Re: poly: inaccurate neighborhood reputations

Consider a case like Consumer Reports, or a movie reviewer. These groups
are in the business of providing recommendations. If they say bad
things about your product, it's not clear that you need to be able to
make them stop. It is in their own self interest to provide useful
and accurate advice.

You can try to make a distinction between factual information and
opinion, but these blur together. Our system allows redress under some
circumstances for incorrect facts, while not for disagreeable opinions,
but this leads to many complications. If information publishing is
easier, reputation will give people an incentive to publish correct
information.

> In one of my alternative worlds, there are no libel laws, just
> recursive rating agencies, consumer complaint files, etc.
> Free speech reigns.
> The problem above causes trouble for my alternate world.

Your recursive rating agencies will downgrade those who put out
inaccurate information. Yes, there is damage until the information
is corrected, but that may be tolerable.

One problem we have today is the sparseness of the network. Only a few
recommenders exist. This means that any one can do extreme damage.
If we can get to a system with a dense network of recommendations,
ratings, and meta-ratings, then the damage any one entity can do will
be much more limited.

Hal
Received on Tue Nov 24 20:18:27 1998