building whuffie

Building Whuffie

Reputation and the Future of the Social

WebKevin Lawver | Music Intelligence Solutions

Monday, November 9, 2009

A Brief History of Whuffie

• The concept was laid out in Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

• Basically, whuffie is a currency based on reputation.

• Geeks were fascinated...


Whuffie Explained• Whuffie is based on your interactions with

others, and your actions that benefit or hurt the community.

• You can see where others’ whuffie comes from:

• right-handed whuffie comes from groups you agree with.

• left-handed whuffie comes from groups you don’t.


How does whuffie apply to community?

• Real-world currency isn’t the currency of most online communities.

• They usually do center around reputation, even if it’s not quantified

• Why not calculate it and use it to recognize your best users?


Today’s Communities• Most communities on the web center

around a primary social object.

• That social object is the source of reputation.

• Secondary, yet useful, actions aren’t rewarded.

• Single-source reputations (Digg) are easily gamed.


Practical Limitations

• Whuffie doesn’t travel. It’s local to the community actions happen in.

• Good reputations may inform other communities, but your reputation won’t map onto a new community.

• Left and Right-handed whuffie is too complex to implement today (for me anyway).


Case Study: Flickr


Community Actions• Taking and uploading photos

• commenting

• tagging

• creating galleries, sets & adding photos to groups

• favoriting

• geotagging


Which actions get rewarded and are

encouraged?


Taking pictures...Monday, November 9, 2009

and that’s it.


But what would happen if they rewarded other

behavior?


Rewarding Good Feedback

• What if Flickr rewarded people for posting comments?

• Adding tags?

• Geotagging photos?


You’d get better comments, tags and locations for photos;


which would encourage photographers...


... to upload more photos...


...creating a virtuous cycle!


Building Your Own Reputation System


How to Build a Reputation System

• Catalogue your system’s actions.

• Assign positive and negative values.

• Then watch the stream and assign values to the objects and users as they “flow” by.

• Reward good behavior, discourage bad.

• Find and showcase your “best” content.


A Sample Whuffie Chart

• Post a photo: 25

• Comment on a photo: 15

• Have a comment deleted: -10

• Tag your own photo: 5

• Tag someone else’s photo: 7

• Have your tag deleted: -3


Gaming the System

• Automated reputation based on multiple actions is harder to game than user-initiated reputation.

• Think about Digg. All they have are votes. If you can infer reputation based on how the community reacts to an object, you don’t need them to vote.


Rewarding Unsung Heroes

• You can look at different angles of your reputation events and reward the “best” in your community at support activities (commenting, tagging, etc).

• Users feel more rewarded for behavior helpful to the community and are then more likely to continue doing it.


Reputation Systems in the Wild

• All of the major e-mail services have a reputation system in place for stopping spam - but they don’t really reward good behavior.

• Flickr’s Interestingness is a reputation system applied only to primary social objects.

• Ficly has one, but most results aren’t surfaced yet.


Warnings• Active communities produce a lot of

reputation events. Calculating reputations for everything can take a long time.

• As you grow, you may need to prune actions you watch, or delay calculating reputations for older objects/actions.

• Negative actions should have less impact than positive.

• Beware precipitous falls or rises and cap them (if needed).


The Future of Whuffie

• Someone (probably Google) will build a reputation clearing house with an open API.

• The sites already gathering reputation data will open it up, scaring the hell out of the unsuspecting masses.

• Someone will crack left and right-handed whuffie, giving us a much better idea of who we’re dealing with on first contact.


Further Reading

• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (obviously)

• The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt


Questions?


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Contact Info

• Old school: [email protected]

• New school: @kplawver

• Work: http://uplaya.com

• Blog: http://lawver.net


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