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Editorial Security The Internet

Distributed Trust Metrics? 39

Posted by Cliff from the tools-for-the-global-community dept.
rw2 asks: "So I run a little political website and have had problems for years with users basically trolling the place. This is a problem that sites like Slashdot deal with through the familiar moderation scheme. Unfortunately that doesn't scale well to smaller sites. There are a couple reasons for this: a smaller sample size makes it easy to mess with the system; and with only several hundreds of people visiting everyday, it's hard to get regular enough moderation. So the question goes back to one of trust metrics. Advogato has a neat hack to deal with this, but even they have barely enough users to make it Work. Surely I'm not the first to desire this. I can think of several stumbling blocks sociologically. But technologically this is a dead simple idea. Has someone looked into developing such a system?"

"I've done some googling for systems that might work in a distributed fashion but turned up nothing. I'd happily register a key with an authority (ideally a distributed one, think supernodes rather than centralized structure) and have it verify my identity. Then, at each website participating in the trust network, I can provide my identity upon registration. As people moderate me and my comments, this feedback is applied to my profile both locally and network wide. The idea is that I may be all wet when it comes to tractors, but relatively well read on politics and technology (i.e.: my overall trustworthiness would be a 7, with a 3 on misc.rural, a 8 on slashdot.org and a 10 on poliglut.org). Now readers of my commentary have a more reasonable way of judging my trustworthiness on both a local and a global scale."
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Distributed Trust Metrics? More

Distributed Trust Metrics?

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  • Unfortunately, I feel that in most cases such a small sample size would render virtually any impersonal/algorithmic trust metric unhelpful or at best unreliable. I think it would be best to implement something simple and human-powered; maybe like an extension of the Slashdot zoo system? This works very effectively as is for shutting out regular trolls (or even just ACs, if that floats your boat) and would probably be just fine without the moderation systems. Set friends and foes, allow comment scores and le

  • Small sites need... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Small groups of the most active good posters doing the moderation. Find people that regularly share your views or at least make intelligent comments? Ask them if they'd be interesting in helping moderate. Spreading the load between a few people should make things easy to manage.

  • What I'd Do: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Thursday August 07, 2003 @07:51PM (#6640756)
    1) require e-mail response verified accounts to post

    2) enable the ability to 'bozo-bin' someone: their account can be made so that they can still post, and they can see their posts, but noone else can. Most bozos won't even know they've been binned, and thus will not try to create a new account to get around it. Think of it as a honey pot for trolls.

    3) Check for bozos all coming from the same domain - likely the same bozo who has realized he's been binned, and has created a new email address from (probably) his own domain - so bin all accounts from that domain.

    That should cut down on the vast majority of problems, I'd think. Also, with a 'small' site, as you say, moderation doesn't work well. Well, with a SMALL site, you don't _need_ moderators to handle the load, so that should work out well, right? :)

    • Re:What I'd Do: (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by thebigmacd ( 545973 )
      To support your very good point, I herefore post in agreement. I never thought of doing that, and I must say I would be suckered by it if it happened to me.

    • 3) Check for bozos all coming from the same domain - likely the same bozo who has realized he's been binned, and has created a new email address from (probably) his own domain - so bin all accounts from that domain.

      I would like to amend this:
      "bin" people who sign on with the same IP address as a recent "bozo", or with a cookie that matches a cookie given to "bozo"'s original handle. However, if bozo@hotmail.com trolls, finds he's being blocked, and then switches to bozo2@hotmail.com, do not block *@hotmail

    • Not so sure about #3, but I love your second idea! Perhaps rather than removing their posts altogether, the posts get automatically modded down so that they don't really bother everyone else. Then if "bozo" happens to use another PC or browser or just log out, they'll at least be able to find their posts if they look hard enough. Much harder to discover that they've been binned this way.
    • The problem with (2) & (3) are that you are effectively censoring opinions. While I can understand your wish to get rid of trolls and timewasters, at what point does sensible control end and censorship start? What if a valid point was buried in 10 paragraphs of swearing & trolling?
      • Chances are, nobody would be able to find that point anyway. The comment has effectively censored itself.

        A long letter laced with profanities to your state congressman would probably cause future letters to be thrown out without a second thought, even if they contained a brillant plan to save your state from raising taxes and cutting services in a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall. This is no different.
  • Block users for ridiculously long amounts of time when they troll. If they troll repeatedly after the ban(s) simply use a redirect statement to send them automatically to http://www.tubgirl.com or even better, www.slashdot.org.

  • Epinions.com (Score:4, Interesting)

    by inerte ( 452992 ) on Thursday August 07, 2003 @07:53PM (#6640768) Homepage Journal
    And its Web of Trust might help you. Let the social net filter the bad stuff.

    It works very well on small samples, IMHO. In fact, I believe a Web of Trust doesn't scale in the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, because of the dilution of the metric.

    Also, since you run a political website, a Web of Trust can help to "cluster" similar points of view.
  • Actually, I just this morning read this article by Clay Shirky [shirky.com] which covers your points exactly.

    In summary, Technical and Social issues are inextricably linked, and what you're really looking for is a group of people to take on a governmental role for your website(s).

  • Here's an idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by anotherone ( 132088 ) on Thursday August 07, 2003 @08:17PM (#6640937)
    Here's an idea I had a few days ago that I think would work very well... a Bayesian moderation system. Add or subtract points based on some kind of bayesian filter. Keep traditional user moderation, but use it to train the filters.
    • Good idea... something like a plus and a minus sign next to each article or comment. It's just for saying what you like or you don't... and new stuff checks against the database and it's sorted accordingly to your rules.
  • It is sometimes difficult to distinguish what is exactly a troll and what is not, therefore it is very very bad in my opinion to completely block someone from your site. I have on occassion been given the "Troll" mod on /. I don't agree with it, because my intention was not to troll, things can be taken the wrong way. I'm not trying to justify my previous posts but i do think it is necessary to keep everyone in the system. Just use a point based system and give mod privledges to a few trustworth users. You
  • Linkfilter FAQ [linkfilter.net]

    Really though, the system doesn't matter much. You have two choices, make it the way you like it or make it so customizable that the content forms itself in the manner that matters most to the reader. (For example on /. you can change your settings so that funny & troll are +1 and informative and interesting are -1 and, in doing so, completely change the content it provides.)

    Personally, I reccomend deciding now if you want a clique that agrees with you or an open site filled with conten
  • What happens when this is larger? Someone has to manage the keys to the sites (for updating the registry of trust levels) so that not just any site can update a user's rating. Who decides what is an appropriate site? Why can't I create my own site and boost my level so my comments show up on other sites with similar content?
  • Require accounts. Allow people to keep individual lists of users from whom they don't want to hear. Allow users to subscribe to each othere's lists.
  • Saw these guys at LinuxWorld Expo (.org area)

    Affero [affero.com]: Rating & Reputation Service for Online Works
    With Affero, discussion style forums, mailing lists, email, web logs (blogs), research, newsletters, campaigns, articles or other forms of digital works can be recognized quickly and easily through ratings, comments and donations to worthy causes.

  • Kuro5hin commentary on the below story [kuro5hin.org]

    This story on Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] entered a living hell when the sites being discussed sent their members to go get accounts and start stuffing the ballots.

    Even controlled moderation would fail simply because the signal/noise ratio at the bottom level becomes so out of whack that no one wants to dive in the sewer on the chance of finding a diamond.

  • As you suggest, a distributed, global (federated) identity would make this all a lot easier and work a lot better. Persistent profile information is powerful and offers many advantages to citizens, corporations and all those middlemen, but can lead to serious privacy abuses if the information is not securely - and absolutely - controlled by the profile owner.

    The fact that global identity is so valuable has not escaped the eye of marketing departments everywhere, and there are several projects aimed

    • I realized after writing that (rather hastily as I still need to finish packing for a two-week trip starting at 6 AM tomorrow morning) that I didn't offer any answer at all to the original question. So let me introduce you to another interesting rating mechanism, Affero [affero.net], which enables you to rate others who help you out by essentially donating to causes they believe in. For example, if this helps you at all, you can rate me [affero.net].
    • The three PK systems you identify include trust management but don't say anything about trust metrics as Levien defines them, or as the poster needs them. Keynote et al give precise trust information. In this context, trust metrics are meant to give you a way to get indirect, heuristic trust information in the absence of precise trust information.

      Incidentally, one of the things you could use such a metric for is to avoid the need for a global namespace - if you just met someone at a club called Snorky, y
  • you've certainly come to the right place! ;>

  • - Let each user decide who some of his friends/foes are, just like in Slashdot. Rate them accordingly, say on a scale of 0-1.

    - that will filter posts by the people you've rated.

    - as for the users you haven't rated:
    - if there is a "path of trust" between you and that user, i.e. if there is a friend/foe of yours who has rated a friend/foe who has rated (...*x) this user, calculate a rate. You can try to multiply the rates, or use the average, whatever works best for you.
    - if there isn't, or if the use
  • Several people have suggested moderation or filtering schemes, in which users can say, essentially, which posts they like and which they don't like. Depending on the approach, the system could even learn, either by user (e.g. the Bozo filter) or by content (e.g. Baysian filtering), etc. It then promotes the posts people like, and hides the ones they don't like. (Sounds familiar?)

    There is a fundamental problem with this though, which is particularly acute for a site such as yours that exists for the sake of
  • You say you have a problem with trolls. I suggest a "Report to moderator" link added to every post. Every user will be able to report a offending post, but it would require an action of one of the select few to actually edit or remove it. You can be the only moderator, or you can grant the power to a few other users. If the site is small, you don't need much manpower.

    It would also help if you could ban IPs of the trolls. I don't suggest requiring registration with e-mail confirmation, because if your site
  • If I'm interpreting you correctly, you want:

    1) A global system of trust metrication, rather than one per website - so I can certify you as a non-troll once and for all, rather than once on each website.

    2) A system which is not in the total command of a single website - in other words, one in which different websites can have a different "root of trust".

    I'm assuming you want:

    3) attack resistance as Raph Levien defines it

    since the experience of sites like Kuro5hin especially demonstrate that non-attack-r
  • I just set up a wiki on trust metrics evaluation [moloko.itc.it].

    The goal of this project is to review, understand, code and compare on same data all the trust metrics proposed so far.

    I'm a PhD student and this is my phd research proposal (Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems [sra.itc.it]) and it is very related to all this concerns (trust, reputation, decentralization, blogs, recommender system, ...)

    Personally I think the more promising path to follow is FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) format [xmlns.com] (see the project blog [rdfweb.org]). There
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