Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Trustworthy Opinions. The Review of Reviews. In the New Your Times Editorial Page for Tuesday, August 3, 2004, there is an editorial about Amazon.com's Real Names program, which is "designed to prevent reviewer fraud, your reputation depends on what others say about what you say." This is another example of the emerging trend towards mechanisms for ensuring what I am calling "trustworthy opinions". (I'm sure there's already some other name for it out there, I just haven't seen it.) Another example is the very sophisticated system used by Slashdot, which has arguably one of the most challenging signal/noise ratio problems of any site, given the volume of postings and its empassioned and technically clever posting (i.e., gaming the system is built into their genes). It uses a combination of automatically selected distributed moderators, meta-moderation (i.e., moderating the moderators), karma, and friends/foes tagging (i.e., trusted/untrusted) to enable very fine-grained filtering of useful, trusted content from useless, untrustworthy content. For an interesting history of how Slashdot's moderation system evolved see How did the moderation system develop? 12:11:02 PM