Reputation is something that seems intuitive and “common sense” to all, but those of us tasked with designing systems to represent digital reputation quickly run into trouble. Designing a system that is robust enough to be enshrined in blockchain consensus logic is even more daunting.
I am not advocating changing the existing property rights of Steem or Steem Power holders. The ideas expressed are provided for academic purposes only. A radical change in the expected property rights associated with a token would violate the trust of those who purchased the tokens under expectations of certain rights.
What is Reputation?
reputation the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something.
This is a very broad definition of reputation that is intuitive. From this definition we can see that reputation is multidimensional (a set of beliefs) and that it comprises of the “popular” opinion. A reputation has nothing to do with “truth” or “fairness”.
A smear campaign can “ruin” someone’s reputation, meaning that most people will generally believe something they perceive as negative about someone else. Presenting the facts does nothing to fix someone’s reputation unless the majority are open to having their opinion changed.
Scope of Reputation
In the most general sense, reputation is the most popular opinions among everyone who has an opinion about you, but reputation can change depending upon which sub-population you poll for an opinion.
Republicans will hold a positive opinion of their fellow republicans and a negative opinion of democrats. There is an infinite number of ways to group people (gender, race, religion, country, family, etc) and groups can be of any size ranging for the world population down to a single individual.
Depending upon the group you select you can get polar opposite “general beliefs” about an individual.
The Purpose of Reputation Systems
When you meet someone new you have no information about them. This lack of information means that you must assume their reputation based upon your opinion of humanity as a whole. This means you might assume they are out to get you if they can, you may assume they are selfish, or you may assume they are friendly and trustworthy. Each of us has a different default reputation that we assign a random individual.
The default reputation we assign people we have no information about (random handle on the internet) quickly morphs into our stereotype for a group of individuals as we learn some facts about them (race, gender, behavior). The more we get to know someone the better informed our opinions are.
Getting to know someone is time-consuming, expensive, and potentially error prone. When attempting to decide how to behave toward someone we don’t know it is often helpful to ask those we trust what their opinion is of someone. This shortcut works well when there are many people whom we trust who have first hand experience of someone else. It works less well when the people we ask simply repeat what they “heard” from others or their own stereotypes.
Feedback based Reputation
Rational ignorance is refraining from acquiring knowledge when the cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the potential benefit that the knowledge would provide.
The most basic form of digital reputation is eBay-style feedback on individual transactions. This feedback is robust, nuanced, and from people who had direct experience with the individual. Like all reputation systems, the value of this feedback is highly dependent upon the reputation of the individuals leaving the feedback.
This kind of reputation system takes the approach of “giving you all the data” and allowing you to draw your own conclusions. This is an amount of work that may make sense for a large purchase, but the cost of reviewing the information is prohibitively high for many applications, such as governance.
Algorithm based Reputation
This approach to reputation attempts to combine structured input from a population of individuals to produce a calculated result. Whether this result has any meaning depends entirely upon the robustness and accuracy of the data provided by the people using the system.
There are at least two dimensions required for any such algorithm to render a meaningful opinion:
- do you trust someone to tell the truth about direct experience
- do you trust someone’s judgment about who they can trust
A computer algorithm can compute a personalized estimation of what your opinion would be if you were to manually investigate. All the algorithm needs is a robust well connected network of statements, lines of trust / distrust, and a meta-layer of information about who can be trusted to make good decisions about who can be trusted.
This algorithm gets increasingly complex as you attempt to model additional dimensions of reputation.
Consensus Reputation
Building a self-governing community depends upon defining a “consensus reputation”. The general algorithm outlined in the previous section is able to estimate your opinion, but the goal with consensus reputation is to render community judgements and measure community opinion.
Direct polling is the most common means of arriving at a consensus. This process assumes that all polled individuals have direct knowledge or that they have spent the time asking their social network for an opinion (Feedback based Reputation) and then submitting their conclusion to the poll.
Once again, most people are not willing to pay the price necessary to gather the information. In this case they either abstain (providing no information) or they vote (providing random information at best, or misinformation at worst). Assuming a large enough sample size, the “random” noise cancels out.
In all cases the result of the poll is highly subject to the signal to noise ratio. Too much random noise combined with intentional misinformation can cause the consensus opinion to be “undefined” at best or “wrong” at worst.
The type of opinion is heavily “centralized” in the sense that every individual must participate in every poll. Lack of voter turnout and rational ignorance weakens these systems.
The typical solution for these kind of reputation systems is to have everyone vote on whom they trust to make judgments about others. In other words, representative democracy is nothing more than a reputation system where the “king of the day” has the power to reallocate individual resources through taxation and property forfeiture. Typically a process of appointing judges, and conscripting jurors is implemented.
Assuming such a government restricted itself to decisions regarding the allocation of its own currency, then you would have a fully non-violent self-governing community. Moral problems only occur when an individual has their physical person and property threatened.
Decentralized Reputation Governance
In a decentralized model there would be no need to elect any one individual with the power over the reputation of all others. Under this model individuals have the ability to act in ways that give and take reputation from others. It is a peer-to-peer trading in reputation.
Algorithms can be Manipulated
All reputation algorithms whose computed result can inflict a positive or negative economic outcome to an individual will incentivize market participants to exploit the rules for maximum profit. The success or failure of the system depends upon the ability of honest individuals to defend their reputation against attacks from dishonest individuals attempting to acquire reputation dishonestly.
One of the most common types of manipulation is known as a Sybil attack. This is an attack where people create fake accounts. There are only two solutions to Sybil attacks: use a trusted individual to certify uniqueness of individuals or base the system upon a scarce resource. This isn’t a problem for personalized reputation systems, but for consensus reputation systems it becomes critical.
A resource based system is “for sale” to the highest bidder. This means that its security, reliability, and trustworthiness depends upon that distribution of the resource being in the hands of trustworthy individuals combined with the total value of the resource in question. The harder it is to buy up a majority of the reputation resource, the more difficult it is to cheat a resource based system.
Reputation as a Resource
The concept of Reputation as a Resource is the basis of proof of stake systems. It is also the basis of Steem Power. Those who hold this resource are trusted with the power to distribute this resource to new users. Unfortunately, Reputation as a Resource cannot operate like other resources.
You do not own your reputation. It is popular mythology that we should own our reputation, but your reputation is nothing but the beliefs others have about you. You do not own their thoughts and beliefs. We have the power to impact what others believe about us through our actions, but the absolute power to change an opinion resides in the opinion holder.
If we define reputation with regard to “trust”, it is said that it is “hard to earn, easy to lose”. To base reputation on a resource it must be a resource that is “hard to earn and easy to lose”. If someone can earn a reputation and then use said positive reputation to defraud others while being immune to the loss of their reputation, then the value of the reputation resource as a whole will decline until it is meaningless.
Negative Reputation
If someone who has no reputation does something “bad”, then the result is they should earn a negative reputation. Alternatively, lack of any reputation at all must be viewed as the “most negative”. All unique individuals who verify and prove their uniqueness should “earn” a non-zero reputation.
Property Rights in Cryptographic Reputation
Crypto currency was born out of a desire for honest money that is free from political control. It is highly valued due to its ability to enforce property rights against all aggressors so long as you can secure your private keys.
To base reputation on a cryptocurrency-like resource means that the allocation of the currency must be entirely subject to evolving / changing community opinion. This is the very nature of both reputation and politics.
In a hypothetical resource based reputation token, the community must have the power to vote with their Reputation to remove the Reputation from someone else. This means that when you buy reputation tokens on the market you are betting that other owners of the reputation token will continue to believe you deserve that reputation.
In a free market, wealth is the measure by which you have served your fellow man can be measured by the profits he has earned. The degree to which wealth is a reliable measure of reputation is to some extent determined by the overall degree of thievery in a society.
Stake your Reputation
When someone acts they risk harming their reputation. It is the risk to your reputation that motivates individuals to behave in a society. With a token based reputation system, losing your reputation carries a direct and immediate economic loss. This is compared to a non-token based reputation where your loss of reputation only impacts future income from lost sales.
Reputation needs to be Monetized
A self-governing free-society based upon non-violence needs to have a solid reputation system that is trusted by all. When people trust the reputation system, they know who they can trust in business and who they should shun. They know who to befriend and who to outcast.
Fraud is how bad individuals monetize good reputation today. They utilize the trust others have placed in them to embezzle money. The largest frauds are currently perpetrated by those who have the greatest trust and reputation.
If someone can gain more by selling their reputation directly than they can earn by fraud, then there is no longer any financial incentive for fraud. Fraud will only occur if it can go undetected long enough for the fraudster to sell their illicit gains before the community can act to revoke their reputation.
Historically loss of reputation has resulted in a loss of theoretical future income. If reputation were to be monetized, then individuals face the potential of the very real present value of their reputation.
When the richer in reputation you get the more you have to lose by falling out of favor. To maintain your position of reputation wealth will require increasingly competent public relations. Meanwhile, investigative journalists would have financial incentive to grow their reputation by alerting the public to anything that would indicate abusive behavior.
Conclusion
Reputation need to be monetized by converting it into a token that is entirely revokable by decentralized consensus algorithm. This would necessarily be a new type of token based upon a different kind of “property right”, namely the communities right to assign and revoke reputation. Steemit has already provided the most scalable solution to date for allocating tokens to those who earn reputation with the community, perhaps a similar system could be employed for removing tokens from those whom the community feels does not deserve them.
"entirely revokable by decentralized consensus algorithm"
Scary. Why should the community be able to revoke what I have already earned If I should have unpopular opinions?
The problem is that we can NOT be "free from political control" unless we are anonymous, since our reputation, as you note, is based upon community response to our actions. Politics basically comes down to determining who gets what ( in liberty based politics, the people that makes it keeps it).
Anonymity has two problems: maintaining anonymity prevents our past actions from being judged by the community, and can be used to game the reputation system, again as you noted.
From where I'm sitting, ANY system can be abused. It comes down to whether the people that hold the most power (whales, token-holders, what have you) use that power to benefit and protect the community that provides them with the power.
Despite my nitpicking, you have laid out the underlying problems of reputation to be more understandable. I don't think there is a perfect system without weaknesses.
One of the major points of Dan's post was that people don't own their reputation. The individual's reputation belongs to others through their collective views about the individual. For that reason it is not about what you have earned, it is about the right of the community to have a measure of their collective view.
I understood that: I really didn't make myself clear by trying to work in a 3 different points at once. Dan did a great job in explaining the problems involved in any reputation system.
The point that I should have focused on was not that reputation should be immutable after earning a certain level, but that due to the ...ahem...capriciousness...of any given community, those with power in the community need to act nobly to maintain the integrity of the reputation system.
I won't use any names, but we had the specific example of a Steemer that was downvoting newbies out of the gate. Someone with the power to do so that in terms of technical ability and voting weight set up a bot to counter that.
Going back to my "evoke" quote, I was looking at it in terms of taking away a vote-earned token, instead of looking at it in terms of adding negative votes. Either way, you end up with negative rep; it's just that taking away a token earned struck me as wrong. Call it semantics.
One more step to digital Keyhotee ;-) watch from 9:50
"It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad deed to ruin it"
I wonder why this is..
Part of me thinks that it is because our default is to not trust people, and it is always a matter of work to move away from that default towards a relationship with trust.
But then I like to think that most people have a fairly high level of trust to begin with, so it is probably more of a reaction to getting hurt or taken advantage of when it happens. How could you? I trusted you! the person thinks. I'm never going to trust you again!
It could be that pro-social behaviour is the expected norm. Even quite anti-social people still behave pro-socially or neutral most of the time, because it is generally the least costly. So there is more information gained from an anti-social act than a pro-social act generally.
I made a reply to @timcliff about this and I think it is also an appropriate response to your comment.
https://steemit.com/reputation/@dantheman/monetizing-reputation#@neoncow/re-timcliff-re-dantheman-monetizing-reputation-20170416t045602781z
Trust is hard to build because we are all mortal and human life is so fragile. If you live in an untrustworthy world, it is very easy to be killed. Two people standing next to each other can very easily do mortal harm to each other with only their hands.
A person who acts suspicious makes us wonder if they are following the same moral code as we are and how they could harm you, even inadvertently without any harmful intent.
Having a high level of trust in other people is where you need to reflect on the society you grew up in. There are many places in history and the current world where life is cheap and people will spend human lives for their own gain. In those times and places, I would wager many people would not have a fairly high level of trust when meeting a stranger.
If you have high levels of trust in strangers, this is not a bad thing, but rather a reflection of the era and place that you grew up in. It's likely that your ability to trust was hard earned by history and institutions you trust in.
Interesting view :)
Cheers. I'm new here and really excited to find people who type in complete sentences. Is there a way to subscribe to tags? subreddit style? It seems I can only follow people so far.
Not yet. One of the big features in development for this year's roadmap is communities. Once those are done, there will be a better way to subscribe to interests.
For now, you can browse the individual tabs via the "Explore" menu. There is a way to sort with the 'new' posts first.
This follows entropy logic in a sense. When trying to put something "in order" there are an infinite number of possibilities for "disorder" but only one for "order".
Yes, people are really risk-averse in that area. Maybe cuz our main predator is other humans.
Perhaps something similar could be used for something like the DOA attack, where a strong-enough community consensus can be used to claw back stolen money, perhaps by just completely killing the attacker's reputation.
like if the community feels a user defrauded them of money from the reward pool, they would have the power to take that money back from the user
@dantheman
I was about to write an article about this subject for tomorrow but now I don't feel like doing it since I don't want to destroy what I have built so far. You have covered me pretty much.
This is my favourite quote of all time and it describes not only reputation but the human experience in its entirety. It was going to be my opening line:
To be is to be percieved, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other... The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go and impressionate themselves throughout all time...
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas... Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we're bound to others... Past and present... And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future..."
oh, that's good. I like it.
that is a trippy f'n flick!
Hypothetically... if we were to do something like this, would a completely different coin need to be created? Not Steem, SP, or SBD?
This was posted a couple hours after your question:
Yes, I mean would a completely new coin have to be added to the group? Not replace what we currently have...
If you read the latest KPMG audit report it says the same thing, people will fraud the system because they can. The higher they get and the more power they reveive the more likely will they use it for fraud because they can. And eventually they will be found out. The good thing about steemit blockchain one can find it out. It must be heaven for investigative journalists and they must not even become a member of steemit.
Do you have a link?
https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2016/01/fraud-barometer-report-2015.pdf
To piggy-back from craig-grant's question: how would this type of new token work when it had been proven that a member defrauded the community out of money? Let's say that the evidence was clear cut. How would that work in theory?
Money would be taken away in the exact same way that money is earned. n^2 net negative votes on individual's action.
A future post will outline various proposals for how a theoretical system might be built.
so..let me gets this straight...this would take from the respective user's SP?
Not Steem Power, that is something that cannot be taken away based upon the common understanding of the purpose of Steem Power, but perhaps Steem Rep!
As someone who is part of a cabal that exercises control over the witness list with ninjamined coins, you could easily change property rights if you wanted to.
I could, but that would impact my reputation much as your remarks and actions have impacted yours.
A little catty but I like it!
Thank you for this post. Perhaps this quote by Edward R. Murrow: “To be persuasive we must be believable;
to be believable we must be creditable; to be credible we must be truthful.” is applicable.
Check this Tagalog version of your post, Philippines primary language.
https://steemit.com/reputation/@juvyjabian/pagpapalago-ng-reputasyon-tagalog-version-of-dantheman-s-monetizing-reputation
It takes a hundred atta-boys to equal one aw shit.
I have always tried to live that way. but in the last 21 years that I've run my own small business, I've found that it really is true. I've never made a lot of money and don't expect to. But I've made a lot of customers happy. I have a good reputation and that's important to me.
I have always felt that a good name is the only thing a man can truly take with him when he dies. Everything else that he has spend his life working for is just left to others. But his reputation, his good or bad name will always be his alone.
There is another post from someone today about worrying what others thing about you. And I agree. It's pretty unproductive to worry needlessly about how you are judged by others. But if a man truly doesn't care about being honorable, or honest, or noble and having a reputation that he and his loved one's can be proud of. I can't help believing that man's life is missing something.
First you work for reputation. And then the reputation works for you. A good reputation is more valuable than gold.
Who is this bot @the-illuminati, and why is he downvoting every post ??!
Check my reward system proposal. I think is the best way to monetize reputation.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ellamaeamor/a-reward-system-proposal-that-will-make-everybody-stay-in-the-platform-and-will-invite-more-signups
Excellent post. I really think we are heading towards distributed reputation. This will lead to trustchain(s) that mitigate risks in trustless environments.
Is the conclusion the TL;DR version?
Yes, that is the general idea of a conclusion.
I see the "DISCLAIMER" and I know this is all theroritcal in nature but...
This sounds very dangerous to me
perhaps a similar system could be employed for removing tokens from those whom the community feels does not deserve them.
Cant I use the get out of jail free card? ;)
I will repeat, I do not believe we can or should take tokens away from existing token holders as that would be a major breach of the existing social contract.
OH I know, Don't worry! I just was curious to see if anybody would be for such a thing and if there were any reason it may be a good idea in a particular set of circumstances. Something like Murder? Just thinking out loud. Thanks for the reassurance tho , some may get confused ;)
But you could fork steem with all accounts included and make the experiment on the fork(?)
I appreciate this explanation and thought process. It was millions in"rep points" and "likes" on another general topic forum that made me realize steemit is revolutionary. Thanks for making this place great.
Keep on reppin DAN!
I don't want to be rude but you wrote bockchain and maybe blockchain? The people who look into blockchain tag will miss this! Thanks for sharing this post!
if reputation were to be represented in transferable tokens then I am not sure how you could take them away before they transfer them or sell them to other accounts.... if they were not able to transfer the tokens then they would not have any value.
I have stated on some of my post that re-blogging and indirect marketing could be a good way to monetize reputation and popularity in steemit... Celebrities do it all the time on other social platforms, they basically sell exposure and endorsements of products.
If you are going to institute a system where people can take back money from someone they feel defrauded them, you would also need to build a system of justice to ensure that fraudsters don't come from the other side. eg. Someone with a significant rep comes along and starts screaming" he defrauaded me, HEY EVERYONE HE STOLE FROM ME!! about a person with a lower rep. The community jumps on board, takes whatever the fraudster says he is deserved from that person, then the fraudster makes off with the earnings of his lies. Unless there is a system to prevent this as well, then it could be manipulated. Edit Thinking about this a bit more, I guess if it is all in the block chain then there would be enough evidence to prove one side or the other, and the matter could be resolved fairly.
As a representation of the real world, modelling reputation would require an algorithm that varied from culture to culture, as different cultures regard reputation in different manners. For instance, in some regions (usually ones near previous war zones), people tend to be more cautious, which is a behavior that comes from the previous generations. It leads to a smaller degree of belief in each other, therefore, a smaller reputation overall.
I hope you won't consider this spam, but I wrote an article this morning that kind of ties in.
With all of the decentralized apps being developed for Steem, it begs the question - how do we trust the app developers with the ability to take actions with our accounts. I use the example of @xeroc's Streemian site, seeming how a user like @xeroc is about as trusted of an app developer as there can be. If you have time to check it out, I would be curious as to your thoughts.
Steem Tools Development - Centralized Steemit.com vs. Decentralized App Center (Security Concerns)
Nice Idea @dantheman. Great explanation there!!! Hope to see a better Steemit in future :)
It would be cool to have some universal reputation system across the internet, but I know that's not easy. We can prove that we are a given person (or account holder) using cryptographic means (e.g. Keybase). That negates some of the need to verify accounts manually.
No system will be perfect. We've seen people here with a lot of financial might using it for 'evil'. I hope the check and balances can deal with that. I've certainly seen some accounts with low reputation scores. It seems you can't take their SP away, so they may still be able to do harm, even if nobody respects them.
It's all an interesting experiment. Most of us didn't even try to trust so many strangers just a few years ago.
source: https://yesterdayslaundry.files.wordpress.com
Therefore steem is (potentially) worth more than money!
Trust (and reputation) is earned in drips, and lost in buckets.
For those who are keeping up with things around the world, we can clearly see this exact thing happening in the news right now:@dantheman, excellent post!
Due to the their faulty batteries, their perceived (or future) value has taken a big hit.
Because she's held public office for so long, people afford her a certain level of trust. A trust we now know she has abused.
I would assume reputation is a huge concern for anyone in any online community. And I completely agree with you, it's hard to gain and easy to lose. Therefore the need to protect it is high. But that doesn't mean we the people should place all responsibility upon the platform to police such things.
One of the things all online communities have to watch out for is affiliate marketers. Of course not all are bad, or pushing scam type stuff. But eventually, someone will try to find a way to game this platform, instead of just being able to appreciate it for what it truly is (Amazing!).
I'll close by saying this:
What @dantheman, @ned, and anyone else involved in building this platform has built for us is truly something unbelievable and absolutely groundbreaking! I believe they've done their best by learning from other platforms and mistakes made in the past. Now it's up to us, the community to do our part. We can't expect this to be like reddit, or facebook because it simply is not. In order to have a platform that doesn't enforce governance upon it's people, than we the people need to do our part to enforce acceptable behavior, and punish (down vote) unacceptable behavior.
Note: Just because you disagree with something or someone, doesn't mean they should be down voted. Let's try to remember there is a difference from a post that you don't find value you in, and a post that intentionally aims to take value away from the community as a whole.
Let's take a moment to think about how people vs. government works:
The entire point of this (as I understand it), is to have a community "For the people, by the people". If that's truly the case, then that means that the people need to learn how to become responsible, as well as accountable for their actions. We can't ask for new policies to be put in place just because we're having a bad day. It's crucial that we get out of this mindset and learn how to work together to solve our own problems the best we can before ever trying to change the entire system in order to fit our needs as individuals.
-Cheers
Very interested to stay in the loop here - personally see reputation as a non-tradeable currency that moderates exchange.
This is interesting, but please explain to me how the top trending post in the last 11 hours is one that has less than $200SBD in payout? What's going on here and why isn't anyone talking about it?
whats u guys opinion on Eigenstrust system (used by NEM)http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/eigentrust.pdf