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Comment by kulikalov | Hacker News Reader

What's the killer feature? How is it drastically different from LinkedIn or Angel.co?

The TRU Score is the primary point of differentiation. The goal is to provide an independent way to measure reputation and trust, that uses community feedback.

There are many ways to generate a score for a person. Our method involves the trading of of virtual shares, which are bought/sold just like stocks. Share price changes are reflected in that persons TRU Score. The investments you make in others is reflected in your TRU Score.

https://sellff.com/about

I don't think this is how people's relationships work. Putting a number next to someone's name doesn't make this person more or less reliable. The only kind of recommendation that is trustworthy is the one made by someone you know.

To add to your point, different employers value different things in their employees. Some employers want a ton of reliability in their employees, whilst others obviously want a reasonable level of reliability but also employees who are creative and easy to get along with. And there are some where your personality doesn't matter so much as long as you get your work done.

The idea is interesting, and it's good that people experiment with such ideas, but I'm skeptical that this scoring concept isn't going to make people miserable and possibly going to be gamed easily.

A better way to compete with LinkedIn would be to simply get rid of the social media feed. I'd find LinkedIn much more pleasant if it wasn't full of trite platitudes, cringey corporate signaling, political grandstanding, dudebro philosophy around productivity, and so forth.

I think there is a range to this being true. Take app review score aggregation. Anything 3 stars and up is probably acceptable. You score a 1 star and within reason nobody will use the app. You can say similar things about tv/movie reviews, car safety scores, and I'm sure many other trust metrics.

And that is part of the problem space we are addressing. How do you find and select people to work with? Whether that is a plumber, accountant or software developer. It's great if you have a referral from a trusted friend. But what if your trusted friend does not have a referral? Or, if the referral is busy at the moment. The need still exists and you need to find a provider.

Perhaps the TRU Score is not the "perfect" solution, but I think it's far better than a simple star rating. How many times on HN do we see posts about people "buying" ratings or followers. As a result, people lose trust in the value of the rating system. So, we have created an alternative that we think people can trust.

A future release has planned to use Stripe Identity. Whereby, you will have confidence in the profile you are viewing and can make an informed buying decision. As designed, manipulation of the TRU Score [when combined with Identity], will be difficult.

I believed this, but watching the movie Parasite changed my perspective on personal recommendations more than a little bit.

This is a rather brittle concept. I certainly don't want someone judging me based off of my occasional use of a professional profile. I would feel very hesitant to allow a proprietary value algorithm to judge me in my professional life. And as a recruiter that value would essentially be mostly meaningless, I'd want to look at recommendations, and experience first. A score based on trading simply measures how good you are at trading, not how good you are at doing your job.

Thx for your comment. To be clear, the TRU Score is not limited to the trading of shares in your profile. It is an input, but not necessarily the one that weighs most heavily in the determination of a members TRU Score.

SELLFF offers multiple ways to support other members. You can write a review and go into details of your connection with another member. Buying shares of another member is an additional, low-friction way to show support. It's fast, easy and provides the added benefit that your investment might increase in value. Any investments you make are an input to your TRU Score. So, if you make good investments in other members your TRU Score will increase...even if your profile shares are not being traded.

I saw something about a trust score and some thing about investing on the site but I don't really understand how it works.

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