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> I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution. Whats that mean? Something between existing rating systems and "social credit system"??

mikestew 8y ago
I'm not OP, but here's what I thought about when I read that, and pardon me while I don my old man cap and reminisce about how much better it used to be. Used to be I'd buy something at a store, use it for a week, it breaks and I head back to the shop and say, "Hey, this broke and it's brand-new." The proprietor would apologize and get me a new one. As years went on, people started cheating the system a little: take stuff back to shops where they didn't originally purchase it. Okay, now we need a receipt for returns. Save the receipt, no big deal. But a little bit of trust was lost there. Shop keeper assumed that if you're returning it, you must have purchased it there, but that's no longer a safe assumption. Save your receipt. REI and L. L. Bean, as two examples, would warrant their stuff for life even if the manufacturer didn't. If you thought a pair of boots should have lasted three years instead of two, take/send 'em back and get new ones. But then people started going skiing on new skis and returning them on Monday. Or (again) returning stuff that REI sells, but wasn't purchased there. Now REI and L. L. Bean don't do that anymore. From the seller's end, I present rebates that they have no intention of honoring if at all possible. 'nuf said on that side. And so on, until today where I feel like I'm in a never-ending loop of that scene from The Big Short: I'll do the deal, but you have to tell me how you're going to fuck me. Because shopping online in many respects makes me feel the need constantly look over my virtual shoulder. Trust is completely gone. Amazon, as a simplistic example, just takes a bunch of shit of varying quality, tosses it all in the same bin with a single label, and it's up to you to figure out which is the genuine lightning cable and which one will burn your house down. In summary, my view of a trust-based system is that I can assume what you're selling is what you say it is, and I the customer will not try and game whatever customer-oriented system you have in place.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  > Trust is completely gone. Not long ago, I returned an item to my local OSH retailer. I didn't even have a receipt. The product was basically a piece of junk. But they just handed me a new, better product in exchange. Of course, OSH closed down.
oehpr 8y ago
Web of trust springs to mind for me. God I'd love something like that for reviews. Farm out all the fake mass reviews you want, unless you get people who have the trust of people who will actually buy your product, you won't get anywhere. More than likely the companies in the market for fake reviews would be the ones to get scammed. If my brother reviews a set of headphones on amazon, I'd trust that a lot more than random 5 star reviews. I'd also trust the people my brother trusts (but less so). I'd love a system like this to be formalized.
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  When I was saying a "trust-based system" in the original post, I was thinking about Silk Road - from what I've read from news, its eBay-like rating system reportedly, significantly increased the safety and efficiency of transactions overall. I was also thinking about #bitcoin-otc - the earliest Bitcoin trading community on Freenode IRC, it identifies potential buyers and sellers via OpenPGP public keys, buyers and sellers rate each other, and the bot builds a Web-of-Trust among all the participants. Alice can simply review all possible personal trust paths to Bob to assess the risk and trustworthiness. My consideration was, it has been shown some trust-based rating systems can work under the most untrustworthy environment, I just went to the assumption that a similar, elaborate design to solve problems like vendor frauds, RMA frauds, etc. So I just vaguely said "I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution".

mikestew 8y ago

I'm not OP, but here's what I thought about when I read that, and pardon me while I don my old man cap and reminisce about how much better it used to be. Used to be I'd buy something at a store, use it for a week, it breaks and I head back to the shop and say, "Hey, this broke and it's brand-new." The proprietor would apologize and get me a new one. As years went on, people started cheating the system a little: take stuff back to shops where they didn't originally purchase it. Okay, now we need a receipt for returns. Save the receipt, no big deal. But a little bit of trust was lost there. Shop keeper assumed that if you're returning it, you must have purchased it there, but that's no longer a safe assumption. Save your receipt. REI and L. L. Bean, as two examples, would warrant their stuff for life even if the manufacturer didn't. If you thought a pair of boots should have lasted three years instead of two, take/send 'em back and get new ones. But then people started going skiing on new skis and returning them on Monday. Or (again) returning stuff that REI sells, but wasn't purchased there. Now REI and L. L. Bean don't do that anymore. From the seller's end, I present rebates that they have no intention of honoring if at all possible. 'nuf said on that side. And so on, until today where I feel like I'm in a never-ending loop of that scene from The Big Short: I'll do the deal, but you have to tell me how you're going to fuck me. Because shopping online in many respects makes me feel the need constantly look over my virtual shoulder. Trust is completely gone. Amazon, as a simplistic example, just takes a bunch of shit of varying quality, tosses it all in the same bin with a single label, and it's up to you to figure out which is the genuine lightning cable and which one will burn your house down. In summary, my view of a trust-based system is that I can assume what you're selling is what you say it is, and I the customer will not try and game whatever customer-oriented system you have in place.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
> Trust is completely gone. Not long ago, I returned an item to my local OSH retailer. I didn't even have a receipt. The product was basically a piece of junk. But they just handed me a new, better product in exchange. Of course, OSH closed down.

oehpr 8y ago

Web of trust springs to mind for me. God I'd love something like that for reviews. Farm out all the fake mass reviews you want, unless you get people who have the trust of people who will actually buy your product, you won't get anywhere. More than likely the companies in the market for fake reviews would be the ones to get scammed. If my brother reviews a set of headphones on amazon, I'd trust that a lot more than random 5 star reviews. I'd also trust the people my brother trusts (but less so). I'd love a system like this to be formalized.

segfaultbuserr 8y ago
When I was saying a "trust-based system" in the original post, I was thinking about Silk Road - from what I've read from news, its eBay-like rating system reportedly, significantly increased the safety and efficiency of transactions overall. I was also thinking about #bitcoin-otc - the earliest Bitcoin trading community on Freenode IRC, it identifies potential buyers and sellers via OpenPGP public keys, buyers and sellers rate each other, and the bot builds a Web-of-Trust among all the participants. Alice can simply review all possible personal trust paths to Bob to assess the risk and trustworthiness. My consideration was, it has been shown some trust-based rating systems can work under the most untrustworthy environment, I just went to the assumption that a similar, elaborate design to solve problems like vendor frauds, RMA frauds, etc. So I just vaguely said "I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution".