whuffie
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^whuffie
Reputation currency. Coined by Cory Doctorow in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
You earn whuffie as people credit you out of respect, gratitude, pity, lust, love, or any other motive for popularity. Problems:
First, whuffie is undifferentiated. Respect ain't cash. Depending on the context, my having accrued whuffie for accomplishment at badminton shouldn't translate into whuffie for neurosurgical accomplishment.
Second, respect is barely transitive. I respect A, and A respects B, so I may respect B by association. But only so far. Add a few degrees, and the referral is useless.
Third, mutual respect is respect squared. I care if people I know and respect and love reciprocate. Whuffie from strangers matters less to me.
Fourth, I take pride that some people hate me. Know me by enemies. I'd rather have modest respect from those I respect in turn, than modest respect from a much larger crowd.
See also:
- the whuffie blog
- AKMA's report on trust metrics and reputation economics (Acrobat file)
- SmartMobs The Evolution of Reputation archives
- Learn Spanish Fast
I agree completely with your analysis and would like to suggest a way around some of inherent incompleteness of Cory's Whuffie concept. I'm working on an application in that will be, in essence, a reputation capital engine and I've come to think that there are really three (3) kinds of whuffie:
- Direct Whuffie: this is accrued from people you directly know (0 degrees of separation) or possibly at most 1 degree (people who directly know people you know).
- Indirect Whuffie: this is accrued from people at the 1st and 2nd degree level.
- Unsolicited Whuffie: this is from people at the 3rd degree of separation and/or people you don't know and have never met.
People can move up the chain but not back down (i.e., someone you've never met {yet} could one day become your best friend, but you can't "un-know them" once you know them.)
One should be able to choose whether or not to accept unsolicited Whuffie. Being forced to accept bad whuffie could leave truly good people with terrible reputations -- sort of like being damaged by hearsay/libel/slander. Sort of a "reputational denial of service attack".
A few other thoughts: whuffie needs categories in addition to the types defined above -- for example:
*technical decision making
*maturity
*reliability
*credibility
*fashion
*food
*sense of humor
- etc...
For example, I may trust someone's judgment on technical topics like systems design, and be quite happy with their over all reliability, but have had very bad experiences with them when they choose restaurants. The ability to represent a more dynamic picture of where someone has good taste/sense/experience versus where they might not have made such good choices would seem to me to help make whuffie a more realistic metric of reputation.
One should also be able to contribute/give Whuffie on only a single category. I.e., a missing category is a non-vote, not an implied negative.
David HM Spector
Eczema Treatment
See also:
