[lord_jim]

Say that I am building an app that leads to real world interaction, potentially with strangers. Clearly a real name policy is not a good way to make these interactions safer, but what would be a proper alternative? A reputation system? Any existing apps that do a good job with this?

Right now I’ve just surfaced links to user’s social profiles so that other users can verify if this is someone they may be able to trust

[PakG1]

I wonder if this is a more difficult problem because the "good" ones are taken off the market, potentially forever. Follow the logic, does this leave emotionally irrational people to have a larger share of the reviews than normal? And then just like it takes only a couple of unreasonable bad Yelp reviews to unfairly damage a restaurant, I can imagine a couple of emotionally unhealthy people damage someone's future dating prospects by writing stuff that has more to do with themselves than their dating partners? Maybe you can account for this by reevaluating reputation by weighing scores from people who receive high scores higher than scores received from those with low scores? Gets really complicated really fast, no? Really curious how online dating companies attack these problems.

[indigochill]

This problem is exaggerated on dating sites due to their nature of "good" users exiting the system, but it applies to pretty much all reputation systems since there's always something to be gained from unfair damages, whether that's emotional release or perhaps competition. And people are usually more motivated to post bad reviews (for whatever reason) than good.

I think if we don't bother with a total score the way many rating systems do and instead show the count of good/bad reviews and show the reviews side by side, it should represent the depth of those reviews and a reader can then try to determine from the review contents whether the good or bad reviews are more likely to be true. It takes a lot more effort to write a compelling negative review than it does to simply rate someone/something poorly.

[strathmeyer]

okcupid doesn't take the time to remove the profiles of people actively trying to blackmail their users, so I'm not sure what all this 'trust' nonsense is about.