Building Web Reputation Systems- P3

Building Web Reputation Systems- P3: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- P3Figure 1-1. Your credit score is a formalized reputation model made up of numerous inputs.FICO score may well be a reasonable representation of something we can callcreditworthiness.For most of its history of more than 50 years, the FICO score was shrouded in mysteryand nearly inaccessible to consumers, except when they were opening major credit lines(such as when purchasing a home). At the time, this obscurity was considered a bene-fit. A benefit, that is, to lenders and the scoring agencies—that, in operating a high-fee-per-transaction business, were happy to be talking only with one another. But this lackof transparency meant that an error on your FICO score could go undetectedfor months—or even years—with potentially deleterious effects on your cash flow:increased interest rates, decreased credit limits, and higher lending fees.However, as it has in most other businesses, the Internet has brought about a reformof sorts in credit scoring. Nowadays you can quickly get a complete credit report ortake advantage of a host of features related to it: flags to alert you when others arelooking at your credit data, or alarms whenever your score dips or an anomalous rep-utation statement appears in your file. [In the United States] an employer is generally permitted to [perform a credit check], primarily because there is no federal discrimination law that specifically prohibits em- ployment discrimination on the basis of a bad credit report. —EmployeeIssues.comAs access to credit reports has increased, the credit bureaus have kept pace with thetrend and have steadily marketed the reports for a growing number of purposes. Moreand more transaction-based businesses have started using them (primarily the FICOscore) for less and less relevant evaluations. In addition to their original purpose—establishing the terms of a credit account—credit reports are now used by landlords Reputation Systems Deeply Affect Our Lives | 11for the less common but somewhat relevant purpose of risk mitigation when renting ahouse or apartment and by some businesses to run background checks on prospectiveemployees—a legal but unreasonably invasive requirement.Global reputation scores are so powerful and easily accessible that the temptation toapply them outside of their original context is almost irresistible. The rise and spreadof the FICO score illustrates what can happen when a reputation that is powerful andubiquitous in one specific context is used in other, barely related contexts: it transformsthe reputation beyond recognition. In this ironic case, your ability to get a job (to makemoney that will allow you to pay your credit card bills) can be seriously hampered bythe fact that your potential boss can determine that you are over your credit limit.Web FICO?Several startup companies have attempted to codify a global user reputation to be em-ployed across websites, and some try to leverage a user’s preexisting eBay seller’s Feed-back score as a primary value in their rating. They are trying to create some sort of “realperson” or “good citizen” reputation system for use across all contexts. As with theFICO score, it is a bad idea to co-opt a reputation system for another purpose, and itdilutes the actual meaning of the score in its original context. The eBay Feedback scorereflects only the transaction-worthiness of a specific account, and it does so only forparticular products bought or sold on eBay. The user behind that identity may in factsteal candy from babies, cheat at online poker, and fail to pay his credit card bills. EveneBay displays multiple types of reputation ratings within its singular limited context.There is no web FICO because there is no kind of reputation statement that can belegitimately applied to all contexts.Reputation on the WebOver the centuries, as human societies became increasingly mobile, people startedbumping into one another. Increasingly, we began to interact with complete strangersand our locally acquired knowledge became inadequate for evaluating the trustwor-thiness of new trading partners and goods. The emergence of various formal and in-formal reputation systems was necessary and inevitable. These same problems of trustand evaluation are with us today, on the Web. Only…more so. The Web has no cen-tralized history of reputable transactions and no universal identity model. So we can’tsimply mimic real-world reputation techniques, where once you find someone (or somegroup) that you trust in one context, you can transfer that trust to another. On theWeb, no one knows who you are, or what you’ve done in the past. There is no multi-context “reputation at large” for users of the Web, at least for the vast majority of users.Consider what ...