8 ms·

Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions

57 points by rms 17y ago

swombat 17y ago
Absolutely agree. Once it becomes obvious that everybody does certain things, they will necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g. if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case making them visible might help stamp them out. For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change along with it. I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing. Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.
- barrkel 17y ago
  Or morality will get caught up in a panic and more draconian laws will take effect. The village of squinting windows, where everybody knows everybody's business, is no paragon of tolerance, and I speak as someone who grew up in such a village. It's a cliche that it's the anonymity of cities that "loosened morals", e.g. gay meccas are usually pretty densely populated urban areas. People in the countryside live in fear of the opprobrium of their neighbours.
- duck 17y ago
  History has shown that the tolerance road doesn't always take you to a happy place like lots of people think. Laws can change easily, but morals?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 17y ago
  And then there are things that only a significant minority does, but nobody talks about. I don't think bringing that out into the open will benefit anyone, since the majority could more easily bully people into submission.
  - roundsquare 17y ago
    Do you have any examples? I'm not able to follow...
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  I like the way you call it 'tolerance' yet redefine it to exclude things you think are unacceptable. ;)
erikstarck 17y ago
The PeopleRank (or Whuffie or Karma or Facebook Points or eBay rating or whatever) is coming, no doubt. This is one of those major shifts to society that one day will just be there and change everything. Are you ready for it? Are we?
- patio11 17y ago
  I don't even think it is that huge a shift from what we already accept, although it will be a quantum leap in effectiveness. I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.) I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully update the social graph for you) you'd almost have to illegalize it. (Let me hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice. It would discriminate directly against whole social classes of people irrespective of their individual behaviour, on the basis of group behaviour. From what you describe, in a private education system built around loans it would have kicked me out at 15 or so. On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those niches from being profitable enough.
    - Confusion 17y ago
      Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither prejudiced nor discriminatory: it's a reasonable extrapolation. The same holds for more sensitive facts about someone: someone with many gay friends is more likely than average to be gay. There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk. If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)
dmfdmf 17y ago
I take the opposite view; this is the return of reputation. The internet ends the anonymity of urban living. Are you a chronic liar, a drunken slut, a responsible employee or a good parent? Soon the world will know so act accordingly.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- praptak 17y ago
  Not if it is anonymous. Chronic liars will be less queasy about making their competition look bad. Heck, I bet that if it catches on, you'll be able to buy "reputation".
  - MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
    Agreed. With the old-fashioned rumor, there's always the chance that it will be traced back to you, providing a real disincentive to gossip. With fully anonymous rumor spreading, just go to town and make up all the shit you want.
    - isleyaardvark 17y ago
      But that cuts both ways, because anonymous internet rumors are worthless. At least with old-fashioned rumor, you were listening to somebody that you could make some judgement on trustworthiness (positive or negative). If anything reputation would be more important, somebody has to put their reputation on the line to criticize someone else.
      - MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
        Worthless? Really? Assume you're interviewing 2 people for a job, and they're both good candidates. However, 1 has a nasty anonymous review about how they suck at their job, and the other doesn't. Just because it's anonymous, you're going to fully, 100% ignore it? Or, could it possibly bias your decision by just a teensy bit?
Tichy 17y ago
I think it might even become creepy to not have any indiscretions. Might look robotic.
zmmmmm 17y ago
This has tones of Zuckerberg's "privacy is passe" and Schmidt's "if you don't want anyone to know about something, don't do it". I pretty much despise this view. I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a problem yet is just that it's still so new. What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a parent for making disparaging comments on a web site: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bitter-website-20100327-r4dg.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bit... Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope).
- gizmo 17y ago
  > but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons. I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just shrug and go on with their lives.
  - Psyonic 17y ago
    There's something about scandals that seem to keep people interested. That's all most reality TV is, really, scandals about people that you don't even know. Tiger Woods (and Jesse James) certainly weren't the first famous men to cheat on their wives... but people still eat it up like a greasy bucket of KFC
gyardley 17y ago
If the only way to protect yourself from negative information is to make the information absolutely untrustworthy, everyone will quickly be accused of everything. This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.
nsfmc 17y ago
When i filter this through my michael arrington lens, i find this article hilarious. It almost seems like he's priming his audience for some big letdown a couple months out, rather than hypothesizing about the future. "the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor." umm... right.
stcredzero 17y ago
A reputation site for journalism could work well because it could be structured to be immune to the big problem of such sites: there would be no hearsay. One couldn't just make up a factual error written by the some author. That author actually has to go and publish the erroneous text.
duck 17y ago
Isn't the trend going away from anonymous interaction on the web? Facebook Connect is an example. Just like anonymous comments on our blogs, we see them with very little value and often just trolls causing trouble. I would never believe anything about anyone that was submitted anonymously.
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  The important thing is this, though: it doesn't matter if you'll believe it, it matters if everyone else will.
  - duck 17y ago
    I don't see it that way. I care what my friends might think, but they wouldn't be the ones that would be anonymous (nor would they believe a faceless site over their real world experiences). Everyone else? Who cares. Some of the treads on here mention getting a job or your boss seeing something. Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? In reality the same thing can happen now at work, but it isn't a problem so I don't see this changing that.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      > Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? Absolutely not. This is why I have forearm tattoos and stretched ears. But many other people absolutely do care. My mom was incredibly upset when I got my first visible tattoo. "You're never going to find a job." Those of us here are of a different breed than out in the greater world.
    - prodigal_erik 17y ago
      > Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? Yes. I would not bet my life that I will never need to, though I've always been more fortunate than that. I wouldn't last very long, the way we treat the homeless.
anonjon 17y ago
Clearly the death of reputation will be a good thing for tech crunch.
dspeyer 17y ago
A good article with a terrible and non-sequitor headline. Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions. That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were only a proxy for anyway). There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.
kirse 17y ago
It's funny how much effort goes into image and reputation management, as if we're putting more effort into maintaining this false appearance of who we are instead of simply being ourselves. For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I wanted to be because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than willing to share with others because that's who I am. Reminds me of the Billy Joel lyrics... Well we all have a face That we hide away forever And we take them out and Show ourselves When everyone has gone
jorgecastillo 17y ago
I don't really think reputation is dead. Sure if you publish all your live to the internet it can be found sooner or later. But if they don't have enough info about you how are they going to know which is your real self. You can web search my name and I bet you won't easily find(if you find it that is) where I live or how I look.

57 points by rms 17y ago

Absolutely agree. Once it becomes obvious that everybody does certain things, they will necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g. if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case making them visible might help stamp them out. For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change along with it. I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing. Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.

barrkel 17y ago
Or morality will get caught up in a panic and more draconian laws will take effect. The village of squinting windows, where everybody knows everybody's business, is no paragon of tolerance, and I speak as someone who grew up in such a village. It's a cliche that it's the anonymity of cities that "loosened morals", e.g. gay meccas are usually pretty densely populated urban areas. People in the countryside live in fear of the opprobrium of their neighbours.
duck 17y ago
History has shown that the tolerance road doesn't always take you to a happy place like lots of people think. Laws can change easily, but morals?
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
wmf 17y ago
And then there are things that only a significant minority does, but nobody talks about. I don't think bringing that out into the open will benefit anyone, since the majority could more easily bully people into submission.
- roundsquare 17y ago
  Do you have any examples? I'm not able to follow...
jodrellblank 17y ago
I like the way you call it 'tolerance' yet redefine it to exclude things you think are unacceptable. ;)

erikstarck 17y ago

The PeopleRank (or Whuffie or Karma or Facebook Points or eBay rating or whatever) is coming, no doubt. This is one of those major shifts to society that one day will just be there and change everything. Are you ready for it? Are we?

patio11 17y ago
I don't even think it is that huge a shift from what we already accept, although it will be a quantum leap in effectiveness. I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.) I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully update the social graph for you) you'd almost have to illegalize it. (Let me hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)
- barrkel 17y ago
  Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice. It would discriminate directly against whole social classes of people irrespective of their individual behaviour, on the basis of group behaviour. From what you describe, in a private education system built around loans it would have kicked me out at 15 or so. On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those niches from being profitable enough.
  - Confusion 17y ago
    Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither prejudiced nor discriminatory: it's a reasonable extrapolation. The same holds for more sensitive facts about someone: someone with many gay friends is more likely than average to be gay. There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk. If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)

dmfdmf 17y ago

I take the opposite view; this is the return of reputation. The internet ends the anonymity of urban living. Are you a chronic liar, a drunken slut, a responsible employee or a good parent? Soon the world will know so act accordingly.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
praptak 17y ago
Not if it is anonymous. Chronic liars will be less queasy about making their competition look bad. Heck, I bet that if it catches on, you'll be able to buy "reputation".
- MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
  Agreed. With the old-fashioned rumor, there's always the chance that it will be traced back to you, providing a real disincentive to gossip. With fully anonymous rumor spreading, just go to town and make up all the shit you want.
  - isleyaardvark 17y ago
    But that cuts both ways, because anonymous internet rumors are worthless. At least with old-fashioned rumor, you were listening to somebody that you could make some judgement on trustworthiness (positive or negative). If anything reputation would be more important, somebody has to put their reputation on the line to criticize someone else.
    - MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
      Worthless? Really? Assume you're interviewing 2 people for a job, and they're both good candidates. However, 1 has a nasty anonymous review about how they suck at their job, and the other doesn't. Just because it's anonymous, you're going to fully, 100% ignore it? Or, could it possibly bias your decision by just a teensy bit?

Tichy 17y ago

I think it might even become creepy to not have any indiscretions. Might look robotic.

zmmmmm 17y ago

This has tones of Zuckerberg's "privacy is passe" and Schmidt's "if you don't want anyone to know about something, don't do it". I pretty much despise this view. I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a problem yet is just that it's still so new. What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a parent for making disparaging comments on a web site: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bitter-website-20100327-r4dg.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bit... Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope).

gizmo 17y ago
> but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons. I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just shrug and go on with their lives.
- Psyonic 17y ago
  There's something about scandals that seem to keep people interested. That's all most reality TV is, really, scandals about people that you don't even know. Tiger Woods (and Jesse James) certainly weren't the first famous men to cheat on their wives... but people still eat it up like a greasy bucket of KFC

gyardley 17y ago

If the only way to protect yourself from negative information is to make the information absolutely untrustworthy, everyone will quickly be accused of everything. This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.

nsfmc 17y ago

When i filter this through my michael arrington lens, i find this article hilarious. It almost seems like he's priming his audience for some big letdown a couple months out, rather than hypothesizing about the future. "the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor." umm... right.

stcredzero 17y ago

A reputation site for journalism could work well because it could be structured to be immune to the big problem of such sites: there would be no hearsay. One couldn't just make up a factual error written by the some author. That author actually has to go and publish the erroneous text.

duck 17y ago

Isn't the trend going away from anonymous interaction on the web? Facebook Connect is an example. Just like anonymous comments on our blogs, we see them with very little value and often just trolls causing trouble. I would never believe anything about anyone that was submitted anonymously.

steveklabnik 17y ago
The important thing is this, though: it doesn't matter if you'll believe it, it matters if everyone else will.
- duck 17y ago
  I don't see it that way. I care what my friends might think, but they wouldn't be the ones that would be anonymous (nor would they believe a faceless site over their real world experiences). Everyone else? Who cares. Some of the treads on here mention getting a job or your boss seeing something. Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? In reality the same thing can happen now at work, but it isn't a problem so I don't see this changing that.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    > Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? Absolutely not. This is why I have forearm tattoos and stretched ears. But many other people absolutely do care. My mom was incredibly upset when I got my first visible tattoo. "You're never going to find a job." Those of us here are of a different breed than out in the greater world.
  - prodigal_erik 17y ago
    > Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? Yes. I would not bet my life that I will never need to, though I've always been more fortunate than that. I wouldn't last very long, the way we treat the homeless.

anonjon 17y ago

Clearly the death of reputation will be a good thing for tech crunch.

dspeyer 17y ago

A good article with a terrible and non-sequitor headline. Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions. That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were only a proxy for anyway). There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.

kirse 17y ago

It's funny how much effort goes into image and reputation management, as if we're putting more effort into maintaining this false appearance of who we are instead of simply being ourselves. For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I wanted to be because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than willing to share with others because that's who I am. Reminds me of the Billy Joel lyrics... Well we all have a face That we hide away forever And we take them out and Show ourselves When everyone has gone

jorgecastillo 17y ago

I don't really think reputation is dead. Sure if you publish all your live to the internet it can be found sooner or later. But if they don't have enough info about you how are they going to know which is your real self. You can web search my name and I bet you won't easily find(if you find it that is) where I live or how I look.