Guess what - people are sleazeballs online too shock horror...

Nick Carr picks up the story of the eBay commenting changes, quoting eBay's experience:

To give you some background, the original intent of eBay's public feedback system was to provide an honest, accurate record of member experiences. Over the years, we've adjusted the system to add non-public means of providing feedback to try to improve its accuracy. For example, we instituted Unpaid Item Reports in 2006, and that has helped us to hold buyers accountable.

But overall, the current feedback system isn't where it should be. Today, the biggest issue with the system is that buyers are more afraid than ever to leave honest, accurate feedback because of the threat of retaliation. In fact, when buyers have a bad experience on eBay, the final straw for many of them is getting a negative feedback, especially of a retaliatory nature.

Now, we realize that feedback has been a two-way street, but our data shows a disturbing trend, which is that sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do ... and this figure is up dramatically from only a few years ago.

Now, the thing that we don't understand (apart from how come it took so long for Nick to grok this story - see our earlier coverage here) is that anyone is surprised. This is human nature, and offline over the millenia we have designed far more sophisticated approached to catch out cheats yet still get swindled - why should things be different online?

The lesson to take from eBay is that it takes a few years for the Bad People to learn how to game it....unless of course, as with Facebook Beacon, the system owner is trying to game it already . In this vein, Nick rebuts some points from Wired's Kevin Kelly:

In a recent post about how "bottom-up" communities need "top-down" controls to work successfully, Kevin Kelly notes that "the supposed paragon of adhocracy - the Wikipedia itself - is itself far from strictly bottom-up. In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia's process reveals that it has an elite at its center (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first appears."

Kelly argues that "the reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture." He's implying that, if you gave them enough time, self-governing communities would eventually work out their problems and run just fine - like happy beehives. But that's contradicted by experience. What we've seen happen with self-regulating communities, both real and virtual, is that they go through a brief initial period during which their performance improves - a kind of honeymoon period, when people are on their best behavior and rascals are quickly exposed and put to rout - but then, at some point, their performance turns downward. They begin, naturally, to decay. Leave them alone long enough, and they're far more likely to collapse than to reach perfection.

I agree - and why would all those people putting their hearts and souls into Facebook and MySpace etc think that human nature will be any different there too?