Credibility on the Internet

February 4th, 2008 seph250 Posted in Internet |

A recent article on the Wired Blog details the strong response E-Bay users have had to a recent change in E-Bay’s user feedback rules. Apparently E-Bay wants to make it harder for store owners to post negative feedback about their customers. E-Bay suggests that there is increasingly “retaliatory feedback”.

“We’ve seen a four-fold increase in unwarranted negative feedback left for buyers in a retaliatory way. Buyers have told us consistently that one of the strongest reasons for not using the site is retaliatory feedback,” says Lieberman. “If buyers have a bad transaction, that won’t drive them away. What does drive them away is retaliatory feedback.”

Basically, E-Bay contests that if a store gets negative feedback from a buyer, the store will give the buyer negative feedback. In the comments of the blog the debate rages on and on about who behaves worse, buyers or store owners, and it got me thinking a little more about the importance of having some measure of credibility online.

To improve our credibility measurement systems, we need to increase the accountability of people judging each other, and broaden our source of information. I can’t address the entire issue of online credibility, but I do want to discuss how consolidating a persons online persona touches credibility. I think we are in the middle of seeing anonymity on the web die, and self-twittering-expression emerge.

It’s almost like seeing the evolution of the wild-west where everyone was just passing through into a civilized nation with proper identification and reputations to uphold!

Widget companies such as Popego, Lijit, Profilactic, mEgo, and MyBlogLog, as well as the OpenID project are working to do just this. The effect of consolidating one’s online persona is powerful for several reasons:

1.) Online reputations will become portable.

When someone first joins a new social site, they don’t have any credibility. Nobody knows who they are or how serious they should be taken. However, with tools to consolidate ones online persona a person is able to bring their credibility with them on the web. The effect is that the “walled gardens” of credibility will be broken down. As an example, I would predict that a highly regarded E-Bay shopper be able to have some sort of instant credibility at Amazon, or other E-Commerce store.

2.) Anonymity will become less accepted.

As web users increasingly tie their online personalities together our expectations rise. We are already quickly suspicious of the myspace user that only has 2-3 friends and just one picture posted. Depending on the context of where we encounter someone online, we could come to expect to be able to browse a persons public Flickr photos, Del.icio.us tags, favorited Youtube videos, or their LinkedIn profile. If someone acts like they have something to hide, we will assume they do. Suspicions will rise and anonymity will be forced out as users compete for credibility.

3.) Fraud and misbehaving will become more difficult.

Take a look at forums. Forums have been around forever, and there are several million of them. One of the biggest problems that forums face is efficiently monitoring their forums. Two major contributors to this problem are spammers and flamers. The spammers create a forum profile and then post links to their websites - shameless advertising for products and services that the forum users do not want. Flamers are another problem. They create a profile and then degrade the quality of the forum by posting profanity, hate, or even racist comments. They don’t contribute to the forum in anyway except to try and start arguments and try to insult forum posters. Forum administrators have to spend considerable time filtering out these types of posts. The main reason this is such a problem in forums is that it is so easy to create a new account when the administrator finally shuts down your original one. As another example, read about what some of the latest drama in Second Life. As our total online persona becomes more connected online and we come to expect less anonymity, it will be increasingly difficult to misbehave online simply because it takes time and energy to build credibility online. Furthermore, as a web citizen I am less likely to misbehave when I know that my actions on one site will effect my credibility on another.