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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

The trick is still: who does the investigation?

A past idea of mine is: everyone. Every vehicle registration accumulates points at the rate of one per week. Fingering another vehicle deducts 5 points from their total and (to deter false reports) one from yours. If your total is negative, you can't drive/ride.

There's probably a great deal wrong with this.

This would de-incentivize the reporting of infractions, which is the opposite of what you want.

You want to incentivize the reporting of verified infractions, while de-incentivize false reports. A consensus system could be used to "verify" a report.

In this kind of system, I think the negative points are to remove the burden of confirming infractions. It's in an individual's best interest to both keep driving AND to remove poor drivers. Hitting the correct ratio is the key.

Old people who don't drive would report one vehicle per week.

We could also do network analysis on the graph of people reporting other people. If there are any strange, unnatural patterns, they could be ignored. But if Jonny has been reported by 10 people in the last month, and those 10 are unrelated to each other, that would be compelling evidence Jonny is not behaving well. The system can still be gamed if a group of people are organized online to report targets (like 4chan does DDOS attacks). Fortunately, in order to report someone one would need to disclose his identity. On 4chan there is radical anonymity, by contrast.

the system i've laid out here can help solve that problem:

https://github.com/neyer/respect

if someone you respect, directly or implicitly, performs the investigation, then you can respect the results of the investigation. if someone you don't respect does it, you can disregard it.

Robert Klitgaard posits that accountability/transparency reduces corruption

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