eModeration introduces ReputationShare online reputations

I recently faced a very similar issue in our community. One of my volunteer Membership Liaison Officers pointed out that a member was actually a pyramid-selling scheme for pushing Aloe Vera related lotion products. The "jobs" they were offering required people to put their own money in.

We discussed it internally, and decided that the terms and conditions of the site, which are "caveat emptor" (buyer beware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveat_emptor) meant that we should not intervene. I guess if they had been a pyramid-selling scheme for something illegal like crack cocaine or viagra I would have suggested that they needed to find some other channel. But I would have done it purely on the pragmatic grounds that we are a community non-profit venture and it would sit poorly with members like the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Cambridgeshire County Council etc if we were seen to be promoting illegal activity.

I know that some trusted players have done a great job of cleaning up the internet. Google do a very good job now of searching websites for bad code and suggesting that you do not go visit them - and presenting enough information before you hit the site so you know exactly what you are getting into. Most of the folks I know who have suffered really badly recently were doing something they knew was kind of dumb, like surfing other peoples WiFi connections or following those nice links that strange people who suddenly become your Twitter follower put up. Generally following the rule that you shouldn't click on anything from anyone you don't know personally works pretty well. Communities like LinkedIn where you can see whether other people you know are referencing someone are also very good at moderating trust.

So I am really not sure there is space for a bad-credit for consumer-to-consumer interactions. Credit card issuers really are "MySpace whores" (in the extremely ugly but accurate phrase Danah Boyd documents in her excellent papers on social media http://www.danah.org/papers). They NEED to identify people who are rolling over debt between different places and building up an unmanageable burden, and they are a small enough community to trust one-another's judgement on who is a bad debtor. Most of us are not trying to get everyone in creation to join our communities, just the nice folks. But in our own case, if someone DOES want to pay £100-£1000 to put up a profile that turns out to all be lies, we make sure that everyone knows this is a caveat emptor marketplace.

Frankly, I hear too many nightmare stories about people getting declined credit because they live in a house were someone previously had a bad debt, or whatever. The Latin tag from Juvenal "Quis custodiet" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F) comes to mind. Why should I trust some random for-profit internet authority to rank people?

I guess the reason there is so much Latin in this post is because the Romans really did think this stuff through, and we have never had to change the common-sense principles they came up with. Market places and communities are much the same today as they were in Classical times. Full of rogues, charlatans, get-rich-quick merchants, ladies and gentlemen of easy virtue, etc. No police could ever replace the basic common-sense rule - if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If you want to watch a really brilliant recent movie about this, try Nueve Reinas (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWUs-smqOeQ).