
Forbin Technologies is a startup company located in Austin, TX. We have designed a, "Trusted Node Authentication(TM)" system, that will solve many of the systemic problems of the current Public Key Infrastructure system, especially the problems of certificate revocation lists (CRLs) and on-line status checking.
This system could also provide the "holy grail" for single sign-on. We believe the simple and efficient single sign-on process for "Trusted Node Authentication(TM)" is far superior to the "federated identity" process provided by the Liberty Alliance framework.
Because of its non-proprietary nature and its ease of use, "Trusted Node Authentication(TM)" could become the cornerstone of a new identity management structure popularly referred to as Identity 2.0. "In Identity 2.0, usage of identity more closely resembles today's offline identity systems, but with the advantages of a digital medium. As with a driver's license, the issuer provides the user with a certified document containing claims. The user can then choose to show this information when the situation requires." (Burton Group)
Microsoft's CardSpace and the open-source Higgins project (supported by IBM) are the two leading Identity 2.0 technologies. OpenID and Sxip are also players in this space. None of these systems has an effective authentication mechanism built in or expressly defined. Without authentication these systems are simply profile management systems and not identity management systems. (Higgins and CardSpace provide a workflow for authentication from an "Identity Provider"; however, they do not answer the question as to why a "Security Token" from an "Identity Provider" should be trusted.)
The basic question is, how can trust be established over the Internet? If you and I have never met and I come to your website, how can you be confident that I am who I say that I am? "Trusted Node Authentication(TM)" answers this basic question regarding the establishment of trust.
Sincerely,
Mike Duffy
CEO / CTO
Forbin Technologies
The reason why is that some people want to be able to say unpopular things without having their reputation ruined for it.
Saying something at the time unpopular is in itself a form of building reputation. I have never shied away from posting libertarian/conservative oriented posts on Slashdot.
You may need to expose a company's dirty practices, but let's face it -- if it's a matter of public record that you're willing to expose a company's secrets, nobody is ever going to hire you again.
But there are outlets to handle that sort of fringe speech where you truly want to be anonymous. Look at the parent poster, was there any reason why every word he or she typed online for ten years or so needed that level of anonymity? I would but not every post was uncovering some dastardly deed by a corp he/she was working for. So for the rest of the time when he is simply disseminated knowledge or opinion, why not be doing so more openly?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The assumption that reputation management should be tightly coupled with identity management is often non properly stated ..
(no matter what Dick Hardt keep saying in his beautiful speeches ...)
I recently wrote few posts on this topic on the Clipperz password manager blog.
I think that illustrates that there are people who will explore any system and figure out a way to 'game' (munchkin?) it to their advantage.
So since we people seem to like doing that, maybe what ever system that gets designed should be done by a game maker, with a decent group of test players.
Cause effectively it would just be another e-penii to wave around to show how L337 you are.
Those that have truely good rep dont care about what others think of them, nor how they would be rated in one of these systems.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
These aliases are truly, and only, thinly veiled disguises. Unless you use aliases like a one time pad.
... If only!
...]
The proof is all through my post, at this point I must stop this charade.
I shall at some time be found out for who and what I truly am.
A very well trained Great Pyrenees. [I work for a Shepherd]
Fravia says it best [fabulous site]:
http://www.searchlores.org/noanon.htm
http://www.searchlores.org/fobegano.htm
BONUS !
http://www.searchlores.org/trolls.htm
I really like the idea of OpenID
http://openid.net/
I think it would further a type of "vetting" or track record for such discourse that requires it / be enhanced by reputations. A HOSTS file of sorts like the academics of ARPANET lore. [I was but a pup]
So, tell me whose advice would you trust concerning sheep herding? Hmmmmm? I chase them for a living, hence, you could trust my advice.
Otherwise:
http://digg.com/
For those of you that think me just another lap dog, I say,
http://www.gailgiles.com/Jack.jpg
[I like CATS (Broadway version), long walks in the meadow, old shoes, Slashdot,
~hylas