Over the last few months, I hacked on a reputation project with David Ehrlichman and Marco Spilimbergo. Here's what we attempted and learned.
The basic premise was this: reputation systems are fundamental to how humans operate, but they are implicit and therefore centralized. Building a decentralized reputation system is hard. So we were working on a way to create, discover, and apply composable reputation systems. It consisted of a no-code reputation system builder and a marketplace for finding reputation building blocks from other people.
Repgrind Wireframe Walkthrough — Nov 2021
Miami Hack Week Prototype Demo & Hackathon Submission — Jan 2022
MetaPod Denver Pitch Competition Video & Deck — Feb 2022
We didn't get traction on this, but I still think this is a pretty good idea. The onchain data is there. In order to build meaningful reputation systems, it has to be perspectival (aka context-specific). So making it really easy to build lots of systems for reading the data and mixing and matching them seems like the way to do it.
Later, David and I worked on building out a project called the DKD (DragonKillDAO, based on DragonKillPoints) to try to create the perfect base mechanism that would naturally evolve into context-specific reputation systems. The prototype was in Discord using currency tracking by MEE6 bot, which was a pretty good place to start.
Invitation to DKD — Mar 2022
DKD Game Rules (forked from B Nomic) — Mar 2022
Note, if you're working on reputation, you just need positive reputation, even with anonymous accounts. I often refer back to this quote from Joi Ito on Toshio Yamagishi's work in particular:
May 2024 update:
If you're going to build a decentralized reputation system, you almost certainly need to use a recursive mechanism like PageRank. Spencer Graham wrote about what we're seeking for the Hats Protocol ecosystem here.
The DKD Game Rules link above is very congruent with tipping in $DEGEN, (and $enjoy and $RARE). I think this is going to evolve into a stable and foundational primitive in crypto pretty soon. I might work on an ERC-20 fork just for tipping. The whole point of crypto is programmable value! This design space is severely under explored. Keep trying to program the representations of value in new ways!