[e-gold-list] Re: This might induce a few clues....

[James A. Donald]

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James M. Ray wrote:
 > eBay decided to raise their fees (again). JMR

The problem is that Ebay is administering the reputation
system and transaction system as a single integrated
whole, which is indeed the easiest way to do it, but
this way gives the owner of the servers on which ones
reputations reside, ownership and control of other
people's reputations.

Ebay fees do serve a useful function in that we want it
to be costly to generate fake positive feedbacks, so
some integration of the reputation mechanism with the
payment mechanism is needful, but Ebay's integration is
primarily aimed at capturing the value of people's
reputations for Ebay, rather than protecting the
integrity of the reputation mechanism.   Wherever there
has been a choice between maximizing Ebay revenue, and
protecting the reputation system from being spammed with
fake positive comments, Ebay has unsurprisingly chosen
to maximize revenue.

Ideally, feedbacks should be authenticated by some
mechanism, but there should be multiple independent such
mechanism - the buyer and seller should see reputational
information from all, or at least most, such mechanisms,
regardless of what mechanism they choose to use to
mediate the sale - reputational information, feedback
comments, should be made available under an open source
style license so that the parties to the transaction
retain some substantial rights in them, rather than
becoming wholly the property of the transaction service.


     --digsig
          James A. Donald
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      CjsnU90Ez5HFe6dOW2LxxlAs26ZU7nXTwKpGstJu
      4deezafRqJaQEWeGO54eqrRhuAiGutImRrw+YmaS2


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