Mnikr

Reputation Construction Through Human Trading of Distributed Social Identities

Brendan Francis O’ConnorSET Corporation

The Johns Hopkins Universitybfo@ussjoin.comTwitter: @USSJoin

John Linwood GriffinThe Johns Hopkins University

jlg@cs.jhu.eduTwitter: @JLGTwit

We developed a system to coalesce people’s distributed social network personas from across the Internet, then buy and sell shares of people in a

stock market to determine reputation.

You, too, can own your own person!

Why do we care about Reputation on the Internet?

Services (Twitter, YouTube, Digg)

Users (Me! Or you!)

Personas (USSJoin, 2Cool4U)

Identities (My Virtual Self)

Who are you (on the Internet)?

“You’re not your job.”

“You’re not how much money you have in the bank.

“You’re not the car you drive.”

“You’re not the contents of your wallet.”

“You are not your... khakis.”

So who am I?

Mnikr, Part IThe Combining

XFN: A MicroFormat with MacroEffects

XFN

Identities

USSJoin@

Twitter

USSJoin@

Youtube

USSJoin@

Digg

USSJoin@

GitHub

Social Graph API

Caveat•XFN data isn’t clean

•We have to make sure “me” relationships are bidirectional

•We find it acceptable to leave some Identities not fully combined

•Some people use it incorrectly for no readily apparent reason

Mnikr, Part IIThe Trading

Other Reputation Systems

•PageRank (Google)

•Windley et al and OpenPrivacy

•Attempting to strip context (e.g., eBay-ness) from context-sensitive reputation (e.g., eBay Feedback Score)

Other Reputation Systems

http://personas.media.mit.edu

Other Reputation Systems

•Accelerando, Charles Stross

•This gave us the idea for a reputation stock market

Stock Markets

Big Ideas• If you have cool friends, they can make

you cool

• Like PageRank

•No one ultra-cool user can make you cool

•Users have to be invested in the system to make others cool

• Prevents Sybil attack

•No Negative Commentary

The Sims Online Mafia

Reputation Math•Every value starts at 1

•Every share purchase raises the value by 1

•Every share sale lowers the value by 1

•The purchase price is equal to the value

•An Identity can only own 5 shares of another single Identity

Reputation Math

•Alice has a share value of 5

•Bob buys one share, which costs him 5

•Alice now has a value of 6

•Bob now sells his share, which gives him 5 points back

•Alice now has a value of 5

Dividend Math

•Dividends = (value * shares) / 20

•Personal Dividends = value / 5

•So if Alice owns 3 shares of Bob, whose value is 8, then Alice gets (3*8)/20 = 1 point

•Bob also gets 1 point for his value of 8

•Dividends are run every 24 hours

Bootstrap

Mnikr: the Social Network

How Big Did It Get?Is 350,000 Big?

The Kings of Reputation Street

Time BetweenTrades

Highest-ValuedIdentities

Next Steps

•Mutual/Index Funds

•Derivatives Trading (Short Selling)

•Real Money

•Majority Shareholder Action Control?

•Lee Konstantinou, Pop Apocalypse

Conclusions

http://www.mnikr.com

•Metcalfe’s Law Can Be Bent

•The value of a telecommunications network is not necessarily proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system

•Stock Market Seems to Work for Reputation (Good People are Good)