

Idea: Real-ID/Trust/Rating Network - captaincrunch

I am contemplating a few ideas for a start-up, and this one in particular sounds really cool to me, however, being in the HN community, I know better to ask for opinions before rushing out and coding the idea.<p>Here are the basics...<p>1. Create a site that would allow users to login via each of the following networks (Paypal, Facebook or Linked in) to create an account.  The more sites that are logged in to be authenticated, and compared to the other hashes, the "trust" factor increases.  The final step would be to send a registered letter to the address of the account.<p>2. Depending on if the details of each account match, and the registered letter is received, it would issue a real-id factor (the more, the more likely it is that the user is indeed who they say they are).<p>3. Users can up-vote other users based on personal transactions, or even recommend with a comment.  There would be no down-votes or negative comments allowed.<p>4.  There would be a back end-api to get a rating/trust factor for other sites to implement it.<p>5. Users with a certain 'rank' could have dedicated email addresses with the site, as well as hot links, that would take people to a secure page to send a message to the user.  I believe the second part, along with captcha would eliminate the worry about potential spam from any site.<p>Is this a good idea?  Would you use it?
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lukeqsee
Idea? Good. Try it? Yes. Use it? No.

1\. Why? It's just another Web of trust
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust>). While absolutely great in
theory, the actuality is unless you can get a significant number of people to
use it -- _regularly_ \-- it won't work. (Hackers don't count. You might get
enough to make it worthwhile to other hackers, but we trust each other
already, right? ;-) )

2\. Why no negative comments? One user who had 100 good experiences and 1000
bad would look good, while in reality not.

3\. If you end up deciding to build it, good luck. I'll probably sign-up, and
hope for the best.

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mindcrime
It's an interesting idea. I was contemplating doing something similar a year
or so ago, but got side-tracked. I hope you can make it happen. If you happen
to do something open-source, gimme a shout, I might be able to pitch in a bit
(or not, I'm pretty slammed these days, but this is something I'm interested
in).

Getting enough adoption to take advantage of network effects and make it
really useful is going to be the hard part, I think. Not sure what to tell you
there, except "Good luck."

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JBerlinsky
Didn't Rapleaf try to do this?

