Engagement-based Reputation System: Connecting Three Dots

Reputation is one of the most important element in social network system. It is a source of social capital for each individual and a higher reputation generally means one is perceived as more reliable and contributive for the society. On the other hand, low or negative reputation is regarded as that a person provides less benefit, or sometimes do harmful behaviors to the community. Then does Steem's reputation system meet these expectation?

Activeness and value

To answer the question, we first need to clarity what adds value to our community. However, there is no single answer and it is very hard to make a conclusion. One says engagement, another says number of users, and some other may say marketing, and so on. The only thing we can tell is this: no activity creates no value nor harm. So if one who does not active for a significantly long time (might leave Steem) should have neutral reputation.

Counterexample

However, the problem of Steem's reputation system is that people with no engagement still have high reputations. I looked up reputation leaderboard and found an example in 51th place. The account has over 70 reputation but its last activity is 3 months ago and it seems the account only upvotes mirring other's vote. Does it deserve 70+ reputation? Probably hard to say yes, but it has 70+ now and will have too.

Another flaw

In addition to high reputation for the inactive, a reputation in the current system can be effectively heightened by whale's recursive voting. This is because the current reputation is an accumulation of given rshares(in plain English, upvotes) and it does not consider who votes.

Downvote from hollowman

Finally, a recent flood of downvotes by Hive account@asshole raised another issue. The main problem is asymmetric game; we cannot downvote him but he can downvote us, since we have activities but he has none. Should we allow hollowmans in our voting game? What happens if we have hundreds assholes?

Reputation based on engagement

To address these problems, I would suggest to a reputation system based on engagement, temporally called En-rep. Briefly, the calculation of Enrep is as follow:

1. Only votes on one's activities(post and comment) in last 7 days are considered
2. Multiple votes from same account for an author in the period is averaged. (e.g. If Bob voted for Alice 100% Monday and Bob voted again for Alice 50% Wednesday, his vote is considered as 75%)
3. If one's Enrep is zero or below zero, its voting power(rshares) is significantly reduced
4. Low Enrep accounts cannot decrease Enrep of higher accounts

Based on these rules, I simulated Enrep from 1/1~1/18. Reduced voting power for negative Enrep account is 0% (so negative Enrep accounts have no voting power) and zero accounts have only 10%. The following table presents snapshots of top 50 Enrep. We can notice highly engaged people with positive feedback are ranked.

Rank/Date	2017/01/09	2017/01/12	2017/01/15	2017/01/18
1	good-karma	furion	furion	busy.org
2	unipsycho	unipsycho	good-karma	good-karma
3	jdcrunchman	the-alien	the-alien	firepower
4	firepower	dragosroua	krnel	dragosroua
5	the-alien	schattenjaeger	schattenjaeger	stellabelle
6	krnel	papa-pepper	kevinwong	the-alien
7	papa-pepper	krnel	dragosroua	kevinwong
8	schattenjaeger	kadavy	ats-david	hanshotfirst
9	kadavy	ats-david	stephenkendal	schattenjaeger
10	elena-singer	kingscrown	kingscrown	kingscrown
11	nspart	writingamigo	steempower	stephenkendal
12	steemsports	luzcypher	doitvoluntarily	norbu
13	awesomenyl	araki	sweetsssj	steempower
14	thecryptofiend	steempower	luzcypher	mariandavp
15	sirlunchthehost	officialfuzzy	barrydutton	chainsquad
16	araki	awesomenyl	justtryme90	thecryptofiend
17	dragosroua	donkeypong	jacobtothe	senseiteekay
18	infovore	jacobtothe	norbu	sweetsssj
19	silvia	hanshotfirst	writingamigo	doitvoluntarily
20	little-peppers	timcliff	surfermarly	ats-david
21	ats-david	clayop	elfkitchen	ballinconscious
22	andrarchy	richq11	cardboard	larkenrose
23	luzcypher	elfkitchen	mynameisbrian	codydeeds
24	furion	good-karma	thecryptofiend	krnel
25	timcliff	eroche	the-future	donkeypong
26	lukewearechange	homeartpictures	gorish	riskdebonair
27	charlieshrem	bacchist	riskdebonair	timcliff
28	exyle	mynameisbrian	hanshotfirst	justtryme90
29	virtualgeisha	the-future	kafkanarchy84	folaut89
30	theprophet0	nonameslefttouse	larkenrose	steemitblog

Hybrid is possible

The downside of Enrep system is it's volatile so actually it's not a capital. As an alternative, we can combine current reputation system and Enrep system, e.g. 25% accumulated reputation + 75% Enrep (they need to be standardized).

Expected outcome

The advantage of the suggested system is connecting the three dots, engagement, reputation, and power. One who is just running a voting bot does not profit much. Activities with positive feedback from the community is a necessary condition for being influential in our community. Also, howllow downvoters is almost impossible since even he/she pretends good to have enough Enrep, it will be gone in 7 days if he/she starts to downvote. But the most important outcome of Enrep would be making more people active and contributed to Steem.