Reputation: Present and Future

What is reputation? Reputation is how others perceive, review and judge you based on past actions. Are you good or bad? Do you do the right or wrong thing usually? Are you successful or not? Are you pretty or ugly? It's a pretty general thing that seems to be an essential, inescapable aspect of being human. And it can be applied as easily to places and things as it can be to people.

Reputation can take a criminally long time and immense efforts to build. That's if it's even possible to build at all. And what is the payoff of building a good reputation anyways?

Normally individuals aren't even able to benefit from their good reputations. All those Facebook users and their good reputations benefit Facebook directly by providing them with a valuable reputational data point that can be used to attract ad dollars. That said, some may argue that while individuals don't directly benefit from their good social reputation, they indirectly benefit by living in a better society or by being a part of a site that isn't bad (or something).

Others may point out that individuals can still benefit from their professional reputations. But just think about the work your average Joe needs to exert in the real world just to get credentialed, then to maybe get a job, then to maybe find consistent work they can do at said job, then the luck they have to have to maybe get recognized for what they've done up until that point to establish some sort of *localized* reputation. With all those 'maybes' it's kind of surprising that anyone is able to accumulate a significant reputation that travels well in the real world.

The recent rise of social network platforms has made it possible for more people to turn their average credentialed professional history into a portable reputation of sorts. That said, such "reputation" is clunky, relatively undifferentiated and still trivially hard to build. What's more, someone can have a great professional reputation, but be a social cancer, thus rendering professional reputation impotent as a meaningful social proof.

I dare say that it feels like reputation is basically unobtainable for most people around the world, and meaningful reputation - reputation that signifies something more than what it's ostensibly about - is even rarer. It's almost enough to make one think that doing away with reputation altogether may make the world better. Not me though. I think it's far more constructive (not to mention easier) to instead think of whether there isn't an easier way that could allow more people to build better reputation.

Although reputation isn't formally recorded on Cent, it most certainly informally exists. Every user that provides responses to bounty posts is in turn evaluated and judged by the invisible tastes and values of the Centian community. Since the top 10 "best" responses to each bounty post receive a monetary reward, reputation is simultaneously established, improved and validated, 10 users at a time.

In the context of Cent then, a user with a good reputation is a user who has provided value to at least one other user in the form of a response that accurately and compliantly responds to a bounty prompt or request. This sounds a lot like someone who has a good social reputation, but instead of directly benefiting others while only indirectly benefitting oneself, in the case of Cent, a user receives a direct monetary benefit for establishing and/or improving their reputation. Interesting.

What about professional reputation? Whereas professional reputation in the real world relies on a confusing array of proxies like records, certificates, recommendations, atomic evaluations, hearsay, CVs, and other things that sort of attest to some sort of professional reputation, the reputation of each Centian is very simple: It's every single payment they've ever received. And remember, they were paid for carrying out an action that was requested (i.e. work).

When payments can be received for performing non-trivial work that was reviewed and evaluated by a large number of one's peers, that are recorded on an unalterable blockchain and also happen to be forever linked to the original bounty deposit which is also tied to a specific prompt or request, there is no need to solely rely on proxies for reputational proof anymore. That means everyone is effectively free to establish and build out their reputation.

So then what next? Well, I'll let you answer that question yourself.