I am replying to a message by A.Shostack about reputation systems. I regret that I will probably be unable to follow all aspects of this thread due to "engagements" but the dialogue so far has been fascinating (is anyone archiving cypherpunks for future historians? seems like it would be *hot* material when the world transitions to a "Cyberspatial Reality" (can't remember where I saw that term...) anyway, a few paragraphs caught my eye.
What if Alice can say "I think David is a fanatic. I also think David is a windbag." and she says these things in such a way that they can be automatically responded to by software? This would require a carefully chosen list of opinions that the system would support. If you had too many opinions, then the system would be worthless, because, in all probability, people would pick different descriptors, and the information would not correlate into anything useful. The list could probably be fairly short, allowing for terms like windbag, funny, fanatical, reasonable, knowledgeable, trustworthy.
there is a lot of merit in the simple idea you write about above, and I think it deserved to be explored by some "mad programmer" with enough coding talent and free time on his hands. any takers? <g>
But any system of personal reputations would fail, because bad mouthing someone with a digital reputation is an open act. Very few people would talk about Alice in a negative light if they know she will hear about it. And even if they do want to, there doesn't need to be an automated system to make it easier.
it seems to me that a lot of good ideas are dismissed here for the wrong reasons. what is one man's junk can be another man's gold. for example, suppose such a system as you indicate is in place. I can easily imagine that people would *love* to publicly trash other's people's reputations as a way of saying "I hate his guts, and I hope everyone else will not listen to him." public *negative* reputations are very important and are already quite ubiquitous in my opinion. they are the means by which a society exerts force on the individual to conform to social norms. and as reprehensible as that sounds to some of you, you cannot deny that exactly this mechanism is employed on the cypherpunks by e.g. TCMay et.al. i.e. the way TCMay loudly *****PLONKED***** someone recently, complaining about "fools and lightweights" for the sin of sending him an encrypted message that didn't contain any interesting criminal instigations <g> so this public broadcasting, this "*****PLONK*****" is often quite public, and you are quite mistaken in thinking people would shy away from it, those with the greatest reputations use it as a method of coercion, in a sense, a kind of cyberspatial peer pressure! "if you want to be my friend, you can't be his friend". this might be called the Larry Detweiler effect, although it appears to me he has been getting far to much credit lately, maybe the cypherpunk reputation servers have been hacked <g>
The big question in my mind is how to get people to feed enough information into it to seed the system? Once it gets started, it will run for a while on slow growth, and then explode at some random point. (Probably right after a serious design bug is discovered. :) After it explodes in terms of use, it will be self-perpetuating because of its usefulness.
I was saying to A.S. in private mail that I thought it was a pity that the cypherpunks didn't invent something like WWW that has really taken off. For example, If remailers are the natural role of future cyberspace, why haven't they caught on? I think because there is no incentive for an operator to run one, and in fact quite a lot of disincentive (who want to get the message "postmaster: please yank this account for sending trash). the best cyberspatial technologies have an inherent incentive to everyone that comes in contact with them, operators in particular (example: NNTP servers are fun for news admins to read, WWW pages are easy to install and act like miniature bulletin boards to get responses, etc). maybe the all-important role of anonymity and pseudonymity could gain widespread acceptance by "piggybacking" some other amazingly desirable system (such as reputation systems). but I really agree with A.S. that the "self-perpetuating explosion" is critial to new cyberspatial technology. it is like a meme spreading, like people latching on to the latest Billboard hit. A lot of the cypherpunk *ideas* have caught on like this, e.g. PGP, privacy, etc. but I would like to see a total *cypherpunk* software creation reach the Cyberspatial Hall of Fame (the anon.penet.fi remailer comes pretty darned close, but it is just one site.. and pgp, well Phil Zimmerman has said at times he's *not* a cypherpunk, because he wears suits <g>). maybe reputation systems will be the cypherpunk magic bullet. that makes me wonder: did Julf build his server after being inspired by the cypherpunks? or did he get the idea somewhere else? well, I have dropped a lot of hints in this message, and I have asked some people to agree to nondisclosure agreements on related issues, and it would be a bit hypocritical for me to say much more, so I probably won't elaborate much further than what I've said above for awhile. Mostly I wanted to give Adam Shoestack some credit for some good ideas. bye Vladimir Z Nuri vznuri@netcom.com ``Imagination is more important than knowledge.'' (Einstein)