Tag: identity

Categories
Economies

3 Drawbacks of Reputation as Currency

Three facesPhoto: Ygor Oliveira

We talked about how reputation as currency on the web has the potential to be quite powerful. But there are drawbacks to using reputation so fluently. Here are three:

1. You Can’t Have a Bad Day.
Our current economy uses money as a currency, which is great because you don’t need to know or trust me to exchange value. With money as a currency, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a good mood all the time or if you snap at the Home Depot cashier or not. It’s an impersonal exchange.

Reputation, on the other hand, doesn’t allow such flexibility. In fact, your reputation’s value is based solely on so-called “good” actions which are defined by a larger system’s expectations rather than what benefits your individual values or goals.

Reputation as the web’s currency (currently in use as the reviews you left on Amazon, your eBay seller ranking, your Klout score, etc.) sounds great until we realize it is a universal truth that you can’t have pleasure without pain.

People do have bad days (even on the Internet). More than that, people make mistakes and fail often. A system that ignores the very basis of how we learn and solely focuses on the positive is a difficult system to keep up with.

2. You Can Be Someone Different Entirely.
Which leads us to the next issue… reputation as currency forces everyone online to fit into a certain mold and exhibit certain behaviors until we have a web dripping in happiness. And a bunch of trolls. People can create a web presence that has nothing to do with their true selves. And on the flip side, they’re also forced to create anonymous profiles to express their real ideas.

Either way, people can create and manipulate who they are and their reputation easier than ever. That’s important because reputation is based on trust, and the more that we force people to be different than who they are, the more difficult it will be to rely on reputation as reasonable indicator of credibility.

3. You Have To Be Large and In Charge.
Trust development is being outstripped by technology. Whereas trust used to occur over a period of time as a result of working closely with another, now we feel like we can “trust” someone with a quick glance at their Google trail. And that’s a problem for the un-plugged.

“The people who have the highest reputation scores are usually the people who are the most public,” argues Paul Adams. Those who are willing to live their life more freely on the Internet are the reputation winners. No one is re-tweeting your stellar shoe recommendation to the stranger on the Metro. If you’re building relationships in real life or want to maintain some semblance of privacy, too bad.

Online reputation is inherently unbalanced toward the happy, fake and loud. It’s good enough for now, but if we want our social architecture to scale in any sort of useful or meaningful way, we need to re-program how reputation works on the web.

Categories
The Internets

Being Always On, Always Right and the Case for Anonymity

There are a lot of reasons I stopped writing my last blog. Primarily though, it was because the Internet takes a lot out of you. It expects to be able to dissect everything. The Internet wants to pull you apart. Everything should be accessible and out there for all. In the Interneted world, you have to be always on.

I don’t particularly want to be always on. For starters, I am incredibly moody. Most people on the Internet seem like happy people or are on their way to being happy.

I am not happy. At least not today. Try again tomorrow?

Still, I soldiered on with my last blog until it petered to its end and took the last bits of me. And then after some distance and perspective, I started this new blog. I started showing up on Twitter. I logged onto Facebook more. But it’s even harder to be on the Internet than I remembered.

It’s exhausting. There hasn’t been a day when I didn’t crave the freedom of anonymity, if only to escape for a moment the pressure to be always right and available.

Not that I even hold anything back. I am not someone different in person. (Although how would you know, right? Or do you trust the identity I’ve put on the web?) What I write is what I experience. Perhaps a temper tantrum or two doesn’t make it in to a post, but well, now you know.

Point being, if I were anonymous, I would write the same things. But I think it would be easier.

There are a great many people, however, that cannot or do not express their opinions and thoughts and ideas so easily. Those people are forced into the category of degenerates on the web: trolls.

Many believe the trolls’ online anonymity “is a treatment of a symptom rather than a cure for the disease. The disease is a total lack of tolerance for the differing views of others in our society. The symptoms of our disease are things like racism, ostracization, unjust reprisal, stigmatization and persecution. [Anonymity] does nothing to address the root causes of these maladies.  On the contrary, it gives people carte blanch to revel, indeed to roll around gleefully, in them. [Anonymity] allow people to be their worst selves, to perpetuate the cycle of hate, fear, and cowardice that has gripped western societies, without the need to face the consequences of their words and actions.”

That comment is fairly reflective of the values of the open web. Radical transparency is linked to the promise of a “more tolerant, peaceful and profitable digital world.” Besides, would trolls ever say the things they do if their real identities were attached to their comments? Probably not, goes the usual argument.

Online authenticity and transparency forces you to live a certain kind of life. First of all, it forces you to live at least part of your life online. For anyone on Facebook, it’s a large part. Add anytime that you log in with your real identity to buy a product on Amazon, or use Twitter, or blog, or sell something on Etsy and it’s an increasingly large part until you don’t have a distinction between public and private identity.

Not only does such transparency force you to live your life online in order to complete basic tasks on the Internet, but it also forces documentation, so you have to live a certain kind of life that can be documented. You have to be right. And good. Online, all the time.

Sure, this allows you to Google yourself and the guy you met at the bar Saturday night, but it also allows you to make judgements based on that data trail. At its best, when we follow our friends’ profiles around the Internet, it is little more than novelty and entertainment. At its worst, employers and potential lovers decide our fate in just a few clicks.

Either way, it’s not hugely beneficial to you.

Companies, on the other hand, retain a large benefit from your identity. They are the ones that want to collect your real identity so they can use that data to their advantage. Facebook’s crowning virtue is authenticity and it seeks to control the web by poo-pooing anonymity at all costs. Now Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and everyone else who wants you to login with their account follows you everywhere on the web and collects every bit of data it can about you.  Mark Zuckerburg famously once told an interviewer that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” How very virtuous… and profitable.

What’s real authenticity anyway? Is there room for you to change your mind on the Internet? One anonymous commenter argues, “Having to log in or authenticate myself makes me less likely to leave a comment. Having to identify the comment back to myself in a traceable way makes it less likely as well. My mood or sentiment about a topic might change, but that post will be written in stone.”

4chan, a site where “roughly 90 percent of all messages on 4chan are posted under the site’s default identity, ‘Anonymous,’” is generally known as the scurds of the web. But “those messages are not only anonymous but ephemeral, because 4chan has no long-term archives: old message threads are automatically deleted when new ones need the room. This mechanism was originally meant to save storage costs, but as [its founder Chris Poole] notes, ‘it’s both practical and philosophical.’ Among other things, it challenges the idea that digital identity should follow you across time, linking what you say when you’re a teenager to the middle-aged business owner you might become.”

Novel, that. People actually change and grow? Say it ain’t so, Internet! Anonymity allows people a place on the Internet to be wrong, Poole says. That’s important because while trolls may not say their real opinions to you in person, they’re still thinking it. And when we take away the place to test those ideas, we take away any chance of tolerance for differing views.

So do you prefer to live in a world where people don’t speak their minds at any cost? Or do you want to allow anonymity? One is decidedly more virtuous.

Categories
Predictions

What Comes After the Social Web?

   I am worried about how the Internet defines social.

There is a big difference between shopping online and shopping in seventy-degree weather, when someone brushes your bag, and you run into your friend on his way to a soccer game. Online shopping is solitary; real-life shopping is social. Seeing that my friend “liked” a new laundry solution on Facebook is not a social experience.

I rarely shop alone. Even on utilitarian trips to the grocery or Target, even if I don’t have an accomplice, I am still out and among other people. I want my best friend to tell me what to wear and that the very short shorts look good on me and encourage me to buy a pair when I would never do so otherwise. I want Ryan to tell me that the color of the bike I’ve chosen is great and for the bike salesperson to tell me that the particular model I’ve picked out is hot across the country and is almost sold out. I want energy. I want exchange. I want life.

This simply doesn’t happen online at the moment. There is no thrill of interacting with another human being. The experience is stale, stagnant and one-sided. It is the worst of consumerism.

I am worried that online commerce is mistaking data for social. When you use my interest graph to connect me with the exact person in California who has the vintage wine I desire, that is not social. My interest graph is not social. My reputation is not social. My identity is not social. These are important as currencies on the web, but only as currencies of social relationships. They are not the social relationships themselves. They don’t form the experience of shopping. Too many sites nowadays are defining social commerce as a like, a share, a review. That is not social. That is data.

Data is good for the company, not the user. Data is good for targeting, personalization, and aggregation. Data is good for marketing, but it’s not social.

“Nothing beats targeted relevancy,” argues one online enthusiast. “And social serendipity will not beat targeted discovery.”

That is so sad. Surely if the web has taught us anything, it’s how much, as a race, we humans love to go off on tangents? To be distracted? I certainly don’t go on Twitter and Facebook to be efficient.

Most people don’t know what they want anyway. I can type in my interests and style preferences until my fingers go bare bone, but what I really want is the summer dress my girlfriend wears out on a Thursday night. She looks so good!

As sites increasingly recommend only what they think you want, you lose out on the spontaneity and delight of finding something new and different. Anyone who has used Pandora realizes this is the service’s strength and weakness. You discover new music initially, but eventually the site just plays the same things over and over.

Personalization isn’t just useful at times then, creepy at others, but also annoying. Only boring people hang out with people just like themselves and do the same things over and over and never step out of their bubble world.

The social aspect of shopping is in that real-time discovery, spontaneous input, and watching of people. The movement, the behaviors of another person. I can’t see that on the web. All of our normal cues are missing. So, we go ahead and rely on algorithms? That’s fancy, but there are easier solutions.

Let’s talk about Amazon’s new flash shopping site, MyHabit; it was just launched this week and it’s in the same vein as other private sales sites like HauteLook, Beyond the Rack, and Gilt. You might think Amazon is behind, but really, Amazon is always just a wee bit ahead of the curve, and man, do they get it right with this.

Okay, first, on those other sites, I can see the front of a shirt, the back of a shirt, I can hover and zoom or use my mouse. Pretty standard nowadays. On a slightly different site called JewelMint I can even watch a thirty-nine second video about a pair of earrings.

But here’s how Amazon, in a rather genius move, instantly differentiates the experience. In addition to upscale photography, the site features videos of the clothing on live models. So the moment you visit a product detail page, the model starts to move; she shifts, she turns, you see her back, and then she shifts and turns back around. I don’t have to hit play and the whole thing lasts about five seconds.

It’s non-intrusive and the user experience is really just brilliant. I can actually see how the model moves and how the clothes move on her. I have a one hundred percent better experience in judging and assessing the piece of clothing that a photograph can never give me. And that is social.

You may be thinking no, that’s UX. You may be thinking you’re not interacting with the model – and certainly I am not talking to her – but really I am. I am watching her just as if she were on the street and seeing how the clothes move and look on her. It is live and it is a humanizing online shopping experience.

This is only the beginning of how user interfaces and experiences, not data will redefine online commerce. I would love to see an interface that allows me to see what strangers and my friends are browsing in real-time. I’d really love to invite my best friend in Madison to go on a shopping date while I’m in DC and browse a site simultaneously while I glance at her and what she’s browsing.

If you try to imagine these experiences in the web’s current architecture, it seems clunky, unrealistic even, but I assure you, the interfaces that use the data of web 2.0 will evolve and become increasingly important in web 3.0. And that’s what will define social on the Internet.

So everyone else is busy prophesying that while “the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce will be about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs will drive buying decisions,” but here’s my prediction: it’s not going to be about data. Data is useless without a meaningful experience to plug into. How the interface and experience of social is formed will drive the next evolution of online commerce.

Just you wait.

Categories
Economies

Browsing Toward a New Currency

Air on MacBookPhoto: kayakleader

This is a continuation of How the iPad is (Thankfully) Destroying Our Economy.

Historically, money wasn’t necessary. Within a community, barn raisings, shared child care, and borrowing tools all occured as part of the gift economy. You used trust, reputation, and identity as your currency and money was only used between communities that didn’t know each other.

(Money is a type of currency; it isn’t synonymous.)

This is essentially the same today.  My neighbor will give me his lawnmower or I can go buy one at Home Depot. In the transaction with my neighbor, we might say I got the lawnmower for free, but really I used our relationship as currency. In the transaction with Home Depot, I used money.

Money only exists because traditionally – and this is important – you haven’t been able to scale the gift economy. The bigger your neighborhood gets, the more difficult it is to know everyone. The more difficult it is to know, the more difficult it is to trust. As strangers, and without trust, we need a way to exchange value.

Whereas the gift economy might leave loose ends (relationships are messy, after all), an economy based on the exchange of money leaves no loose ends; it is something for something. Our current economy is built on that idea of quid pro quo, but the Internet came along and turned that on it’s head for a few reasons, some of which we’ve talked about:

1.  The Internet allows us to live by our screens, not among objects, decreasing materialism and increasing the value we put on knowledge and experiences.
2.  The decentralized web increases the viability of the peer-to-peer economy that doesn’t rely on or include large companies.
3.  The networked web is ruled by plentitude, not scarcity, which changes what we value, how we exchange value, and how we measure and acknowledge it.

In essence, the web allows our social architecture to scale. What that means is that for the first time ever, there is the potential for an economy that isn’t based on money. It means that currencies other than money – reputation, identity, data – can be used to exchange value on a peer-to-peer level and on a larger scale than ever before. And it means that we’re relying less and less on money as a currency (i.e., why we’re seeing our current economy collapse).

Take a moment to wrap your head around that; it’s exciting. Or possibly scary, depending on how you look at it.

“Trust networks are able to be tapped for recommendations and referrals, while predictive analysis algorhithms can suggest the kinds of people, products, services, or events that would resonate with our personalities or value set,” argues digital theorist Vanessa Miemis. “A new set of filtering tools are emerging that are shaping where we direct our attention and resources, namely intentions and actions… These contextual clues around data become currencies in themselves, as they give us more information in order to make a choice or decide who to trust.”

Soon, it won’t matter that I don’t know you. We will still be able to transact with each other – I’ll borrow a dress from you, or you’ll take a spin in my car – because our reputation, identity and data currency will travel with us. The goodwill you build on Twitter, or at your job as an insurance salesman, will inherently influence the transactions in your life.

Early efforts at the peer-to-peer web, eBay rankings or reviews on Etsy for instance, show a small piece of that reputation currency. You can also see some attempts at personalization on today’s web. But that’s really all only the beginning. Facebook, for instance, has the power to be the ultimate bank, building a new economy based on the identity information we feed into our profiles and the mass amount of data they’re collecting. Even better, if this type of data were open across the web and we could own it, these currencies could inform the foundational underpinning of our interactions. And then, well, I can’t even wrap my mind around those possibilities…

You can see why who has the most data, and who controls the data, is increasingly important then. Every byte is almost like a dime in this new economy we’re building on the web.

I’ll continue to dive deeper in this series on digital economies and currencies in future posts, including the drawbacks of reputation as currency, why these new currencies aren’t the same as Free, and the rocky transition time we have ahead of us in this half-changed world.