

Anonymity and Trust - thoughts on reputation system design - elihu
http://metamocracy.com/design/anonymity-and-trust

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elihu
I'm the author of the linked article. Feel free to ask me questions.

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n3rdy
It's interesting that you didn't bring up fico scores, or factor in any of
their methodology.

Obviously fico scores are far from perfect, but one particularly interesting
parameter would be history. An interaction or vote would lose weight as it
ages, making it essential for you to maintain a good rating.

This would also make it tougher on people who want to manipulate such a system
because creating dozens of accounts to vote for yourself would be very
difficult. The fake accounts themselves have no history, making their votes
worth nothing.

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elihu
Credit scores are pretty far removed from the world of online communities --
it's just not practical to credit-check people who just want to use a forum or
play an online game or so forth, but yeah, they are relevant from the point of
view that they're a widely accepted form of reputation economy, and they've
been around long enough to show how a reputation economy could behave, and
what sort of social norms you might expect to arise. For instance, congress
has decreed that people have a right to find out what their score is, and what
data was used to calculate it.

Reputation bankruptcy in particular is an interesting concept. In practice,
for most online communities it basically amounts to creating a new account and
starting over, but you could have some kind of mechanism for someone to
declare bankruptcy (i.e. remove all positive and negative ratings about that
user) without having to change their identity.

I do think that negative ratings should expire eventually so that a single bad
interaction doesn't have consequences that last forever, and if you expire bad
ratings, that means you pretty much have to expire good ratings as well.

My approach to ignoring fake accounts is to treat reputation as fundamentally
subjective. In other words, it doesn't make sense to say "Bob has twelve units
of reputation" -- rather, you would say something like, "From the point of
view of Alice, Bob has twelve units of reputation". (In our system, we
actually use multidimensional scores, but I don't want to complicate the
example.) The only thing that matters is how Bob is connected to Alice. If
there are a thousand dummy accounts that rate Bob positively, it doesn't
matter at all unless Alice has given a positive rating of one of those dummy
accounts, or one of Alice's friends has, or one of her friend's friends, and
so on, and the more hops there are between Alice and the dummy account, the
weaker it's contribution to Bob's score will be.

