Web2.0 Expo Talk — 5 Reputation Missteps
The slides from our presentation yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. We will soon be adding all speaker's notes into the full version on Slideshare.
What's the difference between trolling behavior and plain old spam? It's a subtle distinction, but critical to understanding when combating either. We classify as spam those communications that are indiscriminate, unwanted and broadcast to a large audience.
Fortunately, those same characteristics that mark a communication as spam—its indiscrimination, its lack of relation to the conversation at hand, its overtly commercial appeals—also make it stand out. You're probably easily able to identify spam on sight, after just a quick initial inspection. We can teach these same tricks to machines. Although spammers constantly change their tactics to evade detection, spam can generally be detected by machine methods.
Trollish behavior, however, is another matter altogether. Trolls may not be motivated by financial motives—more likely, they're craving attention, and motivated by a desire to disrupt the larger conversation. (See egocentric incentives.) Trolls quickly realize that the best way to accomplish these goals are by non-obvious means. An extremely effective means of trolling, in fact, is to disguise your trollish intentions as real conversation.
Accomplished trolls can be so subtle that even human agents would be hard-pressed to detect them. In Chapter 7, we discuss a kind of subtle trolling in a sports context: masquerading as a fan of the opposing team. For these trolls, presenting themselves as faithful fans is part of the fun—then it's all the more disruptive once they started to trash-talk "the home team."
How do you detect for that?
It's hard for a human, and nigh-impossible for a machine. It is, however, easier to do with a number of humans. By adding consensus, and reputation-enabled methods, it is easier to reliably discern trollish behavior from sincere contribution to the community. Because reputation systems, to some degree, reflect the tastes of the community, they also have a better-than-average chance at catching behavior that transgresses against those tastes.
Reputation can be a successful motivation for users to contribute large volumes of content and/or high-quality content to your application. At the very least, reputation can provide critical money-saving value to your customer care department by allowing users to prioritize the bad content for attention and likewise flag power users and content to be featured.
But mechanical reputation systems, of necessity, are always subject to unwanted or unanticipated manipulation: they are only algorithms, after all. They cannot account for the many, sometimes conflicting, motivations for users' behavior on a site. One of the strongest motivations of users who invade reputation systems is commercial. Spam invaded email. Marketing firms invade movie review and social media sites. And drop-shippers are omnipresent on eBay.
EBay drop-shippers put the middleman back into the online market: they are people who resell items that they don't even own. It works roughly like this:
This model of doing business was not anticipated by the eBay seller feedback karma model, which only includes buyers and sellers as reputation entities. Drop-shippers are a third party in what was assumed to be a two-party transaction, and they cause the reputation model to break in various ways:
In effect, the seller can't make the order right with the customer without refunding the purchase price in a timely manner. This puts them out-of-pocket for the price of the goods along with the hassle of trying to recover the money from the drop-shipper.
But a simple refund alone sometimes isn't enough for the buyer! No, depending on the amount of perceived hassle and effort this transaction has cost them, they are still likely to rate the transaction negatively overall. (And rightfully so – once it's become evident that a seller is working through a drop-shipper, many of their excuses and delays start to ring very hollow.) So a seller may have, at this point, outlayed a lot of their own time and money to rectify a bad transaction only to still suffer the penalties of a red star.
What option does the seller have left to maintain their positive reputation? You guessed it – a payoff. Not only will a concerned seller eat the price of the goods – and any shipping involved – but they will also pay an additional cash bounty (typically up to $20.00) to get buyers to flip a red star to green.
What is the cost of clearing negative feedback on drop-shipped goods? The cost of the item + $20.00 + lost time in negotiating with the buyer. That's the cost that reputation imposes on drop-shipping on eBay.
The lesson here is that a reputation model will be reinterpreted by users as they find new ways to use your site. Site operators need to keep a wary eye on the specific behavior patterns they see emerging and adapt accordingly. Chapter 10 provides more detail and specific recommendations for prospective reputation modelers.