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This is a good idea, except that it assumes _reputation_ has some directional value upon which everyone agrees. For example, suppose a very famous TV star join

• dbrueck 4y ago
  I posted some additional ideas in a reply to another comment that I think addresses some of your points, but actually I think you bring up a good point of another thing that is broken with both offline and online communities: reputation is transferrable across communities far more than it should be. You see this anytime e.g. a high profile athlete "weighs in" on complicated geopolitical matters, when in reality their opinion on that matter should count next to nothing in most cases, unless in addition to being a great athlete they have also established a track record (reputation) of being expert or insightful in international affairs. A free-for-all community like Twitter could continue to exist, where there are basically no waiting periods before posting and your reputation from other areas counts a lot. But then other communities could set their own standards that say you can't post for N days and that your incoming reputation factor is 0.001 or something like that. So the person could stay in character but they couldn't post for awhile, and even when they did, their posts would initially have very low visibility because their reputation in this new community would be abysmally low. Only by really engaging in the community over time would their reputation rise to the point of their posts having much visibility, and even if they were playing the long game and faking being good for a long time and then decided to go rogue, their reputation would drop quickly so that the damage they could do would be pretty limited in that one community, while also potentially harming their overall reputation in other communities too. As noted in the other post, there is lots of vagueness here because it's just thinking out loud, but I believe the concepts are worth exploring.
  • runako 4y ago
    These are good ideas that might help manage an online community! On the other hand, they would be bad for business! When a high-profile athlete weighs in on a complicated geopolitical matter and then (say) gets the continent wrong, that will generate tons of engagement (money) for the platform. Plus there's no harm done. A platform probably wants that kind of content. And the whole reason the platform wants the athlete to post in the first place is because the platform wants that person's real-world reputation to transfer over. I believe it is a property of people that they are prone to more heavily weigh an opinion from a well-known/well-liked/rich person, even if there is no real reason for that person to have a smart opinion on a given topic. This likely is not something that can be "fixed" by online community governance.
    • brookst 4y ago
      I agree this solution wouldn't scale to all platforms; those driven by maximizing views and engagement would find it counter-productive, as you say. But that's fine. There are enough of those platforms already, and they have all the flaws we're talking about. We don't need to fix the existing ones so much as get to a world where better (by these standards) platforms exist and can compete on quality. Twitter/Reddit/etc kind of try to do that, but it's hard to get right and it's always an afterthought, like Yoshin mentioned. But maybe there's room in the market for something with higher signal to noise, that's reputation based. And reputation doesn't have to be super cerebral and dry and stodgy; reputation can be about sense of humor or whatever is appropriate for the sub-communities that evolve on the platform.
  • brookst 4y ago
    > You see this anytime e.g. a high profile athlete "weighs in" on complicated geopolitical matters, when in reality their opinion on that matter should count next to nothing in most cases, unless in addition to being a great athlete they have also established a track record (reputation) of being expert or insightful in international affairs. I apologize for multiple replies; I'm not stalking you. It's just an area I'm interested in and you're hitting on many ideas I've kicked around over the years. I once got paid to write a white paper on a domain-based reputational system (long story!), based on just this comment. I think it requires either a formal taxonomy, where your hypothetical athlete might have a high reputation for sports and low one for international affairs, or a post-hoc cluster-based system identifies the semantic distance from one's areas of high reputation. And reputation itself can be multi-dimensional. Behavior, like we've talked about elsewhere, is an important one. But there's also knowledge. Can the system model the difference betwwen a knowledgeable jerk (reputation 5/10) and a hapless but polite and constructive novice (reputation 5/10)? So if your athlete posts about workouts, they may have a high knowledge reputation. And if they post about the design of stadiums, it's relatively closer to their area of high knowledge reputation than international affairs would be. And so on. And independently of their domain knowledge, they have a behavior reputation that follows them to new domains.
• elihu 4y ago
  > This is a good idea, except that it assumes _reputation_ has some directional value upon which everyone agrees. Reputation is inherently subjective. I think any technological solution that treats reputation as an objective value that's the same for everyone won't work if applied to any kind of diverse community, but I don't see any problem with a technical solution that computes a high reputation score for that TV star among his fans, and a low score among people who aren't fans. (It's also sometimes worthwhile to consider negative reputation, which behaves differently than positive reputation in some ways. Not all communities should have reputation systems that have a concept of negative reputation, but in some kinds of communities it might be necessary.)