Not everyone can be represented by a pile of numbers and stars. Digital reputation today is a reduction of who we are – fractured across multiple platforms and obscured by shadowy company intentions.

Reputation should be a simple equation: be a good person, create good things, and be entitled to a good reputation. However, today’s reputation game is twisted by technocratic greed and tainted by unethical techniques like review farming.

Growing adoption of decentralized networks coupled with a quickly rising population of independent creators means that now may be the best time to rethink our systems of digital reputation. Decentralizing reputation promote transparency and trust within our digital communities and allow creators to rightfully own their reputation.

Let’s talk about surfboard shapers.

Many new surfers today choose to buy surfboards off the rack — going to a surf shop and purchasing a model from a big brand. Think going to the bike shop and grabbing a Trek mountain bike.

It wasn’t always like this. Not too long ago, a surfer could only get a surfboard made by a local shaper. The intimate relationship between surfer and shaper is symbiotic, two souls driven to create the perfect surfcraft. In those days, word of mouth was your only way of finding the right person to make you a board.

Nowadays, the rise of e-commerce and invention of the surfboard shipping box has shifted attention away from local shapers. Global brands with the cash to spend on sponsorships and oversea factories now control the lion’s share of the market.

Strangely enough, a custom surfboard from a local shaper is often cheaper than something off the rack.

Why doesn’t everyone just order a custom board and support their local shaper? The quick answer is the time delay. A custom board might take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple months.

But there’s a larger force at play. In the age of Yelp, potential buyers may be put off by local shapers’ lack of digital reputation. The modern-day consumer is used to vetting online reviews to fuel their decision. It may be hard to blindly commit to order from a local shaper with no one to vouch for them.

Cryptocurrencies can help level the playing field for small scale creators like our local surfboard shaper. I paid for my custom surfboard on Venmo. Payment services like Venmo, Paypal, or Zelle work well for transferring money, but provide little information for other potential customers.

In contrast, a cryptocurrency transaction is public, and can be instrumented to include useful information: a shaper’s turnaround time or how easy it was to work with them. Many creators don’t have the bandwidth to market their happy customers on top of delivering orders. By baking the testimony directly into the transaction, we can help these creators maintain a trusted and independent digital reputation.

Fake reviews can still exist in this system, but they’ll have less room to hide. Decentralized reviews could support an ecosystem of open source fraud detection solutions. Any enterprising developer could combine publicly accessible information on the blockchain with techniques like social graphs or natural language processing to inform users of suspicious activity.

A creator’s greatest asset is a customer’s good words. In the past, niche craftsmen thrived solely off word of mouth.

The losing battle of small time surfboard shapers to globalization and e-commerce is a story with many parallels. Mom and pop restaurants are in an uphill battle against the “Yelp Mafia”, Etsy makers face threats of review extortion, and honest Amazon sellers lose sales to review farming merchants.

Today’s version of digital reputation is a rigged game against creators. Reviews are under lock and key of the platform, leaving creators vulnerable to a platform’s whims or wants. Reviews are siloed, incentivizing creators to practice a monoculture approach to maximize their review count.

We are in need of digital marketplace tools that facilitate closer relationships with the people we transact with. We need tools to empathize and connect customers and creators.

We also need to provide creators a stable foundation to build their reputation. Creators already have a lot on their plates — they shouldn’t need to worry about losing access to their reputation or jumping through hoops to maintain it.

Decentralization provides the tools to level the playing field for our underdog creators. Reviews stored on the blockchain inherit the best traits of decentralization: transparency and security.

Transparency paints a more complete picture of a person’s digital footprint. Reputation is no longer divided across different platforms. A surfboard shaper with an established reputation can leverage their trail of positive customer testimonies to pursue an adjacent career in surfing instruction. Individuals are independent to pursue different creative avenues while still maintaining a cohesive brand.

Security is at the heart of decentralized networks that have now supported almost a trillion dollars of value creation. The same tech that makes it trivial to own and transact with a crypto wallet today can also make it easy for a creator to secure and manage their reputation. Creators no longer need to concede to Big Tech to secure their reputation.

Decentralizing is a promise of ownership. Digital money in the past was only possible with a third party managing transactions. Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation of Bitcoin’s decentralized network removed the need for a middleman’s meddling hands and opened the door to new forms of democratized financial systems.

A growing marketplace of middle-class creators serving niche communities, like our local surfboard shaper, need a reputation system owned by the people. Decentralized reputation is what the internet has always needed, and now is the best time to build it.