2022-08-07
An autonomous reputation system
https://reb00ted.org/tech/20220810-autonomous-reputation-system/
Context: We never built an open reputation system for the internet. This was a mistake, and that’s one of the reasons why we have so much spam and fake news.
But now, as governance takes an ever-more prominent role in technology, such as for the ever-growing list of decentralized projects e.g. DAOs, we need to figure out how to give more power to “better” actors within a given community or context, and disempower or keep out the detractors and direct opponents. All without putting a centralized authority in place.
Proposal: Here is a quite simple, but as I think rather powerful proposal. We use an on-line discussion group as an example, but this is a generic protocol that should be applicable to many other applications that can use reputation scores of some kind.
-
Let’s call the participants in the reputation system Actors. As this is a decentralized, non-hierarchical system without a central power, there is only one class of Actor. In the discussion group example, each person participating in the discussion group is an Actor.
An Actor is a person, or an account, or a bot, or anything really that has some ability to act, and that can be uniquely identified with an identifier of some kind within the system. No connection to the “real” world is necessary, and it could be as simple as a public key. There is no need for proving that each Actor is a distinct person, or that a person controls only one Actor. In our example, all discussion group user names identify Actors.
-
The reputation system manages two numbers for each Actor, called the Reputation Score S, and the Rating Tokens Balance R. It does this in a way that it is impossible for those numbers to be changed outside of this protocol.
For example, these numbers could be managed by a smart contract on a blockchain which cannot be modified except through the outlined protocol.