Random Acts of Kindness: A Social Site I’d Love to See | Hacker News Reader

Random Acts of Kindness: A Social Site I’d Love to See

zenhabits.net

15 pointsryanwaggoner10 comments

I dont think it would really work, there isnt much you could do for an internet stranger than give money. pretty sure swapping book sites etc already exist.

so it seems like it would just be swamped with people wanting someone to randomly paypal them money, along with a sob story.

plus as mentioned in the comments, it kinda games the idea of karma if you have some badge pronouncing how "good" you are.

I think random acts of kindness are best done off the internet. I think what might make a cool site is somewhere for people to post random acts of kindness people have done for them. no real point to it, just feel good stories

Y'know, I started reading that post with a view towards making a cynical, snarky comment, but by the end it didn't seem such a bad idea.

You'd need to make sure the karma system couldn't be gamed, though -- either by automated actions (kind comments on everybody's walls) or collusion (two people [or a person and a sockpuppet] conspiring to give each other karma). I'm not sure that's solvable.

Gaming can be solved by introducing attack resistant trust metric. The best one the humankind has come up so far is money.

A brilliant comment, but sadly, electronic and paper money is not attack resistant.

Money is attack resistant. Those who think otherwise might end up in jail.

Money is attack resistant? Not entirely. Not to governments, who can raid your savings by printing more. Not to central banks, who have the same powers, despite not being part of the government. Not to corporations that are seen by corrupt governments as "too large to fail." Not to all manner of con artists who pass themselves off as legitimate people involved in finance.

And unfortunately, only a small minority of the above get jailed.

Yes, markets have remarkable resilience. But there are lots of vulnerabilities in markets in the world as it stands now.

Personally, this idea could be quite viral too. Imagine - you get 10 karma points when you invite someone to use the website because you just introduce someone into this Kind World.

Sounds like a fun game to me.

I'd put a "426 karma points" badge on my Facebook profile.

It sounds a lot like LETS:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Local_Exchang...

This would be a fantastic application in Facebook. I think you'd have luck in applying for the Facebook Fund.

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