Reputation Subtypes

[Landon]

Because a lot of you have low attention spans, a TLR can be found here: Split reputation into two subtypes (Opinions and Transaction Reviews). Opinions don’t count towards your overall total, but are still permitted and can be read by other users. Transaction reviews are strictly for services/products and count towards your total.

Spoiler: “Detailed Thread”

Welcome to MC-Market.
A forum dedicated to buying and selling goods.

Yet, there's an issue. Reputation. Ah yes, good old reputation. Currently, reputation is defined as the following (According to MC-Market's Rules): "Reputation is otherwise handled by the community, and is there to gauge the community’s opinion of you."

This seems like a brilliant idea for literally any other forum, except MC-Market. In terms of being a "market", a user's opinion of you is nowhere near important as your buyer-seller relationship. A market is there to allow buyers to buy items, and for sellers to sell items. That relationship between a buyer and a seller is much more important when it comes to providing potential buyers a legitimate review of your services before purchasing.

In any circumstance, when you go to buy an item, you expect to read reviews such as "Brilliant phone! The quality is amazing, the camera is stunning and overall worth $500!" not "The phone wasn't as dark as I wanted". When providing services, your credibility shouldn't be "gauged [by] the community's opinion of you". That is absolutely ridiculous.

Now, I understand one hundred percent that "vouches" exist and are there to serve this exact purpose, to allow users to leave transaction reviews, and not opinions. But, there's a flaw. If I'm browsing services (Take this thread for example: https://www.mc-market.org/threads/265820/, a brilliant example of browsing to purchase a service on MC-Market), I see this awesome number!

Holy cow! This person has 138 reviews, his Setups must be amazing! A 100% rating? No way! I should definitely buy from this person because 138 other people think his services are amazing! But, in fact, that is wrong. The number advertised so prominently throughout MC-Market is not a credibility number to prove you are a legit seller offering quality products, instead, it is a number representing how many personal reviewers(opinions) you have received.

I hope you are beginning to see the issue with this. Why are opinions so prominently advertised on a market-based forum, rather than reviews of a seller-buyer relationship? As I stated before, personal opinions work fine on community integrated forums, but when you're entire forum is dedicated to buying and selling goods, you must ensure that potential buyers are seeing transaction reviews.

Let's take a more MC-Market based example:
"User provided me with a super high-quality plugin in under two days!"
"User is nice. Vouch"

Two totally different reviews, but both are allowed as reputation. Now, of course, this poses an issue. The second option ("User is nice. Vouch") will be counted towards that green number users love so much. And the higher that number is, the more "credible" other users think you are (Not entirely, I do know some users who don't consider reputation credibility). But overall, the idea of advertising personal reviews over buyer-seller reviews is absolutely not how a market forum should operate.

So, a simple solution?
Well, Mick has declined multiple.

One would be to remove opinion-based reviews, and rebrand the entire reputation system as is to how the vouch system is supposed to work- entirely deal based. But, this poses an issue, because as Capaldi stated: What if someone is stealing builds, does that not call for a negative review? (Summarazing, lost the exact quote). And that is a valid point.

Onto solution two (my solution )
Integrate "reputation" into both opinions and buyer-seller reviews.

I'd like to thank YourPanda for this wonderful screenshot:

You could leave transaction-based reviews. These would function how "vouches" are intended to function. The Deal URL is required, and viola. Transaction based reputations would count towards your reputation total.

Case number two would be user reviews. Exactly the same as the current system. Deal URL is optional, since it wasn't a transaction (but could link the service you intended to buy), and could leave a review not based on the transaction and quality of the product, but on the experience with the seller. User review reputations would not count towards your reputation total but will display when browsing the user's reputation at https://www.mc-market.org/feedback/UserID.

Overall, implementing this system of dual use for reputation would help the forum out tremendously. It would finally give a prominent display of vouches for users, as any market should do. It would still allow users to leave their own personal experiences, but it wouldn't affect the user's reputation score as a whole, because opinion-based reviews do not equal the quality of the product. On a market forum, I believe product reviews should be more important than opinions, as it is a product you are buying, not opinions. Advertising opinions so prominently, compared to the discrete product reviews (typically on user's walls or threads) does not help potential buyers in choosing a product. Instead, it misleads them, as many new members to MC-Market are tricked using the "I have high reputation, go first" when in fact, that reputation is 90% "nice user" or "made me a free thread design".

If you disagree, state why. Constructive criticism is appreciated

 

[YahiaShaker]

I don't agree like the majority of people on remaking the reputation system completely as people who have tons of rep are just going to be mad and annoyed for no reason, which can be fixed by your second solution which would be extremely practical. Would love it if this was added and is most definitely needed. Good job OP

 

[Landon]

kag, reason for disagree? I'd love feedback.

 

[Avery]

rep·u·ta·tion
/ˌrepyəˈtāSH(ə)n/
noun

1. the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something.

I think you missed the point that the system was put into place for, it's to judge how you're viewed in the community, not how "trusted" you are. If you want to be viewed as a good person, then give out free things, be helpful, etc. you don't need to be a sales person to improve what people think about you. There's no real way ANY system could be implemented to where you would get an accurate point of how "trusted" someone is. I can sit here and sell you 30 cent spotify accounts all day and gain 200 reputation in the transaction area, would you then trust me with a few thousand dollar deal?

Sure, would I like to know how many successful deals you've made? Absolutely.
Would I still have to do my own research to make sure it's not over 30c Spotify accounts? Yes.

So, this didn't fix anything, there's still going to be rep farmers, there's still going to be people with lots of reputation who scam out, and there's going to be problems with any "reputation" system that's ever implemented. At least now I can see what others think about you, if you're toxic or difficult to deal with, I'll look into it more and make a decision on my own if you're worth dealing with. And for the "new users don't understand this and will get scammed!", that's a shame, but that's life. They'll have to learn from it and move on like most users have.

If you honestly don't trust the green/red numbers on the screen, then go through their reputation and make a decision on your own. If you're unable to do this then why are you on this site?

 

[Landon]

I think you missed the point that the system was put into place for, it's to judge how you're viewed in the community, not how "trusted" you are. If you want to be viewed as a good person, then give out free things, be helpful, etc. you don't need to be a sales person to improve what people think about you. There's no real way ANY system could be implemented to where you would get an accurate point of how "trusted" someone is. I can sit here and sell you 30 cent spotify accounts all day and gain 200 reputation in the transaction area, would you then trust me with a few thousand dollar deal?

Sure, would I like to know how many successful deals you've made? Absolutely.
Would I still have to do my own research to make sure it's not over 30c Spotify accounts? Yes.

So, this didn't fix anything, there's still going to be rep farmers, there's still going to be people with lots of reputation who scam out, and there's going to be problems with any "reputation" system that's ever implemented. At least now I can see what others think about you, if you're toxic or difficult to deal with, I'll look into it more and make a decision on my own if you're worth dealing with. And for the "new users don't understand this and will get scammed!", that's a shame, but that's life. They'll have to learn from it and move on like most users have.

If you honestly don't trust the green/red numbers on the screen, then go through their reputation and make a decision on your own. If you're unable to do this then why are you on this site?

Which is why opinion based reputation should be allowed, but not encouraged. If you’re on a ****market**** forum, “sick user helped me talk to a girl” does not show anything about your ability as a seller on this forum. Opinions shouldn’t be the holy sacred number of this forum, buyer-seller relations should be.

I believe in allowing opinion based reviews, of course. But allowing specific trade reviews wouldn’t hurt anyone at all, it’d better the platform if anything, because this a marketplace, not a general discussion forum.

Edit: And if you can quote where I said this would fix reputation farming, please do. As I never said it will- you can't fix that. This isn't a suggestion to fix reputation farming, it's to make a market forum more geared to the market side of things (buying and selling), not opinionated reviews that give no insight to what a user offers on the forum.

 

[Yandere]

I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles

 

[Avery]

Which is why opinion based reputation should be allowed, but not encouraged. If you’re on a ****market**** forum, “sick user helped me talk to a girl” does not show anything about your ability as a seller on this forum. Opinions shouldn’t be the holy sacred number of this forum, buyer-seller relations should be.

I believe in allowing opinion based reviews, of course. But allowing specific trade reviews wouldn’t hurt anyone at all, it’d better the platform if anything, because this a marketplace, not a general discussion forum.

Edit: And if you can quote where I said this would fix reputation farming, please do. As I never said it will- you can't fix that. This isn't a suggestion to fix reputation farming, it's to make a market forum more geared to the market side of things (buying and selling), not opinionated reviews that give no insight to what a user offers on the forum.

I fully understand, I just don’t see it doing any benefit at all.

You’re “sick user helped me talk to a girl” example also goes along in this way though: “bought a Spotify account for 30c”. Yes, neither are good reputation, but it would inflate their market reputation.

Would it hurt? No.
Would it do much benefit? Sadly not.

If someone can still inflate this number, why bother changing the system? We’ll have the same suggestions down the line about how rep farmers ruin the system and it will need another revision.

The only way I see this suggestion working is if they give very strict requirements on the rep you can give in this new catergory, which I don’t see happening due to Justis’ view on it. MCM also doesn’t have the man power for this, which is unfortunate but true.

(Me talking about reputation farming is where I point out the flaw in your suggestion, not where I was debunking a point. More of a general statement for those who say this will fix it when you didn’t)


P.S. Sorry, this is scattered as fuck, I’m on my phone and can’t format how I’d like to. Basically, yes, this would be fantastic if they could solve rep farming first, but until then there’s no point when this system would be just as inflated and hard to use as the current system. Low quality reps about penny deals would be directly mixed in with deals worth thousands and people would still exit scam and trust the wrong people without investigating the rep.

 

[Landon]

I fully understand, I just don’t see it doing any benefit at all.

You’re “sick user helped me talk to a girl” example also goes along in this way though: “bought a Spotify account for 30c”. Yes, neither are good reputation, but it would inflate their market reputation.

Would it hurt? No.
Would it do much benefit? Sadly not.

If someone can still inflate this number, why bother changing the system? We’ll have the same suggestions down the line about how rep farmers ruin the system and it will need another revision.

The only way I see this suggestion working is if they give very strict requirements on the rep you can give in this new catergory, which I don’t see happening due to Justis’ view on it. MCM also doesn’t have the man power for this, which is unfortunate but true.

(Me talking about reputation farming is where I point out the flaw in your suggestion, not where I was debunking a point. More of a general statement for those who say this will fix it when you didn’t)


P.S. Sorry, this is scattered as fuck, I’m on my phone and can’t format how I’d like to. Basically, yes, this would be fantastic if they could solve rep farming first, but until then there’s no point when this system would be just as inflated and hard to use as the current system. Low quality reps about penny deals would be directly mixed in with deals worth thousands and people would still exit scam and trust the wrong people without investigating the rep.

I've had the idea of a field such as "Price" on trade reviews, and you could filter reputation based if price exceeds $x. But, I don't think it's fair to consider reputation for deals over $x versus less than $x in the total number, but filtering could benefit.

 

[Avery]

I've had the idea of a field such as "Price" on trade reviews, and you could filter reputation based if price exceeds $x. But, I don't think it's fair to consider reputation for deals over $x versus less than $x in the total number, but filtering could benefit.

It's a start, it's just hard due to how money works. 1k may be a lot to you or a little, $100 may be a lot or a little, $1 may be a lot or a little, so on and so forth. If there was a way to filter/sort the deal/reputations and make sure there was no lying involved, then I could see this working (It'd suck at the moment as no one really puts the amount in reps, so possibly all rep would have to be reset).

Overall, it's a wonderful suggestion. I just personally see a lot more steps needing to happen before this could be put into place and it being reliable.

 

[Fawks]

Your perspective of reputation is flawed

If 78 other people see the system in the wrong perspective it is obviously being misused due to how it is made. This clearly shows that it needs to be changed.

 

[Daigan]

This is how every other sales forum works. Not sure why MCM still uses the rep system.

 

[Doge]

If I recall correctly, there was a lot of debate about adding a rep system, but ultimately it was added in 2016 by Ajdin under the condition that it was experimental and it if it got heavily abused, it would be removed. It lasted for like a few months (or maybe less) and it was removed entirely because people were rep farming, giving out negative rep for bs reasons and basically the same issues that are happening now. It was meant to be market reputation, you know, for deals and not whether or not someone is a “nice person” or “He’s a meanie”. But people didn’t use it as intended, which was kinda expected and resulted in removal of the system. Then once Mick was in charge again, he added it back. The same problems happened, but the “solution” was to literally rename the system and change how it works. Opinions were now allowed and the third option which was originally “Trader” got changed to “Other”. So basically the system got changed to accomodate those who weren’t following the rules (which was a lot of people).

I myself made a suggestion (that got 50+ agree ratings) - https://www.mc-market.org/threads/177921/ but of course it was denied because “Right now we aren't looking to change the reputation system.” Looking back I don’t know who “we” was because I was staff at the time and had other staff members + a ton of users who agreed. I mean there have been countless threads like this and they always get a ton of agree ratings. This one especially since it’s very well written and composed.

To be honest though, I gave up on writing well thought-out suggestions like this because they always get denied now or not even looked at at all. I mean, if the email server had issues and the simple issue didn’t get fixed until a month later and if an image proxy that was supposed to be done within hours, still isn’t 2 months later, can we expect such a high quality and high effort suggestion to even be considered? Sadly, I doubt it. However, props to you for making it because it’s great honestly and says what a ton of users want as well.

 

[Landon]

If I recall correctly, there was a lot of debate about adding a rep system, but ultimately it was added in 2016 by Ajdin under the condition that it was experimental and it if it got heavily abused, it would be removed. It lasted for like a few months (or maybe less) and it was removed entirely because people were rep farming, giving out negative rep for bs reasons and basically the same issues that are happening now. It was meant to be market reputation, you know, for deals and not whether or not someone is a “nice person” or “He’s a meanie”. But people didn’t use it as intended, which was kinda expected and resulted in removal of the system. Then once Mick was in charge again, he added it back. The same problems happened, but the “solution” was to literally rename the system and change how it works. Opinions were now allowed and the third option which was originally “Trader” got changed to “Other”. So basically the system got changed to accomodate those who weren’t following the rules (which was a lot of people).

I myself made a suggestion (that got 50+ agree ratings) - https://www.mc-market.org/threads/177921/ but of course it was denied because “Right now we aren't looking to change the reputation system.” Looking back I don’t know who “we” was because I was staff at the time and had other staff members + a ton of users who agreed. I mean there have been countless threads like this and they always get a ton of agree ratings. This one especially since it’s very well written and composed.

To be honest though, I gave up on writing well thought-out suggestions like this because they always get denied now or not even looked at at all. I mean, if the email server had issues and the simple issue didn’t get fixed until a month later and if an image proxy that was supposed to be done within hours, still isn’t 2 months later, can we expect such a high quality and high effort suggestion to even be considered? Sadly, I doubt it. However, props to you for making it because it’s great honestly and says what a ton of users want as well.

It's unfortunate that such basic issues (such as email server and image proxy) took so long to be implemented correctly. If MC-Market could fix the issues that are needed for the site to function properly, then the site could actually grow with wanted community suggestions. But at this point, it seems as if it's "If Mick or Justis don't want it, you can't have it".

 

[Ava]

reset the whole fucking reputation system

 

[Mick]

This is incorrect.
Suppose someone joins the forum on Monday, they then open a thread giving away items, only charging a penny or whatever, and they rack up a whole bunch of "transaction based reputation which is therefore inherently more valuable because it's based on a transaction, right?" reviews.

Then they start a server host.
Well hot damn, those reputation reviews must mean his server host is great, right?
Incorrect.

Your perspective of reputation is flawed and that's why you're seeing the system as flawed. Reputation is not directly reflective of your setups or your individual services. If someone wants to vouch/devouch for those, they can do so on your setup thread either with a review, or with a reaction; or in resources with a review or rating.

Reputation is for *user reviews*; for the person themselves.


This is incorrect information.
"User is nice. Vouch" does not satisfy rule 9.1 and would be removed.
If someone wants to leave their opinion on you, they will need to explain what relevant thing(s) the user did to earn that opinion.

Mick, I and the staff team have been working out an actual form that users will need to fill out in reputation reviews that they leave in order to submit, which will passively enforce all of the required info be included before it can be created.

Making this short

Reputation isn't inherently more valuable simply because it was based on a transaction. I believe I adequately illustrated that in my first paragraphs. That example, by the way, is completely accurate. People farm transaction based reputation like mad. Far more than they can ever farm opinion based reputation, because we have rules requiring reviews be informative and relevant.

Opinion based reputation and transaction based reputation are in equal standing for user reviews, and they should be worth the same amount of points.
The actual issue is the number of useless, uninformative and irrelevant 9.1 violating reputation reviews flooded the site like the one you mentioned (nice guy, vouch), giving opinion based reputation a worse rap; and adding a form that enforces a significant amount of relevant information be included is the best solution to that.
Our new developer is hard at work bringing us new features and I look forward to this one very much.

Well said Justis.

Since the time this suggestion was made, we have also introduced our reputation update with the new fields to leave reputation as Justis alluded to in his response. I believe that these new changes we have made, along with stronger enforcement of our rules against low-quality reputation, makes your proposed changes no longer necessary and could just lead to more problems.

Denied, thanks for the suggestion.