5 ms·

Autonomous Reputation System

38 points by user_named 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Jamesmoorez 4y ago
satisfice 4y ago
Another technocrat who wants to improve human life by literally de-humanizing it. Hey let’s upload and outsource how we feel about each other! It never, ever works. It reminds me of the trope of monsters that ravenously pursue human flesh in order to feel human, and fail fail fail (see Sandman’s Corinthian for the latest incarnation of that). Reputation is a complex social phenomenon. What this post recommends is some sort of online reputation-related game that over time everyone would be forced to play. No thank you.
- satisfice 4y ago
Jamesmoorez 4y ago
Jamesmoorez 4y ago
Jamesmoorez 4y ago
user_named 4y ago
I can just say I hope I'd be able to opt out of this
- celdon25 4y ago
  We're already living in a post-truth world with broken incentives. Something like this will, at worst, add a transparency layer to it.
kwyjibo123456 4y ago
The analysis is completely shallow and ignores decades of papers on the topic in economics and CS.
- inshadows 4y ago
  Care to elaborate and share some interesting links? I'm honestly interested and I agree the article is shallow.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    Drexler (yes, that one) and Miller's Agoric Papers (1988) http://papers.agoric.com/papers/ http://papers.agoric.com/papers/ http://papers.agoric.com/papers/incentive-engineering-for-computational-resource-management/abstract/ http://papers.agoric.com/papers/incentive-engineering-for-co... Fun fact: These papers played a role in the inspiration for me to work on my own similar project when I was still in my early 20s (over a decade ago). It is not an entirely original idea. I had a face to face chat about it with Scribd's CEO at one of their happy hours back in the day. I'd guess that Quora had some component of this in their early vision before dropping it. Some more recent work has done by Anton Kolonin. There are probably others, but I'm too jaded to care enough to keep up anymore. https://aigents.com/ https://aigents.com/ https://aigents.com/papers/2017/Assessment-of-personal-environments-in-social-networks-2017-IEEE.pdf https://aigents.com/papers/2017/Assessment-of-personal-envir... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906383 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906383
    - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
      What’s Clyde Drexler got to do with anything? :)
im3w1l 4y ago
The suggestion sounds almost exactly like slashdot's system. Personally I'm partial to web of trust.
peppermint_tea 4y ago
If I read this right : step 1 : create an actor ; let's say ACTOR1 step 2 : create multiple actors (bots etc) let's say ACTOR[A-Z] to raise the reputation of ACTOR1 step 3 : use all the Rating Token Balance (R) of ACTOR[A-Z] to give reputation (S) to ACTOR1 step4 : ACTOR1 now have a good reputation on the blockchain step5 : ??? step6 : back to nickserv on irc with known nicknames to find someone with good reputation EDIT : I missed the "Note they can only acquire reputation by being good Actors in the eyes of already-good Actors" but I am curious to see how this could not be rigged by a algorithm
- TruthWillHurt 4y ago
  You didn't miss it, you're right. Actors get "S" reputation they can award others periodically. The max amount they can accumulate/award is based on their own reputation. Makes no difference. 1 bot awarding 50 points or 50 bots awarding 1 point each..
numpad0 4y ago
The problem is not the lack of a well-defined ruleset, but that any open or clearly intended ruleset can be optimized for. One of possible solutions is to obfuscate and enforce rules in some irregular, inconsistent and unfair manner, with a well-intended dictatorship or aristocracy oversight, which is proven unworkable long term.
phtrivier 4y ago
I like reputation systems in general because they mimic the way social norms were created in the real world (provided having a bad reputation had consequences, but yet was redeemable) However I'm not sure about: > Bad Actors cannot take over the system until they have played by the rules long enough to have accumulated sufficiently high reputation scores. Would it be possible to automate having a "good behavior" with some very low-stake actions (basically, sharing funny cat pictures ?) with one actor, in order to get tokens to allow upping the reputation of another actors (controlled by the same human being in the end) that is then able to send spam in proportion ? > The Reputation Score S of any Actor automatically decreases over time I get that this is a feature, to prevent the emergence of "gurus", bitwouldn't it incentivize authors to produce poor quality content regularly over producing high quality content ? You don't want to be Don Knuth in such a system...
tgv 4y ago
So everyone gets a global identifier attached to social (media) credits? I'm quite sure that's someone's pipe dream: Putin, Xi, ...
___null___ 4y ago
This sounds ripe for abuse. - who assignes IDs to each actor - who removes stolen actor IDs - even with the anti-abuse provisions for bad actors, what is stopping me from making a botnet to artificially increasing my reputation? - this system, no matter how decentralised, and "hands off" will inevitably be corrupted under the guise of good will and justice. - who is stopping people from downvoting my reputation if it is perfectly valid, but does not align with the community group think? Will this then affect my usage of other services? This is uncomfortable for me, similar to social credit systems, a la Black Mirror.
- ___null___ 4y ago
  Wrote this over lunch and made a typo. "...downvoting my opinion."
samatman 4y ago
This shouldn't even be evaluated until it has a section on Sybil attacks. Literally nothing proposed here is new, and it is manifestly uninformed by the experience of others.
- hddqsb 4y ago
  Yes, that's what I was looking for too. I think the following quote is meant to address that: > To bootstrap the system, an initial set of Actors who share the same core values about the to-be-created reputation each gets allocated a bootstrap Reputation Score. This gives them the ability to receive Rating Tokens with which they can rate each other and newly entering Actors. So basically it assumes there is an initial set of trusted Actors. But even with this assumption there are potential issues (e.g. good Actors may be bribed).
- PeterisP 4y ago
  They do note "Bad Actors cannot take over the system until they have played by the rules long enough to have accumulated sufficiently high reputation scores. Note they can only acquire reputation by being good Actors in the eyes of already-good Actors. " However, the "mitigation" already demonstrates a potential attack for the proposed algorithm, namely, that once a bad actor does get some reputation score capital (e.g. by investing some money/effort on genuine good content) then they get the effective ability to invest that reputation into spawning a self-reinforcing farm with a large quantity of reputation bots (using the mechanism of periodic replenishment of rating tokens) who do not need approval from any good actors if they get initially boosted/sponsored by the bad actor, and they can then indeed take over the whole system by maximizing their effect of the rating process/investment which real users simply won't do.
dizhn 4y ago
I can't tell if this is the result of "I thought of a blog post topic and spent two hours on it" or the distillation of years of thinking. It looks very simplistic, but maybe it's "elegant". Who knows. Intuitively I am thinking it might work for small communities (where it is not even needed) and there's no way it will make its way into something like a Facebook. So I do not really see the point of it.
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  I'm leaning towards the former as this topic has been covered in so much more depth over the last 2 decades.
m0llusk 4y ago
So someone gets negative reputation, this is visible, moralists then join in adding more negative reputation, and possibly without much or even any good reason they suddenly have a massive negative reputation from which they cannot escape. This sounds like an amplifier for gang stalking and other bad behavior.

38 points by user_named 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Jamesmoorez 4y ago

satisfice 4y ago

Another technocrat who wants to improve human life by literally de-humanizing it. Hey let’s upload and outsource how we feel about each other! It never, ever works. It reminds me of the trope of monsters that ravenously pursue human flesh in order to feel human, and fail fail fail (see Sandman’s Corinthian for the latest incarnation of that). Reputation is a complex social phenomenon. What this post recommends is some sort of online reputation-related game that over time everyone would be forced to play. No thank you.

satisfice 4y ago

Jamesmoorez 4y ago

user_named 4y ago

I can just say I hope I'd be able to opt out of this

celdon25 4y ago
We're already living in a post-truth world with broken incentives. Something like this will, at worst, add a transparency layer to it.

kwyjibo123456 4y ago

The analysis is completely shallow and ignores decades of papers on the topic in economics and CS.

inshadows 4y ago
Care to elaborate and share some interesting links? I'm honestly interested and I agree the article is shallow.
- celdon25 4y ago
  Drexler (yes, that one) and Miller's Agoric Papers (1988) http://papers.agoric.com/papers/ http://papers.agoric.com/papers/ http://papers.agoric.com/papers/incentive-engineering-for-computational-resource-management/abstract/ http://papers.agoric.com/papers/incentive-engineering-for-co... Fun fact: These papers played a role in the inspiration for me to work on my own similar project when I was still in my early 20s (over a decade ago). It is not an entirely original idea. I had a face to face chat about it with Scribd's CEO at one of their happy hours back in the day. I'd guess that Quora had some component of this in their early vision before dropping it. Some more recent work has done by Anton Kolonin. There are probably others, but I'm too jaded to care enough to keep up anymore. https://aigents.com/ https://aigents.com/ https://aigents.com/papers/2017/Assessment-of-personal-environments-in-social-networks-2017-IEEE.pdf https://aigents.com/papers/2017/Assessment-of-personal-envir... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906383 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906383
  - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
    What’s Clyde Drexler got to do with anything? :)

im3w1l 4y ago

The suggestion sounds almost exactly like slashdot's system. Personally I'm partial to web of trust.

peppermint_tea 4y ago

If I read this right : step 1 : create an actor ; let's say ACTOR1 step 2 : create multiple actors (bots etc) let's say ACTOR[A-Z] to raise the reputation of ACTOR1 step 3 : use all the Rating Token Balance (R) of ACTOR[A-Z] to give reputation (S) to ACTOR1 step4 : ACTOR1 now have a good reputation on the blockchain step5 : ??? step6 : back to nickserv on irc with known nicknames to find someone with good reputation EDIT : I missed the "Note they can only acquire reputation by being good Actors in the eyes of already-good Actors" but I am curious to see how this could not be rigged by a algorithm

TruthWillHurt 4y ago
You didn't miss it, you're right. Actors get "S" reputation they can award others periodically. The max amount they can accumulate/award is based on their own reputation. Makes no difference. 1 bot awarding 50 points or 50 bots awarding 1 point each..

numpad0 4y ago

The problem is not the lack of a well-defined ruleset, but that any open or clearly intended ruleset can be optimized for. One of possible solutions is to obfuscate and enforce rules in some irregular, inconsistent and unfair manner, with a well-intended dictatorship or aristocracy oversight, which is proven unworkable long term.

phtrivier 4y ago

I like reputation systems in general because they mimic the way social norms were created in the real world (provided having a bad reputation had consequences, but yet was redeemable) However I'm not sure about: > Bad Actors cannot take over the system until they have played by the rules long enough to have accumulated sufficiently high reputation scores. Would it be possible to automate having a "good behavior" with some very low-stake actions (basically, sharing funny cat pictures ?) with one actor, in order to get tokens to allow upping the reputation of another actors (controlled by the same human being in the end) that is then able to send spam in proportion ? > The Reputation Score S of any Actor automatically decreases over time I get that this is a feature, to prevent the emergence of "gurus", bitwouldn't it incentivize authors to produce poor quality content regularly over producing high quality content ? You don't want to be Don Knuth in such a system...

tgv 4y ago

So everyone gets a global identifier attached to social (media) credits? I'm quite sure that's someone's pipe dream: Putin, Xi, ...

___null___ 4y ago

This sounds ripe for abuse. - who assignes IDs to each actor - who removes stolen actor IDs - even with the anti-abuse provisions for bad actors, what is stopping me from making a botnet to artificially increasing my reputation? - this system, no matter how decentralised, and "hands off" will inevitably be corrupted under the guise of good will and justice. - who is stopping people from downvoting my reputation if it is perfectly valid, but does not align with the community group think? Will this then affect my usage of other services? This is uncomfortable for me, similar to social credit systems, a la Black Mirror.

___null___ 4y ago
Wrote this over lunch and made a typo. "...downvoting my opinion."

samatman 4y ago

This shouldn't even be evaluated until it has a section on Sybil attacks. Literally nothing proposed here is new, and it is manifestly uninformed by the experience of others.

hddqsb 4y ago
Yes, that's what I was looking for too. I think the following quote is meant to address that: > To bootstrap the system, an initial set of Actors who share the same core values about the to-be-created reputation each gets allocated a bootstrap Reputation Score. This gives them the ability to receive Rating Tokens with which they can rate each other and newly entering Actors. So basically it assumes there is an initial set of trusted Actors. But even with this assumption there are potential issues (e.g. good Actors may be bribed).
PeterisP 4y ago
They do note "Bad Actors cannot take over the system until they have played by the rules long enough to have accumulated sufficiently high reputation scores. Note they can only acquire reputation by being good Actors in the eyes of already-good Actors. " However, the "mitigation" already demonstrates a potential attack for the proposed algorithm, namely, that once a bad actor does get some reputation score capital (e.g. by investing some money/effort on genuine good content) then they get the effective ability to invest that reputation into spawning a self-reinforcing farm with a large quantity of reputation bots (using the mechanism of periodic replenishment of rating tokens) who do not need approval from any good actors if they get initially boosted/sponsored by the bad actor, and they can then indeed take over the whole system by maximizing their effect of the rating process/investment which real users simply won't do.

dizhn 4y ago

I can't tell if this is the result of "I thought of a blog post topic and spent two hours on it" or the distillation of years of thinking. It looks very simplistic, but maybe it's "elegant". Who knows. Intuitively I am thinking it might work for small communities (where it is not even needed) and there's no way it will make its way into something like a Facebook. So I do not really see the point of it.

PeterStuer 4y ago
I'm leaning towards the former as this topic has been covered in so much more depth over the last 2 decades.

m0llusk 4y ago

So someone gets negative reputation, this is visible, moralists then join in adding more negative reputation, and possibly without much or even any good reason they suddenly have a massive negative reputation from which they cannot escape. This sounds like an amplifier for gang stalking and other bad behavior.