Reputation management

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Reputation management involves recording a person or agent's actions and the opinions of others about those actions (i.e. one's repute or reputation). These records can then be used in a trust model in order to allow other people (or agents) to make informed decisions about whether to trust that person or not.

A reputation management system which uses pre-programmed criteria for reputation management automates the process of encouraging cooperative behavior over selfish behavior.

Reputation management is also a definition of the objective of public relations. While not all PR campaigns are manipulative or deceptive, many of the world's largest PR firms have been involved in disinformation campaigns. This ties closely to the question of negative vs. positive repute and whether positive repute without the integrity of an audit process is just dangerous - this question is most critically investigated by projects such as SourceWatch.ORG. Compare with brand management - the exploitation of positive repute to associate one's services with good things regardless of their actual comprehensive outcome, which is diametrically opposed to the goals of moral purchasing projects such as Adbusters or Consumerium.

Real world communities

Small town

The classic example of reputation management is the small town. Population is small and interactions between members frequent; most interactions are face-to-face and positively identified -- that is, there is no question who said or did what. Reputation accrues not only throughout one's lifetime, but is passed down to one's offspring; one's individual reputation depends both on one's own actions and one's inherited reputation.

There are generally few formal mechanisms to manage this implicit reputation. The town diner and barber shop serve as forums for exchange of gossip, in which community members' reputations are discussed, often in frank terms. Outstanding members may receive small, symbolic awards or titles, but these are mere confirmations of general knowledge.

There is exceedingly little deviation from community norms in a small town. This may be seen as either good or bad; there is little crime, but also little room for dissent or change. The small-town model scales poorly; it depends on each member having enough experience of a large number of other members, and this is only possible up to a point - see Rule of 150.

Big city

The large metropolitan area is at the other end of the spectrum from the small rural town. Community members come and go daily, and most members are only personally acquainted with a small fraction of the whole. Implicit reputation management continues to work within subcommunities, but for the city as a whole, it cannot.

Big cities have developed a large array of formal reputation management methods. Some apply only to subcommunities, such as, say, an association of local dentists. There are four methods (among others) which apply quite generally to the entire population: elections, appointments, the criminal justice system, and racial or ethnic prejudice.

  • The city is governed in part by elected officials -- persons who are given special powers by popular vote at regular intervals. Campaigns are often well-financed efforts to force a positive image of a candidate's reputation upon the electorate; television is often decisive. Elected officials are primarily concerned with preserving this good reputation, which concern dictates their every public action. Failure to preserve a good reputation, not to mention failure to avoid a bad one, is often cause for removal from office, sometimes prematurely. Candidates and officials frequently concentrate on damaging the reputations of their opponents.
  • Appointed officials are not elected; they are granted special powers, usually by elected officials, without public deliberation. Persons wishing to be appointed to office also campaign to increase their perceived reputation, but the audience is much smaller. Effective actions and demonstrated merit are often important factors in gaining a positive reputation, but the definition of this merit is made by the elected, appointing officials, who tend to evaluate merit as it applies to them, personally. Thus persons who work hard to increase an elected official's reputation increase their own, at least in their patron's eyes. Some appointees have no other qualification beyond the fact that they may be depended on at all times to support their patrons.
  • The stresses of big city life lead to much crime, which demands punishment, on several grounds. The severity of this punishment and of the efforts of the system to inflict it upon a community member depends in no small part on that individual's prior experiences within the system. Elaborate records are kept of every infraction, even of the suspicion of infractions, and these records are consulted before any decision is made, no matter how trivial. Great effort is expended to positively identify members -- driver's licenses and fingerprints, for example -- and any use of an alias is carefully recorded. Some small punishments are meted out informally, but most punishments, especially severe ones, are given only after a long, detailed, and formal process: a trial, which must result in a conviction, or finding of guilt, before a punishment is ordered.
Although it is sometimes said that serving one's punishment is sufficient penalty for the commission of a crime, in truth the damage to one's reputation may be the greater penalty -- damage both within the system itself and within other systems of urban reputation management, such as that of elections to office. Between the explicit punishment and the damage to one's reputation, the total effect of a conviction in the criminal justice system so damages a person's ability to lead a normal life that the process, at least ostensibly, is meticulous in determining guilt or lack thereof. In case of "reasonable" doubt, a suspected malefactor is freed -- though the mere fact of the trial is recorded, and affects his future reputation.
  • The ordinary citizen, meeting a stranger, another citizen unknown to the first, is rarely concerned that the second may be an official, elected or otherwise; even so, he may be aware of the relative failure of reputation management in this regard. He does not have easy access to the database of the criminal justice system, and portions are not publicly available at all. Lacking other means, he often turns to the mock-system of racial or ethnic prejudice. This attempts to extend the small-town model to large communities by grouping individuals who look alike, dress alike, or talk alike. One reputation serves for all. Each individual is free to compose his personal measure of a group's reputation, and actions of strangers raise or lower that reputation for all group members.

The high incidence of crime, the proverbial incompetence of officials, and constant wars between rival, self-identified groups speaks poorly of all systems of urban reputation management. Together, they do not function as well as that of the small town, with no formal system at all.

Online communities

eBay

eBay is an online marketplace, a forum for the exchange of goods. The feedback system on eBay asks each user to post his opinion (positive or negative) on the person with whom he transacted. Every place a user's system handle ("ID") is displayed, his feedback is displayed with it.

Since having primarily positive feedback will improve a user's reputation and therefore make other users more comfortable in dealing with him, users are encouraged to behave in acceptable ways -- that is, by dealing squarely with other users, both as buyers and as sellers.

Most users are extremely adverse to negative feedback and will go to great lengths to avoid it. There is such a thing as feedback blackmail, in which a party to a transaction threatens negative feedback to gain an unfair concession. The fear of getting negative feedback is so great that many users automatically leave positive feedback, with strongly worded comments, in hopes of getting the same in return.

The main result of the eBay reputation management system is that buyers and sellers are generally honest. There are abuses, but not to the extent that there might be in a completely open or unregulated marketplace.

Everything2

Everything2, like Wikipedia, purports to be a general knowledge base. E2 manages user reputation strongly; one might say it is central to the project's paradigm. Each user's "writeup" carries its own score, or "vote" total. Users who read writeups are encouraged to vote on them; after voting, a user is shown the current score. There is a complicated system for totaling ratings and rewarding users whose writeups score highly; users who vote are also rewarded.

Users themselves are explicitly ranked; writing many writeups which get good reviews moves the user up the scale, and more highly ranked users get more powers.

The main result of E2's system is that writers tend to focus on their position in the hierarchy and pander for positive votes. Trivial, easy, but amusing writeups dominate long, difficult, boring, and controversial ones.

Slashdot

Slashdot contains little original content, instead revolving around short reviews of content exterior to the site. "Karma" is Slashdot's name for reputation management. "Moderators" are able to vote on both reviews themselves and comments on those reviews in a system not too dissimilar from E2's. In a novel twist, votes are not merely "+1 point" or "-1 point"; moderators also attach one of a list of predefined labels, such as Flamebait or Informative.

Score is displayed next to each comment. Additionally, any user may set a personal preference to exclude the display of comments with low scores. Users acquire "karma" based, among other things, on the scores of their comments, and karma affects a user's powers. Almost any user may become a moderator, although this status is temporary; thus the average user is not able to vote on any comment. Once a moderator uses up his votes, he returns to the status of ordinary user.

Slashdot has become extremely popular and well-read; used as a verb, it refers to the fact that a website mentioned in Slashdot is often overwhelmed with visitors. There is frequent criticism of Slashdot, on many grounds; the karma system is intentionally not transparent and trolling has become not merely an art in itself, but an institution, a house of many rooms. Anonymous cowards are permitted and range freely, as do sock puppets.

Nonetheless, Slashdot's karma system may account for at least part of its endurance and popularity.

Meatball Wiki

Meatball is a wiki devoted to discussion of so-called "online communities", including wikis themselves; thus, it is a metawiki. Its membership is not large. Meatball permits anonymous users, but relegates them to an inferior status:

"If you choose not to introduce yourself, it's assumed you aren't here to participate in exchanging help, but just to 'hang out.'" [1]

While anonymous posters are tolerated, pseudonymous users are not. Thus online handles are supposed to mirror users' real names -- their names in the outside world, on their birth certificates. The control on this is not rigorous -- users are not required to fax in their passports in order to verify their identities -- but the convention is supposed to be generally followed; at least it is not openly mocked.

Thus identified, Meatball's users' reputations are managed much as they are in the small town. That is, there is little formal management, but every user carries in his head his own "score", according to his own rating system, based on his personal evaluation of a given other user's character. This implicit reputation system is, of course, a part of every online community in which handles or names of any kind are used; but in Meatball, it is the whole.

Despite (or because of?) this lack of formal method, Meatball has discussed the problems of reputation management extensively. We will not attempt to link to every relevant page, but one might begin to explore that discussion here.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a general-content wiki; it includes a very wide range of topics, and exclusion of almost any topic is disputed. There is a large number of community members. Anonymous users are welcomed, and most users are pseudonymous, though many do use real names. As in many online communities, some users are sock puppets, although these are discouraged.

Wikipedia, like Meatball or the small town, has no formal method for managing reputation. Barnstars may be awarded for merit, but any user may make such an award. There is a hierarchy of users, such as in Slashdot or Everything2; but it is obscure, coarsely graded, and downplayed. It is not even clear who has been granted what powers, or what a user must do to rise to which level. As in most wikis, there is an elaborate history feature, which may be explored by any user to determine which contributions were made by which users. Any user may examine a list of another user's contributions. Edits may be discussed in a variety of forums, but there is no particular grading or rating system, either for edits or community members.

Wikipedia's size, stature, and growing prominence in the larger world have attracted many users -- some of them troublesome. The small-town method, where reputation is managed implicitly, has begun to break down; it is no longer possible for any one user to know the majority of other users, to have any sort of personal opinion on all of them. The community has responded by developing, ad hoc, reputation management techniques borrowed from other, existing systems. There are at least three classes of such technique.

  • Flooding is something like a political campaign of the big city; it involves the posting of comments in multiple locations, all pointing to a given community member. The actor or actors attempt to bring the target to the special attention of the community at large and to that of powerful members; the goal is to raise or lower the target's reputation. This generally fails, due to the large number of competing demands for attention.
  • Trolling is also common on Wikipedia. Whether trolls vandalize pages or post highly personal opinions, they attempt to raise their reputation among large numbers of community members via outrageous acts, and provoke others to damage their own. This may succeed in the short run, but generally fails due to lack of interest and, again, competing demands for attention.
  • Tribunals, large and small, have grown up, modeled more or less explicitly on the urban criminal justice system. Rules of procedure are established in detail; members or their proxies are "arrested" and put into the system; evidence is gathered, documented, and examined; members of the tribunal debate and vote; a punishment is meted out. As in the model, simple participation as a target of a tribunal damages a member's reputation whether the outcome is for or against him.

Neither informal, implicit personal reputation management nor explicit rewards for merit provide sufficient incentive to deter behavior that deviates from community norms, nor do they provide sufficient grounds upon which to judge the reliability of any user's contributions. In particular, new members and visitors have essentially no way to determine whether any given content was created by a member with high or low reputation.

Those who flood or troll are generally thought of as being problems in themselves, rather than elements of an ad hoc reputation management method. In any case, the cure may be worse than the disease.

Tribunals have little support from Wikipedia's functional framework compared, say, to the rating system of Everything2. Their legitimacy and procedures are constantly questioned. Like their models, they are slow to act and consume considerable community resources in doing so. They have proven of limited value in dealing with troublesome users, and as the community continues to grow in size, their inefficiencies and limitations will further impair their effectiveness.

See also

External links

References

Adapted from Wikipedia en: wikipedia: reputation management under the GNU Free Documentation License.

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