Hi, I am the author of the app. Thanks for your comment.
There's a limit on how often you can rep a single person (once every 24 hours), and if you are to spam different people with rep, your rep is likely to be deleted by the person's profile, which will take your score back down two points. Since a person's profile is public, they likely don't want their profile filled with spam rep or to like their reps are fake. We are hoping members will play their role in moderating in their own profiles.
It'll likely end up working the same way it does on LinkedIn and Twitter. On LinkedIn I get strangers wanting to connect all the time so they can increase the surface perception of the the size of their network. And on Twitter it's similar: people who follow an implausibly large number of people in the hopes those people will follow back end up following me temporarily, hoping I'll follow back.
Is the amount of rep a person gives out visible on their profile? That would be useful in gauging how genuine their motiviation is.
Reputation is a very important problem worth solving. However, I'm not sure your app tackles the most important part of this problem, which is connections between participants.
For example, let's say I started a business and I need first customers, which I cannot get without the reputation. One cheat is to simply create 100 accounts on your website, each referring to each other and giving points to each other. Even if you manually check each account, which I think you wouldn't be able to do at a certain point, I can game the system and gain fake reputation.
An alternative would be a system based on connections. For instance, if my friend or a friend of my friend gave your account some points, then I can be more sure of the validity of your reputation. The more connections you have to me and the shorter the route, the more reputable you appear to me. On the other hand, if all your points come from your own fake accounts which have no connections to any of my friends, your reputation appears 0 to me, even though you have 100 points.
I'm reminded of a game I used to play in middle school called MapleStory. It was a pretty generic, grindy MMORPG but one of its more mechanics was a 'reputation' stat that each character had, with no ostensible uses besides to tell who was well-liked and who wasn't. You could 'fame' someone and 'defame' someone once per day, similar to this system.
As one might expect, the system never was as honest as you'd hope: you'd have massive "fame trading" rings, because what's the point of giving away your fame for the day if you don't get anything in return? And, more maliciously, there would be guilds and clans who'd designate targets to 'defame on sight': forty people defaming you over the course of a week would usually put you into the negative hundreds, sort of ruining that stat permanently (unless, of course, you 'bought fame'.)
Some forum software (for example, the free SMF[1]) include a similar feature, where members can vote each other up/down.
Now while on paper it's not very different from the reddit/HN/etc. karma system, in reality it is- on many such forums, the community is very compact[2], and there is a greater sense of member hierarchy (I believe that having picture avatars contributes to that, as they are very quickly remembered). The resulting social construct is often very interesting, with members staging coups against one another, trying to gain power (= being a moderator), and so on.
I've spent many hours as a teenager in such communities in the early 2000s, and it was very entertaining and interesting in terms of human dynamics- pretty much cyberpolitics where the goal is to rule on a forum rather than a territory.
I'm certain that there are tons of social experiments that can be done in the context of cyber-communities, and that what we have today (social news sites, social network) barely scratches the surface.
[2]: that is, for any 2 random active members, the probability that they have posted in a same thread is much closer to 1 than on reddit/HN/etc.; this is definitely helped by the fact that threads tend to be linear in such forums
I know this is well intentioned, but it might have the opposite effect. There has been a lot of study done on rewards and motivation. It turns out that giving external rewards can undermine motivation. For example, giving stars to children for their drawings will undermine their natural motivation to draw. The same can be said about monetary rewards. Moreover, people who do deeds for an external reward are usually less satisfied compared to those who do deeds for their own sake.
A lot of this research is done under Self-Determination Theory.
I'm not sure about psychological studies as I am not familiar with them nor do I have a degree in psychology, so I am not going to try and be an arm-chair psychologist.
I can say that based on my own anecdotal experience I feel pretty good when I receive a rep, and I also feel good when I give people rep. Others who have used pplrep have reported similar experiences. And I think that's a good thing. Certainly better than dealing with the drama that occurs on other social networks.
Sorry, just saw your reply. Well, the studies show that people well feel good about rewards when they are unexpected. But once it becomes part of a standard routine it turns out to lower intrinsic motivation.
Maybe I miss something, but why would I want to get reps? I mean what is the objective of it. Is it to incentivize people to help others? Or just an ego boost. I can help people without giving reps.
In my opinion this would be a feature of a larger product. It would be cool to implement it in Hacker News. Where you can get Karma for helping others here. But it would still be an add-on. The focus of karma in hacker news is to incentivize people on submitting better articles. What does it mean for me to have more reps ?
I recommend signing up and getting your friends to sign up and use it. It's indeed a very good feeling when one of your friends reps you for something you may have done. It does feel good. And I'm not drinking my own kool-aid. I've been repped a few times, and it does feel pretty good.
Not really. We still haven't implemented any caching. Probably will in the next week or so. And we're gonna need to figure out a way to scale the leaderboard soon. Probably gonna use redis for that.
Props for the clever privacy policy and simple language used, (I wish more sites would take that approach) but it doesn't say anything about sharing information collected with third parties. Given the nature of the site, it would be nice to understand whether the site intends on monetizing collected personal information.
BTW, that isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is an important aspect of the sites privacy policy.
We don't plan to, no. Your info doesn't matter to us outside of us figuring out how people use the site in order to better improve it. At any point, you can just delete your account, and it'll be permanently deleted. There are no soft deletes here. You delete your account, and all content you create is deleted everywhere.
Anyone else think the UI looks very Heroku-esque? I'm not one to sue over superficial differences and "purple" is not a trademark, but I thought pplrep was a Heroku product at first.
The color we are using is actually "blue iris." It's a mix of blue and purple, and we think it looks great. It was pantone's color of the year 2008. Heroku looks great, too, so we'll take that as a compliment ;).
Finally, there's a question of openness. If you store your DB of connections and points on your own server, I'd trust it less than if it was stored publicly, like the Bitcoin blockchain.
Hi. The site just launched. So far it seems our members seem to like Zimmerman. It's out of our hands as to who people want to rep, as that should be up to the community.
In other words, people don't have to be real on your site? Did George Zimmerman actually sign up?
It may help the reputation of the site itself to have a real user base. I know it's slow going in the beginning when you get out there - but I simply don't understand this.
I cannot verify if Zimmerman is real. If famous people sign up and would like their accounts verified, they can contact us. It's a similar dilemma Twitter has.
If I randomly rep enough people I will become A GOD.