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[Lex]

I have been thinking lately of some ways that the rating system I have can be improved while still making the process of rating people simple and here is one solution I've come up with (i haven't implemented this yet):

Instead of allowing you to rate an individual, you would only be allowed to rate transactions with the individual. So, here are some scenarios:

Lets say you're having an important meeting and someone who promised to show up, didn't. You would go into the site, create a new transaction record attached to the person called "liberty meeting xyz" and then give a rating of how important this was to you, if you thought they were completely irresponsible give them a 1, if they called before hand but gave a really crappy excuse give them a 2 or a 3 and if they had a good excuse give them a 4 and if it was something outside of their control (car broke down on the way to the meeting) give them a 5 (since they were obviously going to make it but were prevented from doing it).

Another aspect I was going to add is categories for transactions. For example: Money, Promptness, Effort, etc. So if you know someone who's always very helpful and always on time but never pays back any of their debts you would have a bunch of positive transaction records for them on the Promptness and Effort category but a bunch of negative transactions in the Money category. Then your final rating for this person would consistent of the 3 different parameters.

In this way if someone wants to deal with someone they don't know very well they can get a better idea of the persons strengths and weaknesses. If you need a ride from the airport and someone has offered to give you a ride, you don't care too much about this persons money habbits (hopefuly they'll have money for gas) and while their effort should be somewhere above a 1, the most important thing would be Promptness, right?

There would also be a way for the user being rated to create a transaction and send it to other users to get their rating of it. So, if you organized some event and you want the people who helped you organize to vote on your organizational skills, you would be able to create a transaction item and forward it to all of your members. If you gave someone a ride to the airport you can create a transaction and send it to the person who got the ride, etc.

The person doing the rating would always have the option of keeping it private or making it public. I would probably have to implement some sort of weighting system so that someone doesn't just add a bunch of private negative ratings to someone else. One way to resolve this would be to make a private rating half as influential on the users final score as a public one. Also, if one individual has a ton of negative private ratings in the same category for another individual, the weighting of those ratings would become even less. Rating anonymously would allow situations where you may not want to hurt someones feelings or be the person to confront someone about their money habbits but would still like to give them a negative rating to warn other members.

Anyways, that was kind of a brain dump. Let me know what you guys think of this idea and if you have any additional improvements on it.

[Lex]

Anyone aware of any serious problems with the ripple system?

My gut tells me there are opportunities for fraud in this kind of system where you automatically agree to micro loans as a payment between two other people go through you. I realize that you set limits on how much you're willing to loan but is this scalable.

Thoughts?

[Barterer]

There is no opportunity for that kind of fraud (micro or not) because if you are a link in a chain that passes debt along, you've got a line of trust between you and your adjacent links.  If you get ripped off in a transaction as a passive link, you still know who to complain to.  Shirehours is based on ripple and has been running for some time now with no complaints other than the difficulty of learning the interface.

[Lex]

There is no opportunity for that kind of fraud (micro or not) because if you are a link in a chain that passes debt along, you've got a line of trust between you and your adjacent links.  If you get ripped off in a transaction as a passive link, you still know who to complain to.  Shirehours is based on ripple and has been running for some time now with no complaints other than the difficulty of learning the interface.

How many people are registered with ShireHours? Is it being actively used? How many transactions have gone through?

[Barterer]

100 users

Actively used by a few

About 150 transactions so far.

Hmm, maybe I need to make another trip up there and rustle up some users    Right now the system is not popular enough to generate enough to pay Ryan for the next upgrade I want to make, which is a checkbox which would allow user-selectable email on/off.  That would give end-to-end encryption for some, without shutting off the e-mail receipts most users like to get.

[Russell Kanning]

i think there are 2 problems with the shirehours system
hard for people to understand
nice and private ... but noone knows if anything is happening there

[Lex]

hard for people to understand

Can you elaborate on this.

Do you think the concept is difficult to understand?

Or do you think the concepts are easy but the interface makes it more complicated than it needs to be?

[Lex]

If Ripple was rewritten from scratch, what would you do differently?

[Kat Kanning]

The concept is hard.

[Barterer]

If Ripple was rewritten from scratch, what would you do differently?

Change the "credit" +/- nomenclature so that it does not seem backward to most users.  People generally do not understand why you cannot "pay" others your IOUs until they give YOU credit.. that is, the person you pay has to recognize your IOUs as good (up to a certain amount).  People see a "payment" as a cash payment, so why the hell should it require a line of credit?  Ripple does not work that way..  only IOUs are exchanged. I cannot get the majority of users to understand that that's why the credit lines seem backward, no matter how many posts I write or message boxes I change on the system.  So it needs a major retooling to make it easier to understand and use.  I just don't know how to do it, and can't code fer shit even if I knew exactly what to do.  Any confusion AT ALL on a monetary system is enough to drive people off.. darn. 

[Lex]

What if the system was manual. Meaning that instead of doing all of this voodoo in the background of finding transaction paths and performing these rippled payments, it would be up to the user to make these decisions. Or maybe to allow both methods: manual and automated.

I would think that in most cases, at least for our use, we don't need this "ripple" feature to make payments because the trust distance between most people making payments is going to be 1 most of the time: most payments will be made between people that trust each other. As the system scales and ripple payments are accepted on Amazon and Ebay, then yes, of course the full power of "ripple" would have to come into play.

The largest trust distance in our community will probably be a 2 or a 3. This is a small enough number that you can let the user manually go through the transaction process:

Lets say I want to pay one of the tenants at Russells place. I trust Russell and assuming Russell trusts them then that would be one hop. So, if I was making a payment to the tenant, the system would find Russell and ask me if I want to:

1. pay through russell if we have enough open credit between us
2. add the tenant to my trusted circle and pay tenant directly

In this way there is nothing magical going on in the background. The system will explain what it will do and ask me for my input.

Then as a user becomes more comfortable with how it works they can choose not to manually approve the transaction in this way. For all future transactions or only transactions involving the particular payment path (recipient and intermediaries).

Have a checkbox for "Don't ask me about this transaction path again." So that after I've already successfully made a payment I would not want to get prompted about this specific payment path since I'm already comfortable with it. Next time I pay Russells tenant it'll just automatically happen through Russell - but this will no longer be a mystery since I had approved it the first time. If, on the other hand, the payment can't go through Russell (not enough credit, etc) then the system would drop back down to manual mode.

It would be a lot of extra work to involve the user in the process like this but does anyone see any value in it?

Would involving the user in the process make it easier to understand how it works?

[Friday]

100 users

Actively used by a few

About 150 transactions so far.

Hmm, maybe I need to make another trip up there and rustle up some users    Right now the system is not popular enough to generate enough to pay Ryan for the next upgrade I want to make, which is a checkbox which would allow user-selectable email on/off.  That would give end-to-end encryption for some, without shutting off the e-mail receipts most users like to get.

If I may make a suggestion, send out a newsletter to your users, even if the "newsletter" is an email saying "Hi! We're still here! We gained X new users last month."  I know I have an account, but to be honest, I haven't logged in in so long, I remember nothing about it.   

Also, ask for donations in every newsletter.  Can't hurt.

[Lex]

Going back to the example above.

I trust Kat also and assuming she trusts me and her tenants I also have the option of going through her to make the payment.

In this case there are two "shortest" paths to make my payment (other than paying person directly) one going through Russell and the other going through Kat.

I think that in this particular case the system should ask me which person I want to go through to make my payment.

There is more to this than trust, I trust Russell and Kat the same as far as them being honest with me but in a debt situation trust isn't as important as being effective and pushy at getting someone to pay the debt.

If the tenant at Kat and Russells place doesn't deliver on the product I purchased then who would be the better person to have made the payment through? Who will do a better job at hassling the guy to produce the goods? Or be willing to personally swallow the loss and refund me the transaction.

Which comes to my next question/point, charging a fee for the transaction. Trust is great and I suppose part of ripple is that it's a mutually beneficial system whereby Kat would hassle her tenant to get what I paid for with the assumption that if she paid someone through me that I would hassle them to get her the goods she purchased.

Kat and Russell know a lot of people and it's likely that they will have a lot of transactions going through them. This creates a liability problem for them, even if they give out small credit limits to their friends, depending on how many friends they have this can be a lot of money. For example: Lets say Russell has 50 trusted friends and gives each one a $200 limit on his account with them. If half of the accounts owe him money and he owes to the other half then he's on the hook for $5,000 (he's also owed $5,000, which technically means he's even). Assuming everything goes wrong and none of the people who owe Russell pay him back, Russell will have to pay $5,000 out of pocket to the other half if he wants to maintain their trust. At this point if I was in his position I would want some kind of fee/percentage if I am to insure this many transactions/accounts. Obviously this is worst case scenario and unlikely to happen because of how the system works.

If Russell were to start charging for payments going through him while Kat is still doing it for free (or vice versa) then I would definitely want to see both of the paths to decide if I'm willing to pay the transaction fee and gain certain benefits as far as assuring that I will either get my product or money back or if I want to not pay any fees and go strictly on trust.

[Barterer]

Lex, there is a crude form of what you're thinking already in place.  Users have a checkbox that turns their account on/off for use as an intermediary.  You can stick with one-hop payments, allow no pass-throughs, and set up individual trust relationships with everyone you do business with.  On one hand you have to maximize the "it just works" factor, on the other hand you don't want to freak anyone out by playing voodoo with their money.

The idea of manual path selection is interesting, and I can see how if some are charging a pass-through fee and some are not, you'd want to select the cheapest route.  Or if you see someone you don't trust come up as a possibility, you could avoid them altogether.  But if the system showed you a bunch of paths for you to select from, that would create a privacy issue.. you could deduce who trusts whom and know that their respective credit limits are at least as high as the payment you're attempting. 

As it is, Ripple will just go with the shortest path that has sufficient credit throughout the chain.  It will start with direct 1-1 trust, then look for a path with only one intermediary, then two, etc.  but only the link closest to you shows up on your balance sheet.  That's the person who's house you should egg if the deal goes bad.  In turn, the egg-ee could either accept the punishment, or if not at fault he could look at his balance sheet and egg the next guy's house.  He still has the choice of revealing his other trust relationship to you or not.

If Russell were to start charging for payments going through him while Kat is still doing it for free (or vice versa) then I would definitely want to see both of the paths to decide if I'm willing to pay the transaction fee and gain certain benefits as far as assuring that I will either get my product or money back or if I want to not pay any fees and go strictly on trust.

I'm not sure what you mean by gaining benefits.. as in, Kat would insure transactions for a fee?  I guess transaction insurance would be good if you trust the insurer more than the person who's supposed to supply the goods in the first place.  And since Kat and Russell probably live in the same house, that would simplify the egging justice system 

If I may make a suggestion, send out a newsletter to your users, even if the "newsletter" is an email saying "Hi! We're still here! We gained X new users last month."  I know I have an account, but to be honest, I haven't logged in in so long, I remember nothing about it.   Embarrassed

Also, ask for donations in every newsletter.  Can't hurt.

Yeah, I just never was a sales-y, promotional mass e-mail kind of guy.  We'd still be at what, 8 users? if not for Jack.  But I'm confident that Shirehours will tickle my palms again and I'll do something to give it a boost.  I generally prefer working on the quality of things and just letting people gravitate to or from my stuff.  Right now I'm focused on fixing a rent house and it'll be 3 months before I dare advertise it 

[Russell Kanning]

you guys are both right
your ideas are exactly mine Lex
i can see us doing something like this ... and you charge a little for the handling and trouble
make it basically manual and easy to see and very public to promote it
this is exactly what I am doing with the Cardinal Canning Shire Hours ... it i backed by Silver and/or my labor, so it is real and understandable. i then can promote who has the money or not if they want to be private.