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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

What we need is a form of anonymous / pseudo-anonymous reputation brokerage. Tokens that identify not a person, but how trusted or how well liked that token has been used. You control your tokens, what networks, where they are used. An older token is worth more to you, and to others that see it. The values associated to a token varies depending on the tokens around it. Upvotes, downvotes, activities, flags from the various places where the token is uses contributes to the values attached to the tokens. It's a fuzzy concept at the moment, but I think as these new generation of applications grow, one that we may see evolve.

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That token breaks the very anonymity in the first place. The very essence of anonymity is having no reputation, no information whatsoever.

No, the very essence of anonymity is have no tie to one's physical identity.

No reputation or information is a recipe for meaninglessness; as a reader I have neither the time nor the tools to fully evaluate every statement ever made to me; I must use heuristics to aid my reading (e.g. I will almost certainly ignore anyone who claims the moon landings were hoaxes; it's not worth my time to investigate his claims).

I'm actually very excited by the idea of anonymous reputation, as it could enable all sorts of the things needed to have a well-run global network without enabling physical assaults on persons.

Many, many forums use a feeble ratings/trust indicator for pseudo-anon users but then you end up with a clique of highly rated posters and the circle jerk is complete. The whole point in anonymity is every post has it's merit in what it says not who wrote it. I can easily skim the various *chans, filtering out shitposting pretty quick.

For trading pseudo-anon there is already this reputation system which has worked well http://bitcoin-otc.com/trust.php

I wholeheartedly disagree with this, what you're essentially describing is just watered down identity. The whole point of the value of anonymity is that all posts are equal.

This is unrealistic and won't work in practice. If all posts are equal then all posts are equally worthless. It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation. If everyone is fully anonymous (in a stateless sense), then everyone is basically a "random internet dude".

> "It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation."

Not true. We do not need to accumulate reputation to have a meaningful conversation. For example, I've seen informative conversations on Secret with the only identity mechanism being the icon they're assigned (presumably at random per thread).

Edit: I also don't recall usenet having a mechanism that 'kept score'. Slightly before my time so I may be wrong about this.

But you have an identity mechanism; even if it is per thread, it allows you to attribute a collection of writings to a single author.

I'm not talking about "keeping score" in a system. I'm talking about the ways human handle identity and associate properties with objects. I may not see your karma, but I see your nick. I don't know your name, or anything about your life, but I know your nick is a reference a person somewhere. If I keep seeing comments written by user amirmc that stand out because of their clear argumentation and reasonable tone, I start to recognize the author and accumulate a feeling of respect. So the next time user amirmc disagrees with me, I treat the arguments with little more care and consideration than usual, because I recognize author as a reasonable person.

This is a natural mechanism of human interaction. My point is that if we reject the entire concept of identity, we will lose a lot of information vital to evaluating an argument.

The problem of pages like HN and SO is the artificial interaction, which the voting generates.

Yes, they probably can't find out that the 10k-karma-guy is Jack Miller, but all readers of his posts will be influenced by the 10k-karma.

HN hides the karma mostly. But SO shoves it right in your face, that some gold-20k-guy wrote an answer.

Also people will vote stuff up because they like it. This may be because it's high quality, but it doesn't have to.

Think of books, though. They're the best available counterpoint to what you're saying. People don't necessarily care about the author of a book, but they do care about the content of the book and its ability to piece together a larger idea.

Within forum post culture there's a built-in tendency for content to be fast and disposable. This makes identity relatively more valuable, because it allows a stream of posts to be put in context, just like with a book.

On the other hand, I might well not bother with a book unless I know the author of good. I'll almost certainly prefer a book with a known good author over one without. This is just to prevent my time from being wasted, to maintain a decent signal to noise ratio.

Not really. I might not know the author, but I rarely read completely random books. Most of the times I read things recommended by other people. The context is not in the book, it's in the way I found out about it.

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