Table Of ContentThe Information Society Series
Laura DeNardis and Michael Zimmer, series editors
Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh
Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability, Laura DeNardis, editor
The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions are Reshaping the Offline World, Hassan Masum and
Mark Tovey, editors
The Reputation Society
How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World
edited by Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
©2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or me
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out permission in writing from the publisher.
Trademarks, brands, and names mentioned in this book are the property of their respective
owners.
For information about special quantity discounts, please email [email protected].
This book was set in Stone by Graphic Composition, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States
of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The reputation society : how online opinions are reshaping the offline world I edited by Hassan
Masum and Mark Tovey ; foreword by Craig Newmark.
p. cm. — (The information society series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01664-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Reputation. 2. Information society—Social
aspects. 3. Internet—Social aspects. I. Masum, Hassan, 1971- II. Tovey, Mark, 1970-
HM851.R458 2012
303.48'33—dc23
2011016661
10 987654321
For our parents.
9
Contents
Foreword: Trust, Reputation Systems, and the Immune System of Democracy ix
Craig Newmark
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Building the Reputation Society xv
Hassan Masum, Mark Tovey, and Yi-Cheng Zhang
I UNDERSTANDING REPUTATION 1
1 Designing Reputation Systems for the Social Web 3
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
2 Web Reputation Systems and the Real World 13
Randy Farmer
3 An Inquiry into Effective Reputation and Rating Systems 25
John Henry Clippinger
II REGULATING SOCIETIES 37
4 The Biology of Reputation 39
John Whitfield
5 Regulating Reputation 51
Eric Goldman
6 Less Regulation, More Reputation 63
Lior Jacob Strahilevitz
III AMPLIFYING SIGNALS 75
7 The Role of Reputation Systems in Managing Online Communities 77
Cliff Lampe
1
viii Contents
8 Attention Philanthropy: Giving Reputation a Boost 89
Alex Steffen
9 Making Use of Reputation Systems in Philanthropy 97
Marc Maxson and Mari Kuraishi
IV SUPPORTING SCIENCE 109
10 The Measurement and Mismeasurement of Science 111
Michael Nielsen
11 Usage-Based Reputation Metrics in Science 119
Victor Henning, )ason Hoyt, and Jan Reichelt
12 Open Access and Academic Reputation 129
John Willinsky
V IMPROVING POLICY 139
13 Reputation-Based Governance and Making States "Legible" to Their
Citizens 141
Lucio Picci
14 Trust It Forward: Tyranny of the Majority or Echo Chambers? 151
Paolo Massa
15 Rating in Large-Scale Argumentation Systems 163
Luca landoli, Josh Introne, and Mark Klein
VI THE REPUTATION SOCIETY 173
16 Privacy, Context, and Oversharing: Reputational Challenges in a Web 2.0
World 175
Michael Zimmer and Anthony Hoffman
17 The Future of Reputation Networks 185
Jamais Cascio
18 "I Hope You Know This Is Going on Your Permanent Record" 195
Madeline Ashby and Cory Doctorow
Contributors 205
Index 213
Foreword: Trust, Reputation Systems, and the Immune System of
Democracy
Craig Newmark
People use social networking tools to figure out whom they can trust and rely on for
decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will have shifted
largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks and away from
people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy
on people emerging from the grassroots.
This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equi
librium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point
occurs, even though we're living through it now. Everyone will get a chance to partici
pate in large or small ways, giving a voice to what we once called "the silent majority."
When we need help with decision making, we get recommendations from people
we trust; that trust is built on some combination of personal experience and reputa
tion. That's the way humans work. We talk about reputation being one's greatest asset.
In real life, personal networks are pretty small—people numbering maybe in
the hundreds. Mass media plays a role in shaping reputation for a small number of
people, including celebrities and politicians. Very few people have influence in this
environment.
Internet culture and technology change this dramatically. People tend to work with
each other. People are normally trustworthy—and despite their large media footprint,
there aren't many bad guys out there. People are finding that reputation and recom
mendation systems can be used to drive a lot of profit.
Reputation is contextual: you might trust someone when it comes to dry cleaners
but not politics. So we want to be able to see whom we might be able to trust—maybe
by seeing some explicit measurement, or maybe by seeing something implicit, like
their history, and who trusts them.
We already see various forms of reputation and recommendation systems evolv
ing, often with mixtures of preselected experts or professionals. Amazon.com and
ConsumerReports.org do a good job of this. (Disclaimer: I'm on the board of Consumer
Reports, since their record for integrity is close to perfect.)
X Craig Newmark
Wikipedia.org does a very good job of this, mostly by having lots of people keep
an eye on articles—particularly the more controversial ones. There are ongoing issues
that are being addressed in good conscience as people develop new methods to address
information quality and reliability.
We also see reputation and influence reflected in social networking sites. Such sys
tems show history and context, which play into trust, as well as connections to other
people.
Cory Doctorow postulates a kind of trustworthiness currency called "Whuffie." You
trust someone, maybe want to reward them for something—you give them points.
Turns out that there's an experimental repository of Whuffie: the Whuffie Bank.
Although this sounds facetious, it's a very simple solution to the complex problem of
tracking trust.
One prominent experiment in directly measuring trust is Honestly.com (formerly
Unvarnished), launched in beta form in 2010. You rate what trust you have in specific
individuals, and they might rate you. Honestly.com is pretty controversial and has at
tracted a lot of legal speculation. They're trying to address all the problems related to
the trustworthiness of the information they receive, and if they can do so, they might
become very successful.
This trustworthiness point raises an issue that all such systems have: they might
be easy to game. Any such system is vulnerable to disinformation attacks, whereby
people who are smart enough (and dishonest enough) can figure out how to fake good
or bad ratings. There are numerous very successful groups that are really good at such
disinformation in conventional and social media, often called "front groups," "influ
ence peddlers,” or "astroturfers." One good watchdog of such groups is the Center for
Media and Democracy.
Trust is transitive—it depends on the trustworthiness of the people who trust some
one. If person A trusts you, and person B trusts A, then that might affect how person
B measures your trustworthiness. However, such logic gets complicated when that web
of trust involves seven billion people—or even a few thousand people. It's a research
problem.
How do we trust the custodians of trustworthiness? We need to have some confi
dence that they're not fiddling the ratings, that they're reasonably secure. After all,
trust and reputation are really valuable assets.
I think the solution lies in a network of trust and reputation systems. We're seeing
the evolution of a number of different ways of measuring trust, which reflects a human
reality; different people think of trust in different ways.
The repositories of trust information are the banks in which we store this big asset.
Like any banks, having a lot of this kind of currency confers a lot of power. Having
competition provides checks and balances.
Foreword xi
To restate the bottom line: we are already seeing a shift in power and influence, a
big wave that will be significant by the end of this decade. Right now, it's like the mo
ment before a tsunami, in which the water is drawn away from the shore. It's time to
get ahead of that curve.
As you read this book, here are some questions to ask yourself:
• How might reputation help build "the immune system of democracy"?
• What "immune system disorders" would you suggest watching for?
• What opportunities do you see?
Those who are building, using, and regulating reputation systems should be think
ing about what change they want to see in the world. Now is also a good time for those
people to think about what unanticipated consequences their work might have.
Once the bugs are worked out, reputation and trust might be a key part of the
immune system of democracy—a set of technologies and practices that help power,
influence, and legitimacy to flow toward those who are willing and able to tackle the
challenges that affect us all.
