Accountability Online

Brad Feld put up an interesting post this morning entitled "Anonymous Bullies" that discusses blogger Kathy Sierra's extremely unfortunate experience receiving death threats (warning: there's some really unpleasant stuff in there) via blogs and emails.

Brad asserts that

reputation and trust are at a tipping point and are an issue that is going to have to be dealt with in 2007

Obviously, we at TrustPlus concur. Living eyeballs-deep in the online reputation space, we know that it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Sadly - very sadly - we can all but count on today's problems escalating into something beyond mere threats. As more and more  people blog, post on chat boards, and contribute to wikis, the online community will become more and more diverse. Unfortunately, one doesn't have to look too far or too hard to see the unpleasantness that intolerance of diversity can create. To borrow a line from General Motors: this isn't your father's Internet.

The Internet requires systems to help assert accountability - while maintaining the healthy pseudonymity that exists today. Bad people need to be isolated. Good people need to bring their positive reputation everywhere they surf. These are difficult, but solvable problems.

Community site owners need to think about these challenges and adopt solutions to help  communities manage and police themselves. Reputation is, to some degree, just another piece of user-generated-content. Community site infrastructure creators (e.g., e-commerce platforms, blogging platforms, wiki tools, etc.)  also need to think hard about these issues. Everybody is and can be part of the solution.

Let us of course not forget that the user community has tremendous power online. Folks need to, in true Network fashion, get mad as hell and not take it anymore.

Shawn