"...a reputation system that really works..."
There's the rub. It's difficult to imagine a reputation system that actually works. The current Steem reputation system is demonstrably not it. You can just buy phat votes that will jack your rep on Steem presently.
Think about how rep works in the real world. There are folks you admire, and whose opinions you value highly. They have high rep to you, but who knows what their rep is to others? Not you, unless you know those others and discuss that topic, and they actually tell you the truth.
Rep is a highly complex and utterly subjective mechanism in the real world, and that's why it has value. Trying to make something similar has proved difficult on social media, athough UA seems to have done the best of any attempt I am aware of.
The fact is that I do not share your opinion of User X, and I don't want to. If I do value your opinion, I might assign it some ability to indicate how much I'll respect someone else - but only to some degree, and that is going to vary from person to person, on both ends.
How that might impact witness elections is just as variable.
Personally, I reckon the age of representatives is ending. It's time for liquid democracy without representatives; for users that are nodes and do the governing themselves. AI will be more necessary for we noobish plebs to be able to set price feeds, as an example of one such variable, but that's only necessary if we have multiple tokens, which isn't particularly necessary TBQH.
A stripped down code that can run on obsolete boxes with users sharing the data via torrents can eliminate hosting costs, nodes otherwise, and be actually distributed and utterly decentralized, and after seeing Steem, that's what I reckon we need. There's a million ways to share beneficial interest, and a token isn't a necessity. Dapps that add tokens, different types of content, and etc., can supply nodes and bandwidth along with the content,and users can add them to their stack if they want.
I expect an actually functional reputation system will be more difficult than almost any other aspect of a social media platform because of subjectivity, and the difficulty of making that useful.
Thanks!
First, thanks for your opinion @valued-customer , I felt this post was just too large as a comment at The History of Delegated Proof-of-Stake
I think, every system can be attacked (51% attack on PoW, etc, etc). Regarding REP what I find interesting is that it doesn't have any witness power value at the moment and it is part of the system for some time now. That is an advantage in my opinion. Outsiders can't just create REP in a minute and take the whole chain (like Justin Sun suckpuppets did). If STEEM had a REDPOS protocol, he would at least needed to start a "stealth" attack first (create the suckpuppets and "work" on them to adquire enough REP to guarantee a good witness rank).
Also, in my opinion, a good REP system, should take the account age as parameter too. That's the advantage of a 4 year old blockchain (you can't implement such a thing from day 0, but we are not on day 0). Why would a "baby" represent "adult members" of the chain?
The chain is only 4 years old I know, but it is still better than 0. Maybe if the chain was 40 years old, should ask for a 10 year experience as parameter to become witness. If the chain is 4 years old, at least 2 years. Something like that, the idea is that you need to hang around some (significative) time to become a witness on the chain.
For a social oriented blockchain, I see the "REDPOS" concept as better than "DPOS".
After all when STEEM started it was announced as "experimental POW" with a 1st failed attempt:
[ANN][STEEM][POW] - An experimental Proof of Work blockchain
and here the "good" one:
[ANN][STEEM][POW] - NO IPO | NO PREMINE | NO INSTAMINE (relaunch)
So for a REDPOS deployment, the advantage is that witnesses didn't know their REP would be used, we could argue that they were "mining their REP" during 4 years.
StackOverflow
@krischik StackOverflow is a very specific niche community, so its peers evaluating eachother (a sort of qualified vote.
On an universal social blockchain, you have people interested on arts affecting people interested on tech, mutually contributing to the reputation. Maybe that's the reason why a reputation system for a universal social blockchain is quite a problem. @blocktrades is working on such a system, but I suspect is a higher level of complexity than using models that work on specific subject oriented communities.
You're putting on your blockchain designer hats. This is exactly the sort of discussion I like to see.
Thanks you for your kind words @theoretical!
Actually, with the stake Sun has, he could quickly buy the highest rep on the platform from vote sellers, in only a day or two. At least the way Steem rep is now.
The account age is also not foolproof, although it's better. I just found an acount this last week that has been here since 2016 but made it's first comment that day. They've been delegating to bots during their entire tenure on Steem, but not socializing at all.
While this is an outlier account, and it's pretty hard to imagine anyone setting up an account and waiting for years for it to be usable for some kind of illicit attack on governance, I also know of users that have claimed to have ~10k accounts, and presumably have simply been adding accounts since they got here, and got here early. I am pretty sure there are a lot of users with a lot of accounts, although 10k is, again, an outlier.
Because there are so many of these 'pre-aged' accounts, I don't think account age is a functional rep mechanism we can count on much either, although it might be very useful to look at account youth with suspicion instead.
I do appreciate your interesting ideas, and don't want to discourage you from having good ideas, but do think the criticisms I've brought to your attention should prompt you to think more, and have even better ideas. One of the problems with society is how rep works IRL, and that's why we get such shitty politicians in office.
Pretty sure I don't want the same combination of self-aggrandizing psychopaths with piles of money buying their way to power over Steem. Oh wait..
Anyway, I hope I didn't communicate that I have no interest or respect for this concept. I do think it's incomplete as I have understood it. I do think it can be better than DPoS, at least the bungled interpretation of DPoS we have atm, but I think rep needs to be improved before it can be used to decentralize governance in the way you want to use it.
Thanks!
Thanks for your contribution @valued-customer! For REP I mean "a better REP system" (i.e. as @blocktrades is working on). Also a REDPOS uses a combination of human activity related parameters.
You could let an account "age", but then again, it's just one parameter. For it to have a REP greater than 25, that account needs to have some sort of activity. It needs to be "worked".
So such an attack costs more and is harder to execute than the current attack going on STEEM. I'm just proposing a definition of what a REDPOS protocol would be, I'm not a coder. It relies on a well coded REP system, the current one has been defined as a "bandaid" arrangement.
So a REDPOS implemented with a better REP system should be stronger than a REDPOS implemented with a bad REP system.
That's true, but I think the important question is whether it would be harder enough.
I am not familiar with @blocktrades efforts to improve rep. It definitely needs improvement IMHO. However, as I pointed out, IRL rep is highly subjective and individual, and that's most of why it's useful. I don't see some kind of standardized rep that's calculable as emulating that utility.
Thanks again.
I think we should not shy away from the subjective nature of it. Nobody is expected to get along with everyone. That is how it should be on here.
In a shameless shilling of my own ideas, I posted my take and proposed solution on rep a couple of days ago. It's on my blog if you'd like to voice your opinion.
In the end,I think it will take a number of different systems which conclude on rep in different ways. Having several points of views will allow dapps and users a better picture of who/what various accounts are.
Don't be shy about posting a link to your proposal, doing now for you: Steem Proposal - Account Rating System
From your proposal:
I don't agree, stake related vote is a meassure that turns a sybil attack into a costly endeavour.
Also experience makes certain opinions more qualified than other ones.
It's not logic to put the same value on a witness with 0 year experience at the same level of a witness with 4 year experience. When you are looking for a job, that's an important item.
Agreed. It's about two different subjects:
A) Protocol philosophy. If REDPOS protocol is an improvement over DEPOS for a social blockchain.
B) If a specific implementation on a certain protocol is a better system than what exists today.
I strongly believe that REDPOS is a protocol philosophy that represents an evolution over DEPOS.
But I am no developer. It's out of my reach to produce such an implementation. It would need really good developers to produce a "NEWSTEEM on REDPOS". Just wishing some good ones, understand the need to evolve DPOS and maybe work on some REDPOS alike implementation.