Why The Internet Needs Proof Of Trust

Wojak doesn’t know who to trust

A Crisis of Trust

We are experiencing a crisis of trust in online media. The internet has taught us to distrust TV pundits, news media and other authority figures (often rightly so), yet has failed to provide tools to help us identify who we should trust. This is because the business models of social media platforms are driven by engagement, not trust.

Put simply, even if Jack Dorsey wants to make Twitter a healthier place, the platform’s business model won’t let him. Twitter is funded by clicks.

Trust as a Business Model

Ironically, we are experiencing a proliferation of tech-mediated trust in the world of sharing economies. We’re increasingly willing to get into strangers’ cars and allow strangers to sleep in our homes because corporations like Uber and Airbnb were able to quantify, materialize and monetize trust — so why can’t we do the same with content?

Proof Of Trust

If we want a healthier information environment, we need to design scalable content-based business models that depend on trust.

At Relevant we’ve created a trust metric that can be used by online communities to moderate and monetize content. It’s a reputation system inspired by web of trust and the pagerank algorithm. We are following a few core principles in our designs:

1. Trust is subjective and should never be centralized. Each online community should be able to create and manage their own trust metric and decide on which subjective values it represents.
2. Trust metrics should be resistant to sybil attacks. Creating multiple accounts in order to game trust scores should not be possible.
3. Trust metrics should be transparent. Communities need to be able to monitor and audit trust scores in order to ensure their health and mitigate manipulation attacks.

Trust Markets

For Uber and Airbnb, trust has a very specific and narrow definition: trust that the driver will get you where you need to go and trust that a guest won’t trash your home. When we let communities define and quantify their own context for trust, it can take on a variety of meanings: trust in getting expert opinions on a given topic, trust in getting reliable information, trust in thoughtful engagement, etc. But no matter the context, the trust metric will always represent what is valuable to users. As we have come to realize this stands in sharp contrast to engagement metrics.

Because it is quantifiable, the subjective value produced by each community can be traded in the marketplace. In particular, if we have a concrete and manipulation-resistant metric, we can design a prediction market around it. This prediction market is a base layer for constructing various business models for online content.

Key benefits of trust markets:

• Economic activity can subsidize content creation, curation and community infrastructure.
• Price discovery for content. Prices are a prediction of the value of content to a specific community and as such are a good indication of actual value.
• Trust markets can provide ways for communities to monetize their content either though advertising, subscriptions or micro-payments.
• Economic value flows to communities and to users who provide value.
• Power remains in the hands of communities. They decide if, when and how to monetize their output.

You Can Try It Today!

We launched a beta version of the Relevant app a little over a month ago and it has a fully functional trust metric (Reputation) and prediction market. Much of the complexity is hidden under the hood, but as you use the app you’ll get a glimpse of how Reputation and Relevant economics work.

Here are some tips for building your trust score:

• Find high-ranking posts and add some useful commentary, analysis or references. This kind of contribution has the highest chance of being upvoted because members are already engaging with the content. If you can add something relevant to the conversation, your Reputation is bound to increase.
• Be thoughtful when posting new articles. Consider whether the article is relevant to the community you’re posting in and whether it contributes to ongoing themes and conversations. Add thoughtful / useful comments to articles you post.
• Don’t spam the feed — members will get annoyed if you post too much unrelated content and will downvote your comments.

How to Earn Relevant Coins (Playing the Prediction Market):

• Be the first one to upvote a quality post. Early voters get the most rewards.
• Only upvote quality posts. Posts with below-average rankings don’t get any rewards.
• You don’t earn rewards from upvoting comments, only links and top-level threads.
• The more tokens you hold, the bigger each bet, and the bigger portion of the rewards you’ll earn.
• Don’t try to upvote every single post. A portion of your tokens are locked up with every vote, so you’ll soon run out of tokens to stake.

Sign up for Relevant, or get in touch via Slack or Twitter.