Imagine if Theymos would just reset everyone reputation...
From my perspective of having spent almost a quarter-century enamoured of the idea of cryptographic currency plus reputation systems that would enable pseudonymous economic activity, it is only natural that I think this is a terrible idea. Actually, common sense and basic fairness say this is a terrible idea.
The people with good reputations would not work back up from zero: They would have just seen that valuable reputations they had worked hard to achieve had been arbitrarily “reset”, for the purpose of appeasing those with
bad reputations. Well, no good deed goes unpunished. What happened once, would surely happen again. Therefore, if not patently irrational and/or masochistic, they would leave the forum.
Although there may be mistakes made here and there, it is undoubtable that
most people with negative reputations have earned those reputations, too. The forum would be left with those, plus newbies (
i.e., fresh meat on a forum where everybody who’s not a newbie is a scammer).
Oh, joy!
(Dear readers, I apologize for having merely stated the obvious. It is bad form. Well, somebody had to.)
I'd be happy if the merits were reset as most of my early ones were to get used to the system.
That was your choice. Do you care to explain why others’ choices should be erased because you regret yours?
(And before anybody suggests that having much merit disqualifies me from speaking about merit...)
All the 'dt fun talk' would be gone along with red and green trust :o
Maybe Theymos can think of some better idea to stop and prevent 'more abuse dt wars'
It's not fun at all.
Well, I infer that was his purpose in neutering the effect of feedback, and essentially democratizing DT in a convoluted way.
My prediction as to the latter is that it will destroy the trust system. In the long term, it will put DT under control of those who optimize for gaining control of DT by any means necessary, and devote unbounded time and effort to doing so. That is a bad criterion. As for cleaning up these sordid threads, it will backfire and will escalate, not quash the perpetual DT wars: Demagogues, agitprop, and “negative campaign ads” thrive in such a system.
Not all of this will be obvious when the system is new, because old DT members started with an incumbent’s advantage; but given enough time, the rot will set in and take over. And tinkering with the DT selection algorithm will not help much; such as system as DT is a social problem, not amenable to such technological solutions without a human element that actually works.
Something analogous happened in American history. The revolutionary American founders were not titular nobility; but most were of the gentry, a high social class that was almost nobility. Compare long-established forum members who were at some point selected for DT1 (however imperfect the selective process may have been in both cases). For the first few decades of their new system, the most important elected positions were almost all filled from that class. Then rose “political machines” with gangsters, party politics in the worst modern sense, special-interest groups, etc. They sometimes used outright ballot-stuffing and fraud; similarly, we have circles of alts to Sibyl the system. Otherwise, they are just expert manipulators of mass opinion (
n.b., “confidence men” are so-called because they specialize in luring people to unwisely trust them). Well, now just look at ’em!
So as for my prediction of unintended consequences. Intelligent people may argue over this. The future will show who’s right.
What is not intelligently arguable, or even sensible, is the notion that depriving good people of good reputations, and relieving bad people of bad reputations, would achieve anything but to destroy the community in an instant.
Cui bono?
