
Show HN: ProveTrust, a user trust reputation system for the web - somerandomness
https://www.provetrust.com
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jasonkester
I looked into jumping into this space recently, and doing my research it seems
that all the companies doing this exact same thing (and there are lots of
them) make the same mistake that this one does: Involve the customer in the
loop.

This requires Joe AirBnB User to actually sign up for an account with the
service (and a dozen others) and tell it about all the places that it should
agglomerate reputation from. That's precisely backward.

This service's customer should be AirBnB, eBay, etc. And if the big ones don't
immediately sign up, you'll need to go convince (as in, pay) them to partner
up from the start. Customers get matched up with profiles behind the scenes
automatically and end up with a "credit score" assigned to them that they have
no control over.

The company that builds that product will win. The other twenty will die, as
they are currently in the process of dying, because nobody is going to wake up
in the morning, Google "centralized trust service", sign up, and spend an hour
filling in information.

~~~
ThomPete
Have a look at these guys. They found a nifty way of getting people to sign up
once.

[https://www.trustpilot.com/](https://www.trustpilot.com/)

But yeah the problem is still to get people to me active providers rather than
just ad-hoc.

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davidcollantes
Sign in with Facebook: -1

Trust based on social media: -1

I remember Thawte used to have a WOT (web of trust), and "web notaries." If
was an interesting idea, based on personally meeting, providing passport as a
proof, etc. and have people already trusted vouch for you. They shut it down.

~~~
somerandomness
Thanks for the feedback. I plan on adding other forms of login in the future;
Facebook just has the largest user base.

~~~
z131
I'm with the parent commenter. I actually deleted my Facebook, but would love
to utilize this service to create a public trust profile. I just can't involve
social media accounts.

~~~
somerandomness
What other accounts would you be comfortable associating with this trust
profile? Would you hook up your GitHub?

~~~
drdaeman
I'd hook up my PGP key. Or X.509 certificate. Or old good username and
password pair. Something I can truly own and handle. Why do I need some third
party to have an identity?

Then I'd enlist accounts with any imaginable third parties (email addresses,
Facebook, VKontakte, Google+, BitCoin addresses, GitHub, BitBucket,
StackOverflow and so on and so on) as something I have at the moment.

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somerandomness
The idea is to have a central place on the web to store user reputation and
reviews across many sites. You should be able to have one reputation (Trust
Score) for all sites and not have to re-build it for every eBay or AirBnB.
Further, a lot of sites like Craigslist or OKCupid don’t even have reputation
systems, but could benefit from one.

I consider this a minimal viable product and plan on adding a lot of features,
but would like to get some early feedback. Thanks in advance.

~~~
mvid
I worked for a company that would have been a target client for a product like
this. In the end, we didn't use one of the many similar solutions (legit.co,
trustcloud, scaffold, peertrust, project trust, truly, etc..) for two reasons:

* We didn't want to give our information away. It was a nonstarter. Either to protect it from being used by competitors or because of security concerns of giving private user information to a third party. * Each site and community has different levels of trust, and actions have different meanings. Whether someone commits sexual harassment on OkCupid doesn't matter when you are trying to buy their toaster on eBay. I am much more concerned about someones behavior when they are living in my house, not so much when they are giving me a ride in their car within the city at noon.

It would be nice if everyone didn't have to build their own trust system, but
any competent company will. A general solution will either be too general to
be useful, or require too much private information to be allowable.

The only way I can see a standalone product like this occurring is if a well
established company like AirBnB of Facebook would build it on their existing
(valuable) dataset and and guarantee data privacy.

~~~
somerandomness
Thanks for the feedback. In this case, the target clients are regular users,
not companies. Craigslist doesn't need to share any of their data for this to
be useful to Craigslist users.

"Whether someone commits sexual harassment on OkCupid doesn't matter when you
are trying to buy their toaster on eBay."

You can choose to ignore this information, but for some users it may be a
relevant signal. I personally would rather buy a toaster off of non-sexual-
harassers. Also, perhaps there will be less harassment if there were
consequences, i.e. a worse online reputation.

~~~
jessaustin
If data isn't coming from service providers, does that mean it's all coming
from user reviews? ISTM that e.g. Yelp (there are others too) has been working
through the inherent difficulties for some time, and they haven't exactly got
it figured out yet. What if one of the first million reviews/ratings leads to
a lawsuit? Does this all just go away?

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Scalar
Very cool, have seen a few sites doing this sort of thing. The only concern
with these type of services is the fact that scammers will harvest trust on
small trades and then scam big trades.

Your service should verify the real life identities of users or perhaps work
in some sort of escrow.

Best of luck

~~~
somerandomness
Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, this is a common tactic that scammers on eBay
do. I will work on mitigating this form of abuse.

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tiogemini
Any way to tie into Keybase ([https://keybase.io/](https://keybase.io/))? They
already have my public key and several identities.

An interesting direction would be to build an open Rapportive. Index and
associate everyone you can think of and make the information searchable. E.g,
John Doe == facebook.com/johndoe == linkedin.com/profiles/john.doe ==
twitter.com/johndoe == www.jdoe.com

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jchrisa
Here is my trust profile.
[https://www.provetrust.com/#!/p/HJoWjhUC7JW8u9eiBVMh7E](https://www.provetrust.com/#!/p/HJoWjhUC7JW8u9eiBVMh7E)

So the deployment model will be like Disqus, you just add some JS to your
page?

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petersouth
I wanted to do something similar but was worried about users putting negative
stuff on other people's reputation as a way to harass them.

