Comments on: Can We Build a Distributed Trust Network?

By: Thoughts About Online Reputation

Thoughts About Online Reputation — Sun, 02 May 2010 05:07:13 +0000

[...] that I’ve been thinking a lot about online reviews and reputation systems (e.g., this recent post), I wanted to hear what the experts had to [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 01:56:10 +0000

People may have lots of profiles, but I don’t how many of those are associated with trust scores. I think that the social networking sites started from a premise that you could trust your friends. Now that “friends” has been diluted as a concept, we need to rethink our approach to inferring trust from the social graph.

By: Zainul Franciscus

Zainul Franciscus — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 23:28:52 +0000

Hi Daniel,

The concept of distributed trust is very interesting. Most people have more than 1 social media account. They sometime create different profile in each account.

It will be useful to have a holistic view on how many ‘Trust’ points that a person accumulate across these different site.

This kind of system can benefit the profile owner and both profile reviewer who are interested to evaluate their credibility before engaging in a real relationship with them.

I look forward for your next post

By: Get Unvarnished!

Get Unvarnished! — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:09:05 +0000

[...] reputation space. My curiosity should be no surprise to folks who have read my recent posts about distributed trust networks and solicited reviews. Anyway, I decided to go straight to the source and persuaded Unvarnished CEO [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:14:53 +0000

Look at Monkeysphere. http://web.monkeysphere.info/

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:58:12 +0000

Carl, I understand where you’re coming from. But let me ask you this: do you trust weather sites? I’m not saying they’re 100% reliable, but I suspect you make real decisions based on forecasts. I suspect the same holds for other online information sources. Subjective content is obviously a lot harder to trust, even if it’s presented in good faith, but I don’t think it’s black and white. If we don’t trust anything, we cut ourselves off from useful information. As with all things, there’s a precision / recall trade-off.

By: Carl H.B.

Carl H.B. — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:15:38 +0000

Should we put our trust in any website? The truth is, that all websites have filters, anonymus content writers and ‘paid’ contributers. Even the ‘haters’ usually are exagerating the bad customer service or fraud based on how much time they have to forumlate a complaint. Craigslist is a top ten website in the country and their community is one of the most fraudulant on the web. Good luck trying to build a trusted network when human nature is involved.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:21:27 +0000

Indeed, we seem to do ok in the authentication front with electing politicians through secret ballots. The tricky part here is that some implicit disclosure is actually needed to make trust propagate through a social network.

By: Leonard Kish

Leonard Kish — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:59:46 +0000

I think authentication without public disclosure of judgements is achievable. I think the anonymous comments just have to be metered somehow, much like we each have one vote. You need to be a real person to join and get authenticated when you go on, and then you only have a certain amount of anonymous flame tokens you can use for a certain period. Or maybe, rather than flames, you have only a certain amount of objective (multiple choice, yes/no, 1-10 rating) scores you can give, so there’s no slander, only opinion. Of course, you could also provide public subjective responses in combination.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:22:42 +0000

Evonne, I agree re: the strongest circle of trust, but I'm actually interested in extending that circle effectively. For example, I'd like to be able to have something in between a endorsement from a close colleague and one from a total stranger who is a completely unknown quantity to me. Leonard,I'm a big fan on non-anonymity, and I alluded to its virtues for LinkedIn recommendations. But public disclosure can have a chilling effect on sincere negative feedback. Ideally we'd have authentication without public disclosure of judgements--only their propagation through the social network in a way that sufficiently protects privacy. Assuming this is possible to achieve! Leonard, you might want to check out this post by Adina Levin entitled "Trust is Contextual" (via Ali Sohani).

By: Leonard Kish

Leonard Kish — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:35:45 +0000

For the sake of trust networks, I find it helpful to think of trust as 3 different types:

1. Interpersonal (Are we on the same team?, are incentives aligned?, have each other’s backs)
2. Competence (Is this person capable or failure rates of products)
3. Consistency and transparency (eg, Can we trust these numbers?, statistics, a true reflection of reality? Is this pattern predictable?)

Depending on the relationships and situations involved and the work that’s done, people will get different scores on each.

By: Leonard Kish

Leonard Kish — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:12:51 +0000

One way to do this is on an account basis, ala eBay, craigslist, etc. The other way is when people actually be the same person online that they are offline, responsible for their actions in the real world. How about a network where you could only enter as yourself authenticated via fingerprinting? That way, when you ding someone or prop them up, at least we can be sure they are coming from real people. It could be anonymous, but validated, like our voting system.

We need the laws that build systems of trust in the real world to be reworked for the digital era, laws that make people responsible for their online behavior. Rules of interaction are the cornerstone of effective communities.

By: Evonne @amoration

Evonne @amoration — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:37:34 +0000

I have been working on this problem as well after experimenting with reputation networks and true value over the last 5 years. What’s missing in most reputation rating systems is a sense of RARITY — we never narrow it down to those we trust the most, so all bumps become the same. True trust is a rare gift that we only share with a relatively small number of people compared to the vastness of our networks. Ping me off-blog to talk more about this design and how it works and links with the rest of our social media landscape — I got as far as designing it and finding developers ready to build it out.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:36:06 +0000

Joe, Stack Overflow's system may work better than eBay's, but I think that it has the same vulnerabilities in theory. Unlike eBay, there is less incentive for abuse. Neil, you're right that abuse can take on either polarity. That's why it's essential that trust not simply be a matter of counting the votes of strangers. A friend pointed me to WikiTrust, which made a great point in its FAQ: "When a user A reverts a user B, the reputation of B suffers in proportion to the reputation of A. Vandals usually have no reputation (if they are anonymous), or very low reputation, so the reputation of B would suffer only minimally." I think the same principle should apply to the problem you describe. Even better would be a mechanism to propagate trust through the social network.

By: Neil Raden

Neil Raden — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:18:36 +0000

One problem is that negative statements are almost always issued with greater frequency and ferocity. A single “hate site” can overwhelm a legion of positive comments, especially if the owners of the site are fervent haters of their target and skilled in SEO, which the average person isn’t. These sites typically moderate their comments so it is impossible to unveil their biases and misleading statements.

By: Joe Mako

Joe Mako — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 07:48:54 +0000

Have you seen stackoverflow.com and how they use reputation?

A high rep holds a lot of meaning there, partially because they work to fight the gaming of the system, and their goal is to encourage good practices.

On http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ they go into detail how the system works.