In this post I want to talk about reputation
but before we dive in lets set the scene by mentioning Satoshis invention which is just 13 years old this month, and one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century.
Blockchains & DApps
A Blockchain is a base layer technology, something that happens under hood. It's arguable if we are there yet but that is the vision at least. I will call it a success when you are using something on your phone that you dont know is being powered by a blockchain.
DApps are what you might have heard of described interchangeably as Web 3. These are the consumer facing apps that are built on top of blockchains. They may entirely use blockchains or consist of centralised components and blockchain components.
innovation ...
Blockchain technology was an enormous innovation as it allowed untrusted parties to interact digitally without trust, for the first time. This is powerful, groundbreaking even revolutionary, but with social interactions there will always be a need for some form of trust.
Trust
You might ask youself questions like
- Can I trust an online review?
- Can I trust a seller to deliver goods from a digital shop?
- Can I trust this site to enter my personal details?
I always saw one of the USPs of Hive was the ability to form a trust layer just above the blockchain for DApps to use.
- This trust layer is another word for Reputation.
The USP for Hive is that you can earn a reputation by being a blogger, interacting with communities then decide to open an online shop where you could use that reputation as currency.
...
People would trust you as a seller to deliver the goods you have portrayed in my digital shopfront. Hell you dont even need to enter your credit card details, you can just send Hive or HBD, or even HP Delegations.
This is a bootstrapped cumulative cycle. The more Dapps we get on Hive the more valuable this would become. (all the small boxes in the picture above)
Just imagine 100s of DApps you use daily, Ecency, leofinance, actifit, travelfeed, ...
This could be a really powerful feature.
For a good background on how the reputation calculation on Hive works check out this great post by @sacrosanct https://hive.blog/hive-148441/@sacrosanct/how-does-reputation-work-in-hive-answering-in-quora
Reputation today
This picture I have painted doesn't seem to be playing out. There are some accounts with very high reputation (and questionable rep) and others with low reputation and arguable higher rep. My question for Ask the Hive is,
- Is reputation a feature of Hive, is it broken, could it be a USP???
What do you think, should we revisit how reputation works and reassess this core feature of Hive?
- This post is my daily contribution to a challenge by @dragosroua to "publish a meaningful post every day of January"
Who's Up For A January Writing Streak?
Reputation on HIVE seems more a signal of longevity than anything else. Most of us discourage using the downvote function as a tool for disagreement, so it doesn't really signal quality content as much as just "this person isn't generally a plagiarist."
There should be a limit to how much a single account can disagree with you regardless of hp. A single person being able to bring rep into negative from 45 rep with a few downvotes is pretty ridiculous and is abused heavily by a few.
I might have missed something here but what is a USP?
Unique selling proposition; it's a marketing term.
Informative article and thanks for the link. I am trying to learn more about reputation and also what is USP?
it means unique selling proposition; it's a marketing term. It's what makes your product unique and makes it stand out from other competitors with similar offers.
Thank you. USP is good to know.
The way reputation works right now is probably the only thing holding hive back right now. If the chain is to grow it must be reworked.