Craig Newmark on Trust

I think Cory Doctorow’s Whuffie idea has gotten too deep into Craig Newmark’s thinking about trust and reputation. This is from his newest piece on this topic:

Craig Newmark, Trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence

How do we trust the custodians of trustworthiness? We need to have some confidence that they’re not fiddling the ratings, that they’re reasonably secure. After all, trust and reputation are really valuable assets.

I think the solution lies in a network of trust and reputation systems. We’re seeing the evolution of a number of different ways of measuring trust, which reflects a human reality; different people think of trust in different ways.

Also, the repositories of trust information are the banks in which we store this big asset. Like any banks, having a lot of this kind of currency confers a lot of power in them. Having some competition provides some checks and balances.

We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested. Perhaps there’s a need for new law in this area.

Restating the bottom line: we are already seeing a shift in power and influence, a big wave whose significance we’ll see by the end of this decade. Right now, it’s like the moment before a tsunami, where the water is drawn away from the shore, when it’s time to get ahead of that curve.



I think the metaphor of reputation and trust as a sort of currency leads people astray. It isn’t like a fiat currency, which is backed by a nation or a central bank, and whose value rises and falls with the state of the nation’s economy.

Trust — like knowledge — is an emergent property of social networks, an attribute of social relationships. That I trust a friend and that friend trusts me is a construct of emotions and thoughts, based on interactions over time, and the result of past experiences:

• “Last time I loaned Joe $5 he paid it back; I trust him to pay me back this $10.”
• “Betty’s recommendations in the past have been great.”
• “Whenever we go to movies together, Carlos makes great comments about the direction and acting. I think I’ll ask him what I should see this weekend.”

Attempts in the past to suggest that knowledge can be managed as an asset have largely been fruitless. I predict the same will be true of trust and reputation. And not just because it can be gamed, or that it is highly contextual, but because it won’t connect with our minds well, and how we think and feel about trust.

On the other hand, I believe that trust and reputation measure is possible, through inferences based on how people interact, and what they talk about. But for this to work, a trust analysis tool would have to read email, twitter streams, blogs, and other tangible reflections of our everyday interactions. But I doubt it will lead to Trust Bucks, or other tangible or fungible currencies, folded in our wallets.