On Tuesday night I attended a talk at Stanford entitled “Four Ideas for a Better Internet.” Four groups of Harvard and Stanford Law students, having just completed a special seminar entitled “Difficult Problems in Cyberspace,” each presented a proposed improvement to the internets; they were then grilled on said proposal by a panel of, hm, let’s call them practitioners (many but not all were from the industry). Jonathan Zittrain moderated. In general, I thought all of the proposals were interesting, but none of them was ready to be implemented; they probably weren’t intended to be, of course, but I—and the panelists—could poke pretty serious holes in them without trying very hard.
The first proposal was to improve social network security by allowing you to specify a group of extra-trusted “friends” who could intervene to protect your social-network presence if it appeared to have been hijacked, or who could vouch for a request you might make that requires extra verification (for instance, a request to change the email address associated with your account). This is quite intentionally modeled on similar practices found offline; they made an analogy to the (never-yet used) procedure in section 4 of the 25th amendment to the U.S. Constitution which allows the Vice President, together with a majority of the Cabinet, to declare the President temporarily unable to do his job. It’s not a bad idea in principle, but they should have looked harder at the failure modes of those offline practices—A25§4 itself goes on to discuss what happens if the President objects to having been relieved of duty (Congress has to decide who’s right). More down-to-earth, one might ask whether this is likely to make messy breakups worse, and why the “hey, moderators, this account looks like it’s been hijacked” button (not to be confused with the “hey, moderators, this account appears to belong to a spammer” button) couldn’t be available to everyone.
The third and fourth proposals were less technical, and quite closely related. The third group wanted to set up a data haven specializing in video documenting human rights abuses by dictatorships. Naturally, if you do this, you have to anonymize the videos so the dictatorship can’t find the people in the video and punish them; you have to have some scheme for accepting video from people who don’t have unfiltered access to the net (they suggested samizdat techniques and dead drops); and you have to decide which videos are actually showing abuses (the cat videos are easy to weed out, but the security cam footage of someone getting mugged…not so much). The fourth group wanted to set up a clearinghouse for redacting leaked classified documents—there is no plausible way to put the Wikileaks genie back in the bottle, but (we hope) everyone agrees that ruining the life of J. Afghani who did a little translation work for the U.S. Army is not what we do, so maybe there could be an organization that talks off-the-record to both leakers and governments and takes care of making sure the names are removed.
It seems to me that while the sources are different, the redactions that should be done are more or less the same in both cases. It also seems to me that an organization that redacts for people—whoever they are, wherever the documents came from—is at grave risk of regulatory capture by the governments giving advice on what needs redacted. The panelists made an analogy to the difficulty of getting the UN to pass any resolution with teeth, and Clay Shirky suggested that what is really wanted here is a best-practices document enabling the leakers to do their own redactions; I’d add that this also puts the authors behind the veil of ignorance so they’re much less likely to be self-serving about it.
I’ve saved the second proposal for last because it’s the most personally interesting. They want to cut down on trolling and other toxic behavior on forums and other sites that allow participation. Making another analogy to offline practice, they point out that a well-run organization doesn’t allow just anyone who shows up to vote for the board of directors; new members are required to demonstrate their commitment to the organization and its values, usually by sticking around for several years, talking to older members, etc. Now, on the internets, there are some venues that can already do this. High-traffic discursive blogs like Making Light, Slacktivist, and Crooked Timber cultivate good dialogue by encouraging people to post under the same handle frequently. Community advice sites like StackOverflow often have explicit reputation scores which members earn by giving good advice. But if you’re a little bitty blog like this one, your commenters are likely to have no track record with you. In some contexts, you could imagine associating all the site-specific identities that use the same OpenID authenticator; StackOverflow’s network of spinoffs does this. But in other contexts, people are adamant about preserving a firewall between the pseudonym they use on one site and those they use elsewhere; witness what happened when Blizzard Entertainment tried to require real names on their forums. The proposal tries to solve all these issues with a trusted intermediary that aggregates reputation information from many sites and produces a “credibility score” that you can take wherever you wish to comment. Like a credit score, the details of how the score was computed are not available, so you can’t deduce someone’s identity on any other site. Further, you can have as many separate, unconnectable pseudonyms as you want, all with the same score.
People will try to game any such system, but that’s actually the easy problem, addressable with clever algorithms and human moderators. The more serious problem in my book is, “will produce quality comments” isn’t the sort of thing that you can reduce to a single number. To give an extreme example, the sort of comment that gets you mad props on /b/ is exactly what most other sites do not want. The team did propose to break it down as three or four numbers, but it’s not clear to me that that helps enough. (But if you expose too much detail to sites trying to consume the data, that may leave them unable to reach a conclusion.) And finally, anonymization of this kind of data is much harder than it looks: I need only point at the successful unmasking of two users within the Netflix Challenge data set. Anonymization is in tension with utility here, because the more information you expose about what sort of reputation someone has on which sites, the easier it becomes to unmask them.
I think the idea is not totally doomed, though. We could help it a great deal by turning it on its head: rate sites on the quality of their discourse. This would be done with a publicly documented, but subject to revision, scoring scheme that humans execute against a random sample of pages from the site; we might be able to use a set of seed scores to train some sort of expert system to do it automatically, but I think it’s not a disaster if we have to have humans do the site evaluations. This would be useful in itself, in that it would be a stick to beat sites with when their discourse is terrible. Meantime, each site exports its existing member-reputation scheme (or makes one up—even something simple like “average number of posts per month” would probably be useful) in a standard format. When you want to introduce yourself in a new context, you can bring along a “recommendation” from any number of sites of your choice, which is just each site’s discourse score + your reputation on that site. It is explicit in the UX for this that you are linking your identity on the new site to your identity on the others (I might even go as far as allowing people to click through to your posting history on the other sites). You then get some reputation spillover on the new site from that, which might be as limited as “doesn’t go through the mod queue the first time.” Contrariwise, if you don’t provide any recommendations, your new pseud gets to stay dissociated from your other identities, but doesn’t get any rep. Sprinkle with crypto, nonrepudiation schemes, and human moderator feedback as necessary.
Other people’s comments on this event can be found under Twitter hashtag #4ideas. Zittrain and his colleagues intend to do this again next year, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with next time.