Building Web Reputation Systems- P14

Building Web Reputation Systems- P14:Today’s Web is the product of over a billion hands and minds. Around the clock andaround the globe, people are pumping out contributions small and large: full-lengthfeatures on Vimeo, video shorts on YouTube, comments on Blogger, discussions onYahoo! Groups, and tagged-and-titled Del.icio.us bookmarks. User-generated contentand robust crowd participation have become the hallmarks of Web 2.0.
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Building Web Reputation Systems- P14 Help system display, giving unknown users extra navigation help Lockout of potentially abused features, such as content editing, until the user has demonstrated familiarity with the application and lack of hostility to it Deciding when to route new contributions to customer care for moderation Pros Allows for a significantly lower barrier for some user contributions than otherwise possible, for example, not requiring registration or login. Provides for corporate (internal use) karma. No user knows this score, and the site operator can change the application’s calculation method freely as the situation evolves and new proxy reputations become available. Helps render your application impervious to accidental damage caused by drive-by users. Cons Inferred karma is, by construction, unreliable. For example, since people can share an IP address over time without knowing it or each other, including it in a reputation can undervalue an otherwise excellent user by accident. However, though it might be tempting for that reason to remove IP reputation from the model, IP address is the strongest indicator of bad users; such users don’t usually go to the trouble of getting a new IP address whenever they want to attack your site. Inferred karma can be expensive to generate. How often do you want to update the supporting reputations, such as IP or cookie reputation? It would be too expensive to update them at very single HTTP roundtrip, so smart design is required. Inferred karma is weak. Don’t trust it alone for any legally or socially significant actions.Practitioner’s Tips: Negative Public KarmaBecause an underlying karma score is a number, product managers often misunder-stand the interaction between numerical values and online identity. The thinking goessomething like this: • In our application context, the user’s value will be represented by a single karma, which is a numerical value. • There are good, trustworthy users and bad, untrustworthy users, and everyone would like to know which is which, so we will display their karma. • We should represent good actions as positive numbers and bad actions as negative, and we’ll add them up to make karma. • Good users will have high positive scores (and other users will interact with them), and bad users will have low negative scores (and other users will avoid them).This thinking—though seemingly intuitive—is impoverished, and is wrong in at leasttwo important ways: • There can be no negative public karma—at least for establishing the trustworthi- ness of active users. A bad enough public score will simply lead to that user’s abandoning the account and starting a new one, a process we call karma bank- ruptcy. This setup defeats the primary goal of karma—to publicly identify bad actors. Assuming that a karma starts at zero for a brand-new user that an Practitioner’s Tips: Negative Public Karma | 161 application has no information about, it can never go below zero, since karma bankruptcy resets it. Just look at the record of eBay sellers with more than three red stars. You’ll see that most haven’t sold anything in months or years, either because the sellers quit or they’re now doing business under different account names. • It’s not a good idea to combine positive and negative inputs in a single public karma score. Say you encounter a user with 75 karma points and another with 69 karma points. Who is more trustworthy? You can’t tell; maybe the first user used to have hundreds of good points but recently accumulated a lot of negative ones, while the second user has never received a negative point at all. If you must have public negative reputation, handle it as a separate score (as in the eBay seller feedback pattern).Even eBay, with the most well-known example of public negative karma, doesn’t rep-resent how untrustworthy an actual seller might be; it only gives buyers reasons to takespecific actions to protect themselves. In general, avoid negative public karma. If youreally want to know who the bad guys are, keep the score separate and restrict it tointernal use by moderation staff. The Dollhouse Mafia, or “Don’t Display Negative Karma” The Sims Online was a multiplayer version of the popular Sims games by Electronic Arts and Maxis in which the user controlled an animated character in a virtual world with houses, furniture, games, virtual currency (called Simoleans), rental property, and social activities. You could call it playing dol ...