All Transactions are based on Trust - part 1
As promised, today part one of a series on trust.
Part 1: Analysing a typical web transaction: The Reddit Breakdown
Flashback to a year ago. Reddit is relatively new and has a limited but very active userbase.
I go to reddit.com. I will need to trust the site which implies I need to trust its operators, as it is impossible to trust a computer (they do what they are told, without questioning orders, hence it’s folly to trust a machine implicitly). This will be referred to as Trust #1.
Trust #2. I see an article on the front page, with 100 votes. I need to trust those who have voted that this actually means it’s a good — I basically need to trust that this score number has any meaning.
Trust #3. I follow the link and read the story. I trust that the story doesn’t lie and that any further action I take, like bookmarking it, or recommending it to others, won’t get me any surprises (I’ll need to trust the site author that he didn’t e.g. linkjack the content if I’m going to share it with others, for example).
In the early days of reddit, all 3 forms of trust are more or less met to my satisfaction. Here’s a break down:
For #1: The mere fact that Paul Graham recommends these guys is good enough; I trust Paul Graham. Not very much, I don’t know him personally, but he has a lot of reputation to lose if he recommends a bunch of swindlers. Thus I trust Paul Graham’s judgement enough for me to be satisfied here. Note here that it’s possible to trust someone purely on what they have to lose.
This is an example of trust-by-chaining (I trust the operators of reddit because Paul Graham trusts them, and I trust Paul Graham) and trust-by-buy-in (By recommending them, Paul Graham has effectively placed money (the value of his reputation) on the table which he will lose if reddit is swindling my time by e.g. making crappy articles look highly rated for cash. Paul Graham has a certain level of buy-in to this recommendation). He could be wrong - but trust doesn’t need to be perfect.
For #2: This is where it gets interesting. I trust the votes (back then) because reddit was only known to those ‘in the know’ - the first redditors were personal friends of Graham and the authors of reddit, and had personal buyin not to screw it up for their friends. The userbase then exploded outwards like a viral infection but elitism kept the quality high for quite a while. Those who just post lolcats all day and ‘abuse’ the site by downvoting well written insightful articles that don’t happen to coincide exactly with a voter’s viewpoints, for example, didn’t happen, because the vast majority of the redditors, by mere virtue of being so in the loop that they knew about reddit in the first place, don’t do that sort of thing. There’s also the issue of intent: There’s very little to gain by gaming the site. Unfortunately, trolls and social rejects exist, but as a rule there are far less negative influences if there’s nothing to be had. Back then there the user base was too small and too new and thus flew under spammer’s radar.
This is an example of trust-by-chaining, but without me actually seeing the chains: I trust the authors to only have friends they recommend reddit to who are known by them to have a modicum of nettiquette. This type of trust isn’t very ’strong’, but I don’t need much just to accept a recommendation to read an interesting article. Note that trust is multiplicative: If I trust Jack for 80%, and Jack trusts Joe for 80%, I can trust complete stranger Joe for 64%.
You may realize at this point that the ‘trust from elitism’ argument no longer applies to reddit, nor to digg - they are too famous now. It also explains why almost all ‘open’ social systems, where every user’s vote has an effect, start off stellarly well and always drop off. From kuro5hin, to digg, to reddit.
For #3: This is a bigger problem. The only practical ‘proof’ you have for the majority of links (specifically: Every link to an article on a site that you aren’t familiar with) being trustworthy is the personal recommendation of the original submitter. I don’t trust the voters enough to expect them to have done due diligence on the trustworthiness of the operator of the linked article. For the same reasons as #2, in general this trust was at least satisfied to some extent in the early days.
Fast forward a year.
Reddit is now so famous, the trustworthiness percentage of any one vote has dropped to absolute 0. Not 0.00001, there’s nothing left. The value of a normal redditor’s vote is extremely low, and some of the redditors are actively abusing the system, voting their own blogs up just for the traffic, posting their own linkjacked material, voting other stories down just so that their own has a better shot, etcetera. These cancel with the very low value of the vote of an unknown internet user, resulting in a value of absolute 0. The value of a vote is also not negative (which would mean I could just read the most negatively rated articles!) because the same scammers would force the equilibrium back to 0 if reading the most lowly rated articles ever became a useful way to use reddit.
A trust level of 0 is the only trust level which is utterly worthless. The information available to me for any given recommendation from reddit is: The ’score’ (upvotes - downvotes) + the username of the one that posted the article. The practical value of knowing that 150 more reddit users thought article X was good enough to vote it up versus down, coupled with the fact that user ‘foobar’ thought it was good enough to post to reddit, assuming I don’t know ‘foobar’, is valueless. I might as well pick a completely random web link to read - it’s a lottery.
There is no such thing as a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ unless you meet the stringent requirements for this: No attempts to screw up the system (or those attempts are symmetric and thus cancel out), and no practical way for mob mentality to form - no way for each individual of the crowd to be influenced by the rest of the crowd. Reddit and digg definitely do not meet the qualifications and thus there is no trust to be found by knowing “a bunch of” random people’s opinions happend to coalesce. Hence: The recommendation has no value. It is worthless. Practically, this will probably manifest itself as sucky submissions, and this is in fact exactly what’s going on. The function has changed - it’s a rolling window on the current meme of the web, no longer a site that recommends interesting articles.
There are ways out of this dilemma. Specifically: If I did trust the user ‘foobar’ directly, for example because I remember that his submissions have been excellent so far, I’m satisfied for Trust #2 and Trust #3 and I can go read the article (A form of trust by past performance - inductive reasoning is behind the assumption that he will continue to do so. It’s certainly not worth 100% trustworthiness, but it’s enough for article recommendations). Unfortunately that completely goes against the idea of popularity aggregators and as expected both digg and reddit make it very hard for you to work in this manner. There’s no easy way to mark someone as a ‘friend’, for example.
A site which actually works almost entirely on that principle (articles recommended by people you already trust) is del.icio.us, the online bookmark service. You can add people as ‘friends’ and watch the stuff they bookmark in your inbox. While each link does list the # of random users who also bookmarked that link, no amount of ‘votes’ (in the sense that bookmarking is a vote) will make a story appear in my del.icio.us inbox until someone in my personal circle of friends (obviously, people I trust) personally bookmarks it, thus allowing transfer of trust: I trust my friend, he apparently trusts the link he just bookmarked, and thus I trust the link.
Lots of startup ideas I hear about base themselves on the notion that the opinion of random unknown people has an intrinsic value. The problem is, in the early stages of a startup, they do, because the people from whom you cull the opinion aren’t actually unknowns: They are tied to you by your viral marketing scheme. Your startup is doomed to fail unless you can manage to toss some form of trust in there, for example by allowing users to reduce the site experience to just those people they personally trust, or by explicitly staying small.
To continue reading, go to part 2.
