| Thank you for clarifying. I still think the situation isn't quite as bleak as you're suggesting. > making social media followers, Academy Award nominations, and academic citation metrics all fungible with an "Internet points" abstraction even in principle is almost certainly a disaster waiting to happen. I don't recommend that any community makes a social media follower equivalent in value to an academic citation metric, but there may be specific cases where, for example, having more than 1000 social media followers grants you the same allowance of a resource (e.g. compute cycles, or disk space) as having 1 research paper cited in a prestigious journal. The important thing is that it would be up to each community to decide for themselves how much each type of reputation is worth. (They could even decide that having an Academy Award nomination should give negative reputation, although if identities are anonymous then a user would have plausible deniability). It's also worth noting that social media followers are, in some sense, already fungible. For example, some monetisation programs require at least 1000 followers, and some brand deals require a specific audience size. Obviously that is treating one follower as completely interchangeable for any other follower. |
Okay, let's explore that. Now a researcher has an incentive to go buy social media followers as a hack to get compute resources.
The problem with these sorts of equivalencies is that they are often transitive ($ = followers, followers = compute, therefore $ = compute). I've exploited some myself in a small way (eg. created Gmail accounts to generate 'referrals' to get more free storage), but many developer services have recently had to discontinue their free tiers due to exploitation for mining bitcoin, and there is a whole subculture of travel points and credit card reward hacks, eg. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/13/137795995/how-...
Formalizing a mechanism for reputational equivalencies could lead to an explosion of exploitable edge cases similar in spirit to privilege escalation in a security context.