No, not my age
But my reputation here on Hive. I just noticed it without paying much attention, but since I hit 76.52, peakD is showing it as 77 now. It's probably taken at least a year to move on from 76 and it will probably take "forever" to reach 80. This is because the calculation is logarithmic based and it therefore takes longer and longer to progress higher. But what does it mean anyway?
Here is what Gemini says:
On the Hive blockchain, reputation is a score that indicates how much value a user has added to the platform, based on the upvotes and downvotes they've received. New users start at 25, and the score increases with upvotes, especially those from users with a high amount of Hive Power, while downvotes can decrease it. This system is designed to reduce abuse and signal trustworthiness, though its perceived effectiveness varies among users.
I did a bit of searching and stumbled upon a post from a now seemingly abandoned account from 5 years ago which shows a nice little flow chart:
and there is an even older post from Arcange (9 years ago!) that shows the increased difficulty in a chart:
Does reputation matter?
In a real sense, yes, since users will get blacklisted and muted from front pages should the rating go too low. Fortunately, they can still post and this guarantees the web3 freedom we are used to here on Hive. It's not entirely clear to me, however, what the significance of this number really means. First, essentially all older accounts' reputation (5+ years) will be inflated by the "voting bot period" we had back then. Almost everyone used them to game the system and it was possible to make very quick reputation gains by using them. This of course has nothing to do with "proof of brain" and the number then essentially becomes useless. Fortunately, this abuse was stopped with the downvote control changes. But still, the mark is there...
Also, the whole proof of brain concept obviously has to be taken with a grain of salt: many bigger accounts automate their votes or follow curation trails. In theory, the PoB concept is sound, but practice has shown that it doesn't quite work. But perhaps we have settled for "it's kinda close, so it's not entirely broken"?
The number itself to me at least signals two things (which are relative) when I browse posts:
- Age of account
- Reputation/Trustworthiness
A higher number will generally mean it is a somewhat older account (not very accurate of course, but still sort of works), and generally speaking it should hold some sort of "reputation" since it has gained whale votes over a long period and hasn't been downvoted by larger whales. In other words, it holds some trustworthiness. While there is some abuse here (and I have experienced it myself some months ago), the system in general does seem to work. It's not great by any means, but it's almost impossible to manage this better when there is no central authority. I guess abuse from whales is being largely kept in check by fear of DVs from other whales. Again, not great, but it does kind of work.
So does it matter?
Honestly, I am not sure if it does. If I had a rep of 45, would that change anything? Would fewer people read my posts? Would users take advantage of it and DV me more often? Would I get more votes from whales? If it was 10, that would be problematic since it could get "censored", but hopefully that would have been the result from legitimate abuse.
Perhaps the biggest value from a reputation system could come from dealing with AI. I have no idea how many posts on Hive are created or partially created with AI. But surely, some are? I have experimented with it myself and overall I think it can be very useful to improve one's posts, like style or grammar. Obviously, it could also be used to create posts to try and farm upvotes. Since I haven't really noticed this here it suggests that this abuse is being kept in check. So far so good.
I would expect that a user with a higher reputation would also not try to exploit the system with pure AI posts. I could therefore "safely" upvote that account. But how could I be certain? I guess like with everything else here it is simply a quick way of gauging at something. The real "proof" comes from actually reading or seeing the post of a user. I think several years ago, @Blocktrades had the idea of changing the reputation system. It sounded very ambitious and also very difficult to implement. I wonder if that is still a thing?
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