I went to a blockchain event this week out of curiosity, and heard a talk which really impressed me in that it could solve many unrelated problems with online sites in a single stroke. But before I tell you what it was, let’s set the scene with some example contexts in which I could see it helping in the future.
Some websites such as StackOverflow and Reddit have achieved a fairly impressive and high profile degree of success by harnessing gamification, i.e. a system based on a reputation metric (sometimes labelled “karma” or “gold”), together with a set of rules and rewards engineered in a way which incentivizes the desired behaviour, namely the contribution of high quality content. These generally work pretty well, but their systems can still be abused / manipulated in undesirable ways, and also typically there is no mechanism by which a user who has acquired a high reputation score on one site can benefit by transferring that reputation to another domain. (Although reputation earned within one community within the Stack Exchange network does give you an initial boost when joining other communities within that network.)
A different problem I’ve been mulling over for years is how to create a reliable marketplace for placing bounties on FLOSS engineering problems. Companies such as BountySource are already having some success doing this, but it feels to me that we’re still a long way from fully realising the potential for a freelance FLOSS development industry. One of the big problems in this space is figuring out how to measure good behaviour and reward it appropriately, whilst discouraging bad behaviour. Sound familiar?
A third area I’ve been considering is that of bug/issue trackers for public FLOSS projects (and even commercial products). Unfortunately it’s not uncommon for these systems to get spammed to hell and back by idiots. For instance GitHub is so scared of this problem that they’ve chosen not to open this particular Pandora’s box. However a karma-based approach could drastically improve the signal-to-noise ratio on these systems.
After spotting the common theme between these use cases, I concluded a few years ago that building a Reputation as a Service (RaaS?) platform to track reputation in a reliable manner, and allow federation of reputation between different communities, could make a lot of sense. That way each service which relies on reputation metrics doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Fast forwarding several years, blockchain is a proven technology, and its transparency, immutability, and global decentralized nature all suggest that it’s a near perfect technology on which to build my (probably unoriginal) RaaS idea. And the good news is that there is already an organisation apparently well on the way to solving this: Credify. (No need to google it – the links are below!)
One significant hurdle to building RaaS (which needs to support thousands or even ultimately hundreds of thousands of transactions per second in order to work on a truly global scale) on a blockchain is the poor scalability of the blockchains offered by the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum. However Credify has neatly side-stepped this by building on top of EOS, and they’ve taken advantage of the blockchain to design a much more powerful system which rewards not only good behaviour but crucially also good recommendations and punishes bad ones.
One of their obvious initial targets is the online product/service review industry, since sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon etc. are plagued with fake reviews, and that translates to a huge financial impact within those markets. However I’m very interested to see whether this kind of approach will extend to less commercial areas like the ones I highlighted above.
If you want to play around with Credify, here’s a referral link. Or if you just want to learn more, check out their very nifty home page. If this thing takes off like I suspect it will, I suspect there might be some advantages to becoming an early adopter.
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