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Reputation Can't Be Asserted
Marco Barulli is building a reputation system for blog comments. In this post, he runs through a scenario for how it might be used. One thing bothered me. One part of his scenario says:
[Alice] invokes a bookmarklet to ask her reputation manager for a unique comment token.
The reputation manager can’t be “hers.” The reputation system envisioned by Marco uses tokens to authenticate someone to retrieve Alice’s reputation. This isn’t reputation in the general sense.
Reputation is other people’s story about you, not your own story. Thus a general purpose reputation manager can’t under Alice’s control. Sometimes we imagine a world where we can control what other people think about us, but it just won’t work.
That said, I do think that reputation systems should be transparent so that you can tell what factors are being used to compute your reputation and how the computation is being done. Another key part of transparency is seeing who accesses your reputation and when. But once I put you in charge of your reputation or even who can see it and who can’t, it ceases to serve the function of reputation.
Posted by windley on February 4, 2006 11:56 AM
Comment from Marco Barulli at February 4, 2006 4:21 PM
I'm afraid my bad written English makes things difficult to understand, I apologize ...
Our reputation system for blog comments does not work the way you say.
The token is just a "key" that Alice submits to the blog owner (Bob) along with her comment; later Bob can use the token to send a feedback about Alice (acceptance or rejection of the comment) to the reputation manager she is registered to.
It doesn't contain any reputation information. It is a just a unique identifier, never issued twice by the reputation manager.
In this way the reputation manager can collect information about the comments of Alice and their reception in the blogosphere. And from these identity and transactional data it can compute Alice's reputation.
Every feedback will cause a reputation update. It is thus very important to allow feedbacks only for something Alice has really done, and the token should help enforcing this constraint.
The reputation manager is definitely not under the control of Alice.
On the other hand, Alice has full access to her comment history and how this is processed to provide reputation assessment to the authorized blogs.
More details in the last 3 posts on clipperz.net.