

Scoreboards Where You Can’t See Your Score - ctoth
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/technology/the-scoreboards-where-you-cant-see-your-score.html

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michaelochurch
Reputation economies are pretty interesting. There's a trade-off inherent in
them related to the number of potential sources of trusted information. If
that number is small and the credits are hard to fake, you get corruption as
the in-crowd uses the power it already has to increase its share. Over time,
the reputation economy becomes "prestigious" but ineffective and harmful to
society. That's Silicon Valley. On the other hand, if that number of credible
sources is large, you don't have good-ol'-boy corruption in the reputation
economy, but it's open to "flooding the channel" attacks.

Something that I've learned is that it's impossible to erase negative
information (even, or I should say, _especially_ if it's untrue) about anyone
or anything. This is the "Streisand Effect". On the other hand, you have to
flood the channel. I know someone who signed up for a bunch of social media
profiles just to knock negative publicity off of his top 10 Google searches,
who hired an Indian firm to astroturf-endorse him on LinkedIn, and who created
a bunch of identical-looking articles (to the one describing his indiscretion)
that popped the date of the damaging event back 8 years, making it appear to
have happened when he was a teenager.

Flooding the channel is the absolute best defense against a reputation
problem. Unfortunately, there's a fine line between that and _spamming_ ,
which I think we all agree is bad for the world.

If you want to take the dystopia concept further-- and, for the record, I
don't actually think that this will happen, but it could-- we may get to a
point where it's impossible to get a "real" job without a ridiculous amount of
public endorsement and credibility, so the bottom-90% who don't have that end
up working in body shops where their jobs are to pump up the reputations of
their clients. Instead of having Third World body-shops creating level-60
paladins or clerics in virtual worlds and selling them (and their equipment)
for a few thousand bucks, they could be building up level-60 _resumes_ and
selling them to aspiring executives for much more.

