Do we have good online reputation systems?
Abstract: Reputation systems are crucial to online platforms’ health. They are prevalent across online marketplaces and social media platforms either visibly (e.g., as star ratings and badges) or invisibly as signals that feed into recommendation and moderation engines. In theory, good behavior (e.g., honest, accurate, high-quality) begets high reputation, while poor behavior is deterred and pushed off the platform.
In this talk, I will discuss how these systems seem to fulfill this mission only coarsely: reputation metrics alone are not strong predictors of success, nor disappearance, nor misbehavior. On one platform, we were able to predict 2 times more suspensions than the reputation system in place using other public signals. In another platform, we found that users with high reputation signals were suspended at significantly lower rates (up to 3 times less) for the same number of offenses and behavior as regular users, which may be counterproductive to platform health. Our results show that crowds develop various heuristics to flag low-quality/malicious, often disregarding reputation and leaving much room for improvement.
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
- Date: 09 Oct 2024
- Time: 06:45 PM to 08:00 PM
- All times are (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
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- 130 N. Bellefield
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- United States 15260
- Room Number: 5th floor conference room (Room 538-539)
- Starts 27 September 2024 12:00 AM
- Ends 09 October 2024 12:00 AM
- All times are (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Alejandro Cuevas Villalba
Biography:
Bio: Alejandro is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in Societal Computing, advised by Prof. Nicolas Christin. He is interested in how to better represent reputation online to improve platform health, as well as to enable new governance and financial applications. His recent work focuses on how reputation is leveraged in underground marketplaces, p2p marketplaces, and cryptocurrency communities. He is a recipient of a CMU Cylab Presidential Fellowship, as well as a IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award. Prior to CMU, he obtained a B.S. from The Pennsylvania State University, where he worked with Prof. Peng Liu and Prof. Xinyu Xing on a variety of systems security projects. A Paraguayan native, Alejandro has been invited to talk about his work at the Paraguayan Central Bank and the Paraguayan National Police.