notes
handling negative gossip in online dating
21 october 2003
Online dating can be a perilous forum. Participants search for potential matches and only have a potential mate's own self-description to go on. Often these self-descriptions are deceptive, and there are only so many assessment signals that can be read from such a profile. This is a forum where collaborative sharing of dating experiences with other members could be personally beneficial. However, the twist is that this forum is competitive by its nature. Bill will not want to share information with John on Mary because Bill and John are competitors. If Bill feels positive about Mary, he will want to conceal that from John. If Bill feels negative about Mary, he may actually want to pigeonhole John into a match with Mary to free up competition over other women. A central public reputation system will not suffice to provide warnings about negative reputation. If Mary has racked up negative feedback, she will simply leave the community or choose a new login name.
Just as with ebay, it seems that the best reputation system may be to maintain positive and negative information through separate systems. A positive testimonial system can be used to help males and females who have had positive dealings to cross-promote. They can enhance each other's positive reputations and these scores can be used to increase the prominence of a user in the results pages of potential suitors. However, a potential suitor cannot just go on positive reputation, since this only measures certain dimensions of reputation, such as social eptness. Also, it should be expected that such positive feedback will not be extremely informative. A male will want to leave positive testimonial for a female in hopes of reciprocation, but, unless he is completely uninterested in that person, he will probably leave fair vague praise.
Negative information must be handled differently, and a gossip system is preferable because there is no means of retribution. Negative gossip is treated as a commodity. It reveals dimensions of reputation not covered by positive reputation. In the following diagram, I illustrate the trade and barter of negative information.
The man labeled "81" is seeking gossip about the female. He receives only a fraction of the negative gossip on the female, proportionate to his "participation score" of 81. He has gained this score by previously recording feedback about his experiences with other women. Each time someone has accessed his feedback and judged it to be helpful and informative, his participation score has been rewarded. This is similiar to a measure of his reputation and expertise. Comparable systems exist in Amazon's book review system and Epinions.com's expert reviewers. Others are encouraged to accurately report the helpfulness of comments because if a person judges man "81" as not helpful, future gossip will be suppressed from this person. Men are encouraged to help out others because without being helpful, he himself will not receive help. Of course, a dyadic information bartering system would seem more fair, however, there may not be enough information reciprocity to motivate bartering between most men, e.g. it is unlikely that male X has info on female A and wants info on female B, and male Y has info on female B and wants info on female A. Thus, I opted for a community measure of participation.
The positive reputation system is motivated by cross-promotion and enables signaling, while the gossip reputation system is motivated by inside information as a commodity, and enables sanctioning/warning. By treating positive and negative reputation information separately in subsystems that best suit each, we can leverage their combined informational benefits.