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Rate my startup: community reputation system.

14 points by jwegener ↗ HN
I'm participating in Lean Startup Machine (a 54-hour startup weekend dedicated to learning and implementing Lean Startup principles). My team is working on building a simple out-of-the-box reputation system.

The tool helps busy bloggers and community managers better manage trolls, spammers and inappropriate content. It also helps encourage participation on blogs.

Would love some feedback on the concept: whether it addresses an issue you've had, and whether the any of you community manager types would be willing to pay for this tool that can deliver productivity gains.

http://www.ReputAPI.com

Thanks in advance! -Jonathan

8 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] thread
skymt
Your site says nothing of how the system actually works. How does it identify individuals across sites? How is reputation calculated?

If you did this the obvious way (HN or Reddit-style karma keyed to email addresses), you're going to run into a couple problems. First: if your startup takes off, users with a grudge will have a way to hurt another user's reputation across a large chunk of the Internet. This is obviously an issue with existing reputation systems, but there the damage is contained.

Second: trolls are accustomed to creating new addresses for each campaign on a troll-hostile site. The users you really need to worry about wouldn't have negative karma, they'd have a blank slate.

habiteer
I'm one of the other participants. It is true that the site does not have much content at all, we're just throwing something out there to get feedback from potential customers as quickly as possible. The idea is to let implementors/sites choose whether they will keep the reputation-system scoped to their site only, to a collection of sites (usually in the same space), or globally.

Our algorithm for calculationg reputation is an improved upon version of the attack-resiliant trust metrics of http://advogato.org.

shirtless_coder
vaporware alert
prodigal_erik
This. Maybe they've done some actual work, but there's no way to tell from reading this. It reeks of a "dry testing" scam.

Edit: Oh, it seems they started ... yesterday. There simply isn't enough here for any meaningful feedback.

bosch
It'd be nice if I could find out some more information without having to enter my e-mail address. Until your website has built up it's "reputation" you might want to have more information available without requiring an e-mail as people might not trust something they haven't heard about before.
ryanelkins
There is a book that came out a few months ago by the people who built the reputation system that Yahoo uses called, aptly enough, "Building Web Reputation Systems". It's a really good book. One of the things they make very clear is that the idea of trying to build a globally useful reputation system is basically a pipe dream.

The problem is that reputation is earned in context. So, reputation on a particular blog is useful, but trying to extrapolate that out to be useful on another blog is not as useful. Reputation gained in one domain is not really transferable to another. (As an example - if Jon Skeet had a cooking.stackexchange beta account, he shouldn't be automatically the most reputable user just because he has the top stackoverflow account - cooking and coding aren't directly transferable skills.) The best you can hope for is saying that this person is not a troll or spammer. The real hard part is, say, for Wordpress, it's easy for people to create a new account - how do you distinguish between new people and trolls on new accounts? This is probably the fatal flaw for the use case you are espousing.

You also need to think about how you're going to control overprotective "old timer" members. I've read of people that put in systems only to have the top members down mod everyone else so they could protect their top spots. I assume for the Wordpress plugin that you are going to add some sort of comment voting system. (On a side not that's ANOTHER problem with blogs - there isn't much a person can actually do on them - read a post, comment, maybe vote in a poll - hard to build a reputation system around that).

Obviously, since my startup (IActionable) is in the same space and would be a competitor I believe in the general concept, but I think many people make the mistake in thinking that it is an easy problem to solve. Blogs especially are a tough nut to crack because you have to add in a lot of functionality that most of them don't come with.