Reputation systems
Reputation is something that we deal with every single day. It helps us to make assumptions about how people will act in various situations. But what actually is reputation? And why is it so important online? This article looks at some of the challenges that face those looking to create reputation systems, and how Xpressify solves these problems in a unique way.
📚 TL;DR
- Online reputation systems help us trust strangers, and we use them every day in apps like Uber and Airbnb and on sites like eBay and Amazon.
- Reputation systems in job marketplaces are unfortunately broken — they are easy to cheat and new participants are often blocked from opportunities by those with established reputations.
- Xpressify is uniquely positioned to solve these problems by leveraging crypto-economics and automated workflow systems.
Trust is an essential part of our day-to-day lives; so integral, in fact, that we often forget it’s there. Every time we go to the supermarket to buy food, we’re trusting that it’s safe to eat. We trust our partners to treat us with respect, and we trust our friends to support us when we need them. Even things like money require trust — whenever we receive fiat currency, we’re trusting that it’ll maintain its value into the future.
When our trust is broken, it can hurt. If governments don’t keep a check on financial instruments, the value of our currency can change and lead to dire economic outcomes. If someone we love breaks our trust it can put into question everything we thought we knew about that person. If a business breaks our trust by not delivering on a promise, we often never return and even tell our social circles to do the same.
Trust, be it in our personal lives or in business, goes hand in hand with reputation. We get reputation over time through consistency in our behaviors: if I regularly break promises to my friends, I’ll get the reputation as someone who is unreliable, and if a business consistently delivers great service to their customers, their reputation for good customer service will spread through the community. The relationship between trust and reputation is such that reputation tells us to what extent we can trust other parties for certain things.
Trusting strangers online
In a geographical community, trust and reputation builds over time. Businesses can be slow to change, so it’s likely that the same mechanic or supermarket will service the same people for years. Over this time we learn through our experiences and the experiences of others whether or not to trust their services.
The internet, however, is not limited by geography. Buying something on eBay means that the seller can be anywhere in the world, and that we may only deal with them once. We might not know anyone else who has dealt with them, and we probably haven’t heard any rumors about them from the local gossip. Still, we need to know if we can trust this stranger to deliver on what they promise, and this is why digital marketplaces developed reputation systems.
Reputation systems have changed the way that we interact with businesses, both online and offline. Every time you choose to leave one or five stars, you’re interacting with a reputation system. Every review you leave on Yelp powers their reputation system for restaurants, and even Airbnb hosts leave reputation scores for their guests to let others know whether you’re going to steal the cutlery. Reputation systems have become so powerful that just a few bad reviews can ruin a business, and unfairly negative Yelp reviews have already been the subject of defamation proceedings.
Reputation systems incentivize everyone to behave properly. If I’m selling little porcelain statues on eBay, it’s in my best interest to ensure that the orders are filled quickly, arrive without damage and that the product descriptions accurately match what I’m shipping. If I do all of this, I’ll surely receive positive feedback from customers and they’ll give me good scores on all of eBay’s reputation metrics. This means that the next potential customer will see their reviews, believe I can be trusted, and give me another sale. If I send plastic figures instead of porcelain, or if they’re broken when they arrive, or if they just don’t show up, I’ll instead receive negative feedback. The next person to visit my store will then see this and decide to take their money elsewhere, until one day you’re simply out of business.
Challenges for reputation systems
While a good reputation system should be easy to use, designing one that works effectively is a challenge. There are several important requirements in a fair reputation system, and striking the right balance between them can be difficult. To help understand why we can consider a few different situations.
- Unreliable reviewers. Imagine you receive a negative review from someone who is just interested in being mean, with the content of their review not bearing any resemblance to the actual interaction you had. In this case the reputation system needs to be able to determine malicious reviews from the legitimate ones, perhaps through a dispute system or with an algorithm that monitors the behavior of reviewers to detect whether they’re leaving fair reviews.
- Unfair advantages. Congratulations! You’ve just decided to quit your job as a web developer and to try to make it on your own as a freelancer. You navigate to a job marketplace, set up a profile and wait. And wait. And wait. You’re experienced, but nobody is hiring you. Why? Because you don’t have any reputation. People naturally prefer to deal with those with established reputations over those with none, which makes getting any reputation at all a serious challenge for new entrants into these marketplaces.
- Users in disguise. The gig is up on my eBay store. I’ve sold too many fake porcelain statues, and now my reputation is in ruins. Nobody is dealing with me, and rightfully so — I’m a scammer and a terrible businessperson. But there is still hope for my future income. All I need to do is create a new email, set up a new account and my reputation is returned to neutral. I can begin again the dodgy behavior that got me a negative reputation in the first place. But stopping people from creating multiple accounts is only one-half of the problem — there are bustling account marketplaces where anyone can buy verified accounts with established reputations on a range of online platforms. Anyone can buy the disguise of a reputable face, and there is very little anyone can do to stop them.
Creating a reputation system that is scalable, efficient and fair has so far eluded most platforms. Major jobs marketplaces still exclude newer participants and cannot effectively deal with reputation fraud through profile selling. As a result, clients and professionals alike are losing time and money and are finding it hard to trust the systems designed to measure trust.
Reputation on Xpressify 🐝
Solving the reputation dilemma is central to our mission at Xpressify. As a hub for project development that connects professionals with those needing their services, a fair reputation system is one of the key features that sets us apart from the competitors. There are several key features that make the Xpressify reputation system different.
First, new users can complete sandbox tasks which are checked by skill-verified Masters. These Masters have put up a stake in the system, so if they’re caught giving unfair evaluations, they risk losing money. This evaluation serves as the first review for new users and unlocks the platform, so even clients know that everyone in the Xpressify jobs marketplace is capable of doing what their profile says they can do.
New users are also prioritized for low-risk tasks by our automated workflow system, Hive. Being assigned simple tasks means that these users can build reputation without having the age of their account impeding them from even beginning.
Next, users have a range of tools that give them verifiable data to back their reputations. Optional task monitoring software can track efficiency without relying on subjective opinions, and in the event of a dispute, can be used to prove certain claims. All this data feeds into a user’s reputation score and in doing so reduces the impact of human bias on their rating.
Finally, the unique reward mechanism offered by the Humankind Project incentivizes users to hold on to their accounts instead of simply selling them. This project will see a portion of the profits from Xpressify distributed to all users quarterly, but only to unique, identity-verified people. It won’t be possible for an individual to set up more than one account. Selling your Xpressify profile means forgoing your share in the profits from the ecosystem.
This system is also built to disincentivize users from buying accounts. Due to the identity verification system, paying for an established account carries the significant risk that any funds associated with it can simply be withdrawn by the original account creator. This is a powerful incentive mechanism built on the concepts of decentralized finance (DeFi) and is something which existing centralized competitors simply can’t offer.
This post is part of a series where we explore the features that make Xpressify unique. You can read more details on our website, Xpressify.io, or in our whitepaper.
Be sure to keep up with us on all our social channels so that you don’t miss a thing! 🐝
Keep up with the Xpressify Hive:
Website: https://xpressify.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Xpressify
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xpressify
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xpressify
