Who are You Online?

The internet is a pretty amoral, often moronic, and sometimes scary place. Why should this be? Shouldn't the internet merely be a reflection of our society and culture onto a computer screen?

Call me an optimist, but I'm not quite ready to buy the argument that 'people are amoral, moronic and scary'. I think it has more to do with anonymity, and anonymity leads to lack of consequences, and no consequences means bad behavior.

In the real world there are many social restrictions on how a person behaves. Laws and religious codes are the more obvious examples, but there are also any number of unwritten cultural rules that range from how one should respect a person's privacy to what clothes are fashionable this season. People who break these rules are punished by being ostracized or ignored. This is by no means a perfect system (as any high school geek can tell you), but it's hardwired into our brains' emotional systems, so we're stuck with it.

On the internet, all these rules are relaxed or erased. While civil law still applies, social and cultural mores can have no consequences when all the participants are anonymous. People behave badly because there is no reason for them not to.*

So how do we make the internet a friendlier place?

Reputation.

Imagine if everyone had a backlog of all the posts they'd ever made to websites that everyone else could trace through. A user would think twice before posting something nasty or foolish. On the flip-side, people would be more likely to listen to someone whom they could see had made intelligent and well-behaved posts in the past.

This immediately sets off the privacy buzzer in some people's minds, but there is really no need to associate this online persona with a real person. Anyone who's played a massively multiplayer online game can attest to how a virtual persona can be anonymous yet still have a reputation to be accountable to.

In fact, most websites already require people to create semi-anonymous user profiles in order to post. The key is to tie all these internet identities together into one cohesive and searchable whole. There need be no limitations on the number of personas you could create nor which personas are used where. People who want to behave badly could just create fresh profiles for every site, but readers could have the option to filter out people without an online reputation.

Such a system could insert reputation into the internet without destroying the anarchic playground that we all know and love. From reputation comes respect and the ability to mute all the shouting, the whiners and the just plain psychopaths infesting the web today.

* - I suspect the biological reason for this is that we are creatures of emotion. When considering our actions, emotional factors get summed up and the strongest one wins. Shame is a very strong emotion, so it often wins in real-world circumstances, but on the internet it is muted so that more visceral emotions like anger, lust, ego win out.

Addendum

The best part about such a system is that the infrastructure is already in place via public-key cryptography. (I'll leave a write-up of how the technology could be used for a later post.) The only gap is a standardized way of associating keys with personas and personas with websites.

There are a few notable single-sign-in systems that I've seen which are kin to what I've described, though they aren't intended necessarily as reputation building systems:

• TypeKey is a blog focused identity system that allows blog owners to restrict comments based on a centralized registration list.
• OpenID is an open source effort that allows users to create their own individual profile servers that websites could authenticate and pull profile information from.