

Our new Rails app: pplrep - grizzy
http://pplrep.com/?=h

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mcantelon
>Each time you rep someone, you are rewarded with 2 rep points of your own.

If I randomly rep enough people I will become A GOD.

~~~
pplrep
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.

~~~
mcantelon
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.

~~~
pplrep
The amount of times they've given out rep is indeed visible on their profile.

~~~
mcantelon
Perfect. Would be easy, then, to make a greasemonkey plugin to do some simple
math and work out a "sincerity ranking", etc.

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snitko
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.

~~~
pplrep
Thanks for your comment. I am the author of the app. We are always checking
for abuse, and if someone abuses the system, it will be dealt with.

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jmduke
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'.)

~~~
GuiA
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.

[1]: [http://www.simplemachines.org](http://www.simplemachines.org)

[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

------
pooya72
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.

~~~
pplrep
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.

~~~
pooya72
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.

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gee_totes
Either I have a really good internet connection right now (which is unlikely),
or this app seems really fast! Good job! (Also the colors look great).

Are you doing anything special on the backend?

~~~
pplrep
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.

Thanks for the kind words.

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aespinoza
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 ?

~~~
pplrep
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.

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jnorthrop
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.

~~~
pplrep
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.

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sebg
On the front page - if you make an element that looks clickable, people are
probably going to click on it.

<div class="hpar"></div> should probably be clickable. I probably clicked on
it 5 or 6 times before i had to scroll down.

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unknownian
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.

~~~
pplrep
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 ;).

------
snitko
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.

------
LordHumungous
>Each time you rep someone, you are rewarded with 2 rep points of your own.

Uhh I'm no expert but it seems like rep points don't really mean much if you
can award them to yourself.

~~~
pplrep
It's a way to encourage people to use the app. It was not originally like
that. I added that two days ago. But you guys are right. Feature removed.

------
aroman
Edward Snowden currently on top of the leaderboard. Hmm.

[http://pplrep.com/leaderboard](http://pplrep.com/leaderboard)

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readme
Is the search supposed to do something? I tried three people I knew and then
tried 'John Smith' \-- returned 0 results every time.

~~~
pplrep
It's working the way it's suppose, to ;). Your friends haven't signed up, most
likely, and 'John Smith' isn't a member of the site.

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omgsean
George Zimmerman is in seventh place. This app doesn't really make any sense.

~~~
pplrep
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.

~~~
mrcwinn
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.

~~~
pplrep
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.

------
jpdoctor
It looks like facebook likes without the rest of facebook, or did I miss
something?

