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Comment by ab_initio | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for your comment. As for your arguments, I am somewhat unconvinced.

1) This is impossible. What exactly is impossible? Getting Digg and Reddit to adopt it? Maybe, but there are a variety of uses that I can think of that have nothing to do with digg reddit or HN.

2) This has been tried before. So what?

3) Twitter and Facebook do this already or something similar. So what? First of all, both facebook and twitter have totally different business models and really have no incentive to include reputation. Further, the mere fact that there exists a large competitor in the market doesn't mean a small venture that may be more simple, targeted, and agile cannot succeed.

Maybe I am being naive, and if so, I fully expect to hear about it. However, I find your arguments unconvincing, and I would be greatful to hear other people's thoughts on them.

Thanks again for the comment.

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1) This is impossible. What exactly is impossible?

Getting anyone to use it. How will you get users?

I think thats certainly an issue. Right off the top of my head I see two distinct paths by which one might drive adoption:

1) There are a variety of smaller sites that utilize reputation type systems. For examples, take a look at all those tech help sites (one called it exchange comes to mind). These all fit into the Question/Answer model. I think there is some merit to exploring blogging as a second option. Specifically blogs can use reputation threshholds for posting, filtering, and comment prioritizing (putting the good ones at the top). Basically those are the primary areas where I'd like to look to start building a user base, but I think there are many more out there.

2) As one commenter recommended, the service could be expanded to include more than just simple +/- karma type scores and move to more complex stuff like Kiva loanability etc. This is pretty self explanatory, add a service that makes life easier for these sites, and they'll ask their users to adopt it.

Finally, I realize openid is a different beast but it boils down to similar idea, universalize your identity. Login and passwords are, of course, prevalent everywhere, so there is a huge market for this type of service and it seems to be picking up some steam. Our target market is smaller, but if it proves nearly as useful to users within that space, it has a chance of being adopted as well.

Getting people to use it is FAR from impossible.

Let's look at it a bit of a different way. If I understand it correctly, this could be used to identify trolls and such. Makes me think about the NIN rant of last week.

So, let's say you built your first go of this on top of something like the Disqus API, and convince a few sites to use it.

Maybe create a few simple plug-ins for forum services, etc.

All far from impossible. Don't go the 'boil the ocean' route where you try to grab everything at once. Piggybacking on OpenID is a decent idea (as mentioned already), but personally, i believe that OpenID is far from a success (it isn't mainstream yet). You could potentially create a system that piggybacks on Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, etc. and as long as you have a simple enough way for to hook into the service, I think you could get some traction.

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