4 responses to “The social problem with reputation scoring”
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Good post Antony. I think you’re right that social influence scoring of this kind makes it very easy to put the focus in the wrong place. For me, it’s in danger of being used in overly-simplistic ways (e.g. I only have to get my content to the ‘right’ people in order for it to spread rather than concentrating on the motivations for why people would want to spread that content, or making the content good enough to spread in the first place). There’s also something about creating rankings using these scores (so-called ‘leaderboards’) that also makes me deeply uncomfortable – for me, it’s too close to beginning to create a value judgement on people based on certain behaviours which may or may not be good/beneficial/helpful. As you can probably tell, I’m not a fan.
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Thanks, Neil.
Yes – you point out two things that make me uneasy: leaderboards on a highly subjective metric, and the conflation of the score with a value judgement.
I can see how these scoring systems can be useful, but they are literally too easy to be used in the way they sometimes are. Currently working on a post about when and how they can be useful…
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[…] As far fetched as these may seem, there are aspects of scoring creeping into our lives to measure the social aspects of our online lives. Through the scoring of your influence with platforms such as Klout, recently purchased for $200M. This and other social scoring platforms have created controversy for how they can be ‘gamed’ and in the uneasiness some people feel that they turn our online social interactions seemingly ‘less human‘. […]
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