This is a question that often comes up in our conversations And one that we must be mindful of. Here are a couple points to consider though:
Reputation thrives under diversity and contextuality, so building the stacked up structures that are common in the traditional economy are harder. For example a single, centralised top-down score for âwho is the best film criticâ isnât as effective as a fragmented mosaic of reputation scores. Thatâs because who I might consider a good film critic might differ from yours. Building reputation as an economy is the key here since it promotes this multi-dimensional approach.
This might be worth an extended conversation - but Iâll put it out anyway. Since reputation is fundamentally non-zero-sum - thereâs never a question of âinclusionâ as you do with money. Anyone can leverage the reputation economy as long as there is rich social fabric i.e. a community of people willing to validate your work.
We think these two point go a long way in building a meritocracy of sorts, and reducing some of the inequities that exist in the current economy system.
Does being agent centric also mean that reputation scores are not objectively true, but clearly originating from specific agents doing the rating? e.g., if someone has a habit of giving unfair scores, then collectively we should be able to see that ratings from this person are less reliable than others.
Reputations can be either objective or subjective, and can be relative or absolute.
Absolute objective reputations are relatively easy to do (exam grades, traffic violations, no. of likes on a post) but they are not very rich. They are unable to capture more subtle judgements, and how it matters to you.
So unfair scores definitely are a a good use case for the power of relative and subjective ratings. If everyone who you value rates a certain individualâs subjective ratings poorly then that should show up to you when you interact with that person.
(Combining this with the question by @dellams above: Can you please expand on the relative reputation score (context) as well as staking? Thank you. ) @Brooks
@jakob.winter, yes youâre right - reputation data is of two types: objective data as well as subjective view points. While objective data is easier to handle, subjective data is best represented through âRelative Reputationâ.
This is captured in point no. 3 of the Reputation Economy principles Relative Reputation basically means the reputation score is a function of âwho is queryingâ. In other words, the score that you see about your ride share driver is a function of your context (maybe your network, or preferences in the past etc.) and not an absolute score that everyone sees in the same way.
This sounds complex, but is actually highly intuitive in agent centric environments like Holochain - since we arenât trying to establish universal consensus. Reputation scores get calculated on individual user chains, which hold information that is relevant to us, and not the entire community.
So to answer your question in a sentence, the key lies in embracing relativity, and staying away from absolute, monolithic definitions of reputation.
âWe now know that the problems of climate change, lack of emotional well-being, and inequity canât be solved with material capital alone. They require organised efforts to facilitate cultural shifts, re-building social fabric, information sharing and more.â
How do you see reputational currencies contributing to the resolution of such problems?
At an abstract level, we are creating a formal economic language for reputation. This enables reputation to serve as an economic vehicle for social, cultural and informational capital. Itâs a sharp contrast to money serving as the only vehicle available for all forms of capital.
In more tangible terms, it allows entrepreneurs or people driving movements to reward specific behaviour in tangible, yet non monetary ways.
So in terms of contributing to solving the big problems of our time, we see reputational currencies as a way to introduce more meritocracy into wider discussions and social exchanges. Valuing agent centric reputations should drive a different set of outcomes from the ones we are getting today.
What are your personal stories? What inspired you to become interested in these current-sees and reputation?
What is your personal motivation to build this ecosystem? Is there a vision you would like to see in your personal live and/or in the world because of what you are building?
What motivated you to create your app/platform?
After a life as a mainstream trader, I spent four years at a community founded by Gandhi where I came across living examples of distributed economics. A conversation with Eric Harris-Braun in 2014 sparked Sacred Capital. Weâve been formally developing the project since 2017. The intention is to build a formal economic language for multi-dimensional value, not only material value.
By economically viable, do you mean monetarily rewarding? Yes, absolutely. Eventually, the aim is to build reputation as a thriving economy in itself, that intersects with the money when contextually appropriate. However, we leave that decision up to the app creator (Reputation Labs will also assist entrepreneurs in figuring the best way to do this). For example, âpunctualityâ may warrant a monetary reward in some situations like highly time sensitive work, but may require other benefits in other applications.
Over time, we hope reputation forms as a wealth system in itself. And once thatâs in place we can explore models like reputation backed mutual credit/equity and debt issuances. These are financing models still prevalent in less industrialised nations - where money is circulated on the basis of social fabric. With the advent of distributed ledgers, these models can be further accelerated and we hope to eventually reach a situation where money transfers may begin to be replaced by decentralised money issuances.
The vision for our dashboard encompasses this - you would be able to view your reputation scores across networks, and simultaneously view the available credit that you can draw down at any given moment. (But all of this is for later - itâs not something we will lead our development with).
We think reputation economies have remarkable implications for organisations since they provide programmatic social fabric. Some of this will evolve over the coming years, so itâs better to not over-speculate at this point. But the gist is organisations in the traditional economy do not have access to a formal economic language for reputation - as a result, reputation was articulated and captured through managers in the âcompanyâ or the ânon profit orgâ.
With reputation economies, we can break past some of the human limitations of articulating performance/human potential/reputation and hold them in truly scalable ways. In other words, organisations of the future might look more like social networks, designed for specific purposes, fuelled by reputation currencies. These networks of people will have far greater organisational capabilities.
Like we mentioned before, this might be a bit further out in the future, so Iâll leave it at that
To add on @Bhuva, this diversity is celebrated. By designing reputation as an economy, you enable any app/eco-system to benefit from network effects for their reputation scores irrespective of scale.
Love the ideas shared by Sacred Capital and the deeper questions here? My interest was in know about the macroeconomic picture and how ready are as a whole to move to these new ways of thinking and engaging with each other (via reputation, user-owned data, so on). Whats our sense of the adoption enablers and timeline for early adopters and subsequent folks?
Spreading an economic language for reputation is going to be a very long process. Sacred Capital has been on this journey for many years now.
But for us this next twelve months is where the theory moves into practise. We want to put the tools in the hands of early adopters and support them with training and information on designing reputation. Our plan is to first publish some basic zomes for managing and calculating reputations for app developers to start building on.
The last few months, both within our own networks and in wider discussions, we have seen a lot of interest and talk on why reputation is needed. This is why we are moving now put it into practise. We believe that by this time next year we will see a lot of applications, both agent centric and data centric, implementing reputation.
This has been a wonderful AMA! The questions and answers were informative and thought-provoking! Weâre looking forward to hearing about your projectâs progress and exciting updates!
This AMA thread is now closed. If you have questions after the planned AMA, feel free to ask them here.
And one that we must be mindful of. Here are a couple points to consider though:
