
Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions - rms
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/
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zmmmmm
This has tones of Zuckerberg's "privacy is passe" and Schmidt's "if you don't
want anyone to know about something, don't do it". I pretty much despise this
view.

I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People
are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being
trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's
indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see
someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological
impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a
problem yet is just that it's still so new.

What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start
getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's
already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a
parent for making disparaging comments on a web site:

[http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-
bit...](http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bitter-
website-20100327-r4dg.html)

Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort
out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad
enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but
the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of
it don't give me much hope).

~~~
gizmo
> but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the
> fun of it don't give me much hope

Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the
USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't
credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons.

I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have
grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or
gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just
shrug and go on with their lives.

~~~
Psyonic
There's something about scandals that seem to keep people interested. That's
all most reality TV is, really, scandals about people that you don't even
know. Tiger Woods (and Jesse James) certainly weren't the first famous men to
cheat on their wives... but people still eat it up like a greasy bucket of KFC

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swombat
Absolutely agree.

Once it becomes obvious that _everybody_ does certain things, they will
necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g.
if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population
engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case
making them visible might help stamp them out.

For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms
about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change
along with it.

I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing.
Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.

~~~
wmf
And then there are things that only a significant minority does, but nobody
talks about. I don't think bringing that out into the open will benefit
anyone, since the majority could more easily bully people into submission.

~~~
roundsquare
Do you have any examples? I'm not able to follow...

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dmfdmf
I take the opposite view; this is the return of reputation. The internet ends
the anonymity of urban living. Are you a chronic liar, a drunken slut, a
responsible employee or a good parent? Soon the world will know so act
accordingly.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
"good parent" is an excellent example of how this is a terrible idea.

A story from the spooky future...

Father: "I told you to do your homework before flying on your jetpack with
your space friends! You're grounded! Go to your room."

 _Child stomps up stairs. Soon, the soft sound of typing_ "...and he routinely
abuses his children, both sexually and psychologically. And he's a drunk."

~~~
gizmo
Correction, spooky _present_.

Right now children can effortlessly destroy the lives of parents, family
members or teachers... by spreading exactly those kinds of lies.

~~~
hardik
exactly.. check out this "instructional" video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiwreHjQiqs>

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gyardley
If the only way to protect yourself from negative information is to make the
information absolutely untrustworthy, everyone will quickly be accused of
everything.

This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.

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erikstarck
The PeopleRank (or Whuffie or Karma or Facebook Points or eBay rating or
whatever) is coming, no doubt.

This is one of those major shifts to society that one day will just be there
and change everything.

Are you ready for it?

Are we?

~~~
patio11
I don't even think it is that huge a shift from what we already accept,
although it will be a quantum leap in effectiveness.

I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's
claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make
FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being
too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather
flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net-
beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends
are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to
the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.)

I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to
maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully
update the social graph for you) you'd almost _have_ to illegalize it. (Let me
hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)

~~~
barrkel
Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice. It would
discriminate directly against whole social classes of people irrespective of
their individual behaviour, on the basis of group behaviour. From what you
describe, in a private education system built around loans it would have
kicked me out at 15 or so.

On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to
create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for
it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those
niches from being profitable enough.

~~~
Confusion
Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably
someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither
prejudiced nor discriminatory: it's a reasonable extrapolation. The same holds
for more sensitive facts about someone: someone with many gay friends is more
likely than average to be gay.

There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a
university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They
aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on
solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in
business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates
risk and the actual risk.

If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they
would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have
determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated
people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons
that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university
education, etc.)

~~~
kiba
_They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate_

I am pretty sure that picking only people with a university degree is called
discrimination.

Now, is it a good discrimination is a whole another matter.

~~~
Confusion
True. It would be nice if we would have different words for 'acceptable' and
'unacceptable' discrimination, because I'm not the only one that keeps falling
in the trap of using the word to mean a specific kind of discrimination.

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Tichy
I think it might even become creepy to not have any indiscretions. Might look
robotic.

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nsfmc
When i filter this through my michael arrington lens, i find this article
hilarious. It almost seems like he's priming his audience for some big letdown
a couple months out, rather than hypothesizing about the future.

 _"the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as
a badge of honor."_

umm... right.

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duck
Isn't the trend going away from anonymous interaction on the web? Facebook
Connect is an example. Just like anonymous comments on our blogs, we see them
with very little value and often just trolls causing trouble. I would never
believe anything about anyone that was submitted anonymously.

~~~
steveklabnik
The important thing is this, though: it doesn't matter if you'll believe it,
it matters if everyone else will.

~~~
duck
I don't see it that way. I care what my friends might think, but they wouldn't
be the ones that would be anonymous (nor would they believe a faceless site
over their real world experiences). Everyone else? Who cares. Some of the
treads on here mention getting a job or your boss seeing something. Do you
really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by
something like this? In reality the same thing can happen now at work, but it
isn't a problem so I don't see this changing that.

~~~
steveklabnik
> Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be
> swayed by something like this?

Absolutely not. This is why I have forearm tattoos and stretched ears.

But many other people absolutely do care. My mom was incredibly upset when I
got my first visible tattoo. "You're never going to find a job."

Those of us here are of a different breed than out in the greater world.

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kirse
It's funny how much effort goes into image and reputation management, as if
we're putting more effort into maintaining this false appearance of who we are
instead of simply being ourselves.

For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I _wanted_ to be
because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until
after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance
and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my
utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than
willing to share with others because that's _who I am_.

Reminds me of the Billy Joel lyrics...

 _Well we all have a face

That we hide away forever

And we take them out and

Show ourselves

When everyone has gone_

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dspeyer
A good article with a terrible and non-sequitor headline.

Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions.
That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can
start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were
only a proxy for anyway).

There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look
at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.

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jorgecastillo
I don't really think reputation is dead. Sure if you publish all your live to
the internet it can be found sooner or later. But if they don't have enough
info about you how are they going to know which is your real self. You can web
search my name and I bet you won't easily find(if you find it that is) where I
live or how I look.

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stcredzero
A reputation site for journalism could work well because it could be
structured to be immune to the big problem of such sites: there would be no
hearsay. One couldn't just make up a factual error written by the some author.
That author actually has to go and publish the erroneous text.

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anonjon
Clearly the death of reputation will be a good thing for tech crunch.

