On Mon, 19 Aug 1996 bryce@digicash.com wrote: [good ideas about distributed ratings systems]
There is the interesting issue of whether this will cause self-reinforcing "degeneration", where people (or an "affiliation"-keyed group of people) accidentally overlook a worthy page early in the game, and then, using each other's behavior to influence their own, reinforce that mistake.
It probably will. But people like being degenerates. Another interesting issue for privacy is setting the granularity of the information. If you know that only a few people have visited site A, and you tell the distributing service that you like site A, then the rating service has the potential to become a way to track people (to a certain margin of error). Were I running such a service, I wouldn't hand out information until enough static had accumulated to provide anonymity. -rich