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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.