Scoreboards Where You Can’t See Your Score

Reputation economies are pretty interesting. There's a trade-off inherent in them related to the number of potential sources of trusted information. If that number is small and the credits are hard to fake, you get corruption as the in-crowd uses the power it already has to increase its share. Over time, the reputation economy becomes "prestigious" but ineffective and harmful to society. That's Silicon Valley. On the other hand, if that number of credible sources is large, you don't have good-ol'-boy corruption in the reputation economy, but it's open to "flooding the channel" attacks.

Something that I've learned is that it's impossible to erase negative information (even, or I should say, especially if it's untrue) about anyone or anything. This is the "Streisand Effect". On the other hand, you have to flood the channel. I know someone who signed up for a bunch of social media profiles just to knock negative publicity off of his top 10 Google searches, who hired an Indian firm to astroturf-endorse him on LinkedIn, and who created a bunch of identical-looking articles (to the one describing his indiscretion) that popped the date of the damaging event back 8 years, making it appear to have happened when he was a teenager.

Flooding the channel is the absolute best defense against a reputation problem. Unfortunately, there's a fine line between that and spamming, which I think we all agree is bad for the world.

If you want to take the dystopia concept further-- and, for the record, I don't actually think that this will happen, but it could-- we may get to a point where it's impossible to get a "real" job without a ridiculous amount of public endorsement and credibility, so the bottom-90% who don't have that end up working in body shops where their jobs are to pump up the reputations of their clients. Instead of having Third World body-shops creating level-60 paladins or clerics in virtual worlds and selling them (and their equipment) for a few thousand bucks, they could be building up level-60 resumes and selling them to aspiring executives for much more.