Karma Chameleons and the danger of whuffie based feudal systems

There has been an interesting resurgence of interest in community allocated "social capital" systems, driven by the rise of social networking, a concept sometimes known as "whuffie" from a Cory Doctorow novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, imagining a world of a post shortage economy of plenty - Wikipedia on Whuffie:

The usual economic incentives have disappeared from the book's world. Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person's Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person's favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

Now I've read quite a lot of the theory behind this, and it all sounds marvellously idyllic - but I am increasingly coming to the view that reputation systems driven by unmediated opinion are very dangerous (how does one ensure the wisdom of crowds is not actually the madness of crowds). The reason for this view is my experience with our karma voting system on this blog, which I've now removed. The only real lesson to take from analysis of our karma voting system over 2 years is that:

(i) Votes are usually a tiny % of views - 5% would be high.

(ii) There is one thing that drives voting far, far more than anything else - popularity at the time, ie adherence to the zeitgeist (another word for mob opinion)

And, as is palpably clear watching behaviour on social networks like Twitter etc, people understand this "dark side" only too well. The chart below explains the game theory of what really happens in "whuffie" type reputation systems:





Now, in theory, the whuffie system is unbiased and awards social capital - karma points - to people who incline to the right of the table, do the right things, speak truth unto power, are genuine etc etc. The problem occurs where the zeitgeist - the agreement about what is good and proper - can be shifted by the beliefs of the people within the system. This is the reality of the human condition, there are always trends, beliefs etc that are not true (often promoted for self interest), and the opportunity to play games exists.

I call these game players the "karma chameleons" - people who change their views with the zeitgeist to gain (game) the collection of karma in the system - to always espouse the popular view is a very useful strategy. This is what we saw with our karma system on the blog. Write a post on something that is the popular view, I'd get high karma votes - no matter if it was correct or not Contradict the popular view, and negative votes pour in.

The karma chameleons gain in the game at the expense of those who are espousing views that are not part of the zeitgeist. The risk is where the zeitgeist view conflicts with an unpopular but true view - the people who espouse this latter become "prophets" (ie they will only be respected in other virtual countries with unbiased value system). The problem with this position is that there is no profit in it, even if it is correct for the system's health - so those who would espouse the truth - and still profit - move to the "truth economist" position - ie to gain whuffie but still speak truth, you have to be "economical with the truth" and just not enter into large areas of discussion. One can think of a number of areas of discourse today where these areas exist, to the high risk of many in some cases.

Now bear in mind, in the social network capital system as imagined, whuffie is all - it defines your wealth, which defines status, access to resources etc within the ecosystem - so this game is played hard and to win.

And this is the risk with these systems, if they become the only way in which people accrue status in a system and all rewards are allocated by crowd opinion. This is even more exacerbated in social media by the power law dynamics it works under - as was noted the other day in a humorous (but sharply true) rant about Twitter "Social Media Experts", the Big Dogs in the system tend to attract acolytes who "clamp on" to any behaviour that is espoused by the existing high whuffie individuals (game being played - karma chameleons become acolytes of the highly placed to gain whuffie at expense of weaker players).

This ecosystem thus, without some form of strong mediation, resembles not so much the democratic system that the whuffophiles imagine, but is potentially more like a Feudal system with robber barons and their bands roaming round the social net mugging defenceless digital peasants (or at the very least lording it over them and forcing acquiescence to their ways).

How must the mediation work then? In the real world it works because Real World Whuffie comes from a variety of sources, the social mob cannot for example vote my salary this month to zero if I say things they don't like on my blog, because my salary is paid via an alternate form of capital. Also, transaction costs are high, so real life society - in the majority of cases - doesn't prosecute or throw people into prison lightly, and even then usually there is some mediation via a legal system that all are aware of. In fact, as Robert Wright points out in his book Non Zero, human civilisation has been a long process of trying to reduce the impact of just these sort of big man/mob rule based systems. This is not the case in today's virtual social media, which resemble more (in architecture) the closed kingdoms of despotic potentates (and capricious ones in some cases) - if you flee them, you leave all your accrued digital wealth behind. They are just too new, we haven't yet had the time to develop the tools to civilise these virtual environments yet.

OK, OK - I exaggerated to make the point, I'm coming at it from the point of view of imagining what it would be like if a whuffie based system was the only game in town, and you couldn't leave it, which is not the case today. But you can see the behaviours I have described in any social media system today - take the Twitter lynching of journalist Sarah Lacy last year for example ..

Anyway, thats the long winded reason that, from today onwards, we won't be using karma voting in future