

How Hypothes.is is going to fix online Identity and Reputation - zerostar07
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hypothesis.php

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milkshakes
worth reading to the end just for this gem:

 _Disclosure: My really good friend Randall Leeds is building Hypothes.is as
the technical co-founder. This happened after RWW started covering founder Dan
Whaley's efforts to create an annotation system for the whole Web. It's a
complete coincidence. Still, I admit that this may have an impact on my
reporting. But hey, at least my fund isn't investing in it._

~~~
18pfsmt
That is interesting. I'm glad you posted it because I'm done reading these
breathless blog posts, so obviously desparate for page views. Four years ago,
I still read things like Gigaom, TC, and RWW, etc., but I've found they offer
nothing of value beyond the HN comment threads.

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tilgovi
Thanks, zerostar07!

If you're interesting in helping out, watch <https://github.com/hypothesis> or
subscribe to our dev list with dev+subscribe@list.hypothes.is

~~~
tilgovi
I should add we have a low-volume list for outgoing announcements if you'd
rather just hear those: announce+subscribe@list.hypothes.is

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aufreak3
Sounds like a nice idea, but this post makes it look like it is doomed from
the start ... and such a system could even be detrimental to a humane,
forgiving society.

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amirmc
> _"If we could filter the Web by reputation, we could turn it into a
> meritocracy."_

What does that mean?

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Adaptive
Very excited to see this move forward. Look at this project and compare it to
something like diaspora, and you see some significant differences which give
hope that this can achieve traction, notably the extensive, deep market
research done up front.

~~~
18pfsmt
Have you ever looked at the number of Diaspora-like (AKA distributed/
federated) social networking projects?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network>

~~~
tilgovi
We're not trying to compete for attention in the social web. Part of that is
reflected in our involvement with the W3C Open Annotation Working Group
(<http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/>). While Hypothes.is may be one
place to publish, the goal is to provide better linking and referencing tools
to facilitate aggregators and plugins that can bring the conversation back to
the source material. In other words, to bring this conversation on HN into the
RWW frame and vice versa and to allow better quoting and transclusion between
these content silos.

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droithomme
Yet another horrific police state nightmare under construction.

~~~
tilgovi
Quite the opposite, actually. I will be seriously considering the privacy
implications of everything we do. One of our core principles is a commitment
to pseudonymous accounts. To the extent we allow multiple identities to be
linked to one account, it will be in your control to do so (or not) as suits
your multi-faceted persona, tin foil hat paranoias, or legitimate privacy
concerns. While we understand there is a social cost to cheap pseudonyms (see
Friedman, Resnick (2001)
[http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/identifiers/081199....](http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/identifiers/081199.pdf)),
we believe we can develop a reputation system and a user community that
resists gaming attempts without significant barriers to entry or privacy-
invading personal information mining.

The goal of Hypothes.is is, on the contrary, to be a forum where you can voice
your opposition to policies you find to be ushering in a police state and have
the community weigh in on an informed discussion.

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kijin
> _Real people are multi-faceted. We want to be able to express different
> aspects of ourselves in different contexts._ [links to Chris Poole's
> "identity is prismatic" interview]

So far, sounds OK. But then,

> _A pseudonym could also be privately verified with a government-issued ID or
> some other standard, so the user remains pseudonymous to the world, but the
> reputation system knows who it is._

Really? Seriously? Government ID is about as far away from multi-faceted
identity as you can get. The consequence of a database compromise is also
going to be orders of magnitude more catastrophic than the average password
leak.

Not even Google knows my driver's license number, and I'm sure a lot of us
would like to keep it that way. If you want to know what happens when you tie
all online identities to Government IDs, just look at South Korea.

~~~
tilgovi
I think Jon was just trying to provide some information on the spectrum of
possible identity solutions one can choose from. At Hypothes.is, it's
extremely unlikely we would try to do anything like this. However, it does
represent a form of "verified pseudonymous" identity, in which your uniqueness
as an entity is verified by a central authority, but that identity is never
exposed. See my comment below for more information about what we might
actually implement.

~~~
notatoad
This reply still seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of
multifaceted identity. The fact that i am one physical person should be
irrelevant to a reputation service. If I have one identity that I use to post
jokes on reddit and another identity that I use to post serious content, those
identities should have different reputations. What I do with one should not
affect the other. My uniqueness should not have to be verified, the only thing
that should matter towards my reputation is what the persona I am currently
acting as has done before.

~~~
tilgovi
Yes. I totally agree. I would certainly love to support multiple distinct
personas. There is an open question of how to do that while mitigating the
damage potential. There are also cases where multiple personas might usefully
be linked. For example, when commenting on programming issues you might want
to link your persona to your stackoverflow identity or your HN account.
Honestly, the biggest mistake I could make would be to assume I know what the
community wants before we have a community. I think it's probably wise to err
on the side of less friction and more prismatic identity and deal with
restricting multiple signups if/when we need to. For now I plan to enforce
uniqueness for outside identities (only one pseudonym per Twitter account) but
also allow a basic reCAPTCHA username/password signup. If someone wants to
contribute code to manage multiple personas within one account that would be
fabulous, but annotation functionality feels more priority for me. If you
think there's still a fundamental misunderstanding please continue, but I
totally agree with your comment and don't think there's anything about it
that's incompatible with my current vision.

