So far, my reflections on QP and my efforts to implement QP have led me to some important insights about what is required for any implementation of QP that will even have a chance of being widely adopted:
- It needs to minimize cognitive strain: Interacting with QP must be made as easy as possible, otherwise people will give up on allocating Esteem Points to people or other entities. It seriously needs to be dumbed down to simple ratings, like different sizes of smileys or something like that. And this has to happen from the start, otherwise adoption will be close to zero.
- It needs to be ubiquitous: Having to open a dedicated application on a desktop or laptop won’t cut it. The application needs to be accessible on the web, on mobiles, on wearables, embedded in the Internet of Things, and eventually integrated with the nervous system of humans as closely as possible.
- It needs to incorporate general entities from the start. General entities like companies, or even whole industries, teams, networks, organizations, products, places, and so on. Because that’s how people want to use a reputation system. Reputation is allocated to people, and stuff that’s connected to people somehow. In the latter case, users don’t need to know which people are associated with the stuff, but the system needs to know that in order to work.
- Sybil protection has to work reasonably well, otherwise the system will be swamped by malicious Sybil attacks.
These requirements mean that the Minimum Viable Product is already rather complex, so a significant amount of work and care has to be put into it. Mobile and web implementations need to be awesome and provide a great user experience.
Making the system easy on the surface increases the necessary internal complexity of QP a lot. For example, people want to allocate Esteem Points to entities who are not part of any QP network, yet. The system has to deal with that in a way that doesn’t inconvenience the user. This means, the system will need to become active to integrated the respective entity somehow. Also, users don’t want their Esteem Points to go to waste by being allocated to entities who do not exist in the system, yet. So, you need a concept of “conditionally allocated Esteem Points” (how to call them? Pre-allocated Esteem Points?), that only become real Esteem Points, once the entity in question becomes integrated in the respective Quantified Prestige Network.
All of this means that it’s very challenging to even create a compelling demo of QP. We need to throw a relatively huge amount of resources at QP to make it work.