Identity & Reputation: What's In a Name?

This post on reputation and how to monetize it really got me thinking about identity in general and especially those online. One of the flaws with every reputation system I've seen so far is that it only applies to a specific corner of the web, usually a single website. Someone can usually establish a high reputation rating in one place even if they have a very negative one somewhere else, and the two don't affect one another. In other words, violations committed under a different identity don't carry over into your others. Because of this, one can quickly develop a high-rep Steemit account (only takes a week or two if they snag some whale love) and use it to lure people off-site into scams or worse. This works because the rules of flagging only apply to specific violations committed on Steemit itself. One can easily use Steemit as their hunting grounds and maintain their reputation points as long as their violations occur off-site and thus cannot be considered flag-worthy. This certainly isn't something that's unique to Steemit, of course. It's common in online marketplaces too. For instance, someone could sell a bunch of cheap trinkets on eBay without ever violating anyone there and then "up-sell" them by direct correspondence afterwards. In this way, the easily-established eBay reputation serves as the predator's tool rather than that of potential victims. Can this be fixed? Personally, I remain doubtful but I still think it's a fascinating challenge worth tackling together as a community. We'll probably always have catfish and other sorts of fraudsters in our midst but if we can mitigate their impact on the platform in some way, we definitely ought to make the attempt. Any ideas to this end could potentially be crowdfunded by upvotes, as we're already used to seeing, or they could be funded by an organized bounty in the manner that @ned describes here. It's a subject I thought a lot about, over the years. I rejected my childhood name, Aaron, a decade ago and adopted a new one for everyday use that was both simpler to spell and pronounce while retaining its uniqueness. It was also important to me that it's .com domain name was available for the sake of personal branding in the future. Over the years, it proved to be a worthwhile move and besides the more practical advantages, it also just felt good to homestead a new name from scratch rather than being forever tied that way to the parents I thoroughly despised. Much more recently, with the advent of Steemit, I began using the handle PiedPiper and it has been fun to repeat the process all over again in a new community setting.

Establishing a new brand can be fun but it usually requires an investment. It prompted me to think on the subject of identity and reputation again and I realized that this adoption of the PiedPiper name has come at a transitional time in my life, just as the last one did. The first time, when I was 19, I was leaving my parents' world to find a new one of my own choosing. I was moving away from a world that I wanted no part of but this time, the transition is one of arrival - of embracing a new place in the world. In this past year, I found a suitable place to call home here on the South Pacific coast of Chile, I found great new friends to join me as neighbors, and together, we bought the land and are building the community of our dreams. It was actually one of these new neighbors of mine, @onceuponatime that introduced me to Steemit in the first place so that adds even more to the serendipitous feeling. I'm glad that my new friends here on Steemit can be a part of the story at such a positive time and I'd like to thank those of you that read this for all of your positive contributions you've made here so far. It has already been a hell of a ride and we're just getting warmed up.

I guess the point of all this rambling is that the dilemma we're all considering isn't just about managing labels and avatars, it's about threat detection and productive community building. When you build a village, it's important to be on the look out for predators who would abuse you and your fellow villagers. Most mechanisms to that end are full of holes and the more you work on tightening security, the more you often end up infringing on people's privacy. Personally, I'm comfortable with total transparency but I know the majority of my peers are not so we have to be sensitive in this regard and refrain from going to far. I'm sure this will be an ongoing topic of discussion for some time and we probably won't reach any solid consensus on it but I'm still very interested in everyone's opinion about it. What do you think? Where do your preferences fall on the spectrum of transparency and secrecy? Is the reputation points system we have now enough? If not, what sort of modifications would you like to see?