Marc Köhlbrugge

In his post Blogging is broken Ryan Carson makes a valid point about blogs, large ones in particular. Basically he writes that once a blog gets too big, trolls will be able to slip in and out unnoticed. You see this all over the internet, whenever a website gets very popular a lot of negative things come with it too.

Aaron Dragushan comments with the suggestion of using a karma system. I think this is an excellent idea and I think it wouldn’t be to hard to implement using OpenID.

All you have to do is creating a system which relates OpenIDs with karma. Let’s call the system OpenKarma for now. The karma of an OpenID can be requested by everyone using a simple API and every OpenID can add or remove karma to another OpenID. This way website owners can choose, for example, to only allow OpenIDs with positive karma to log in and post a comment. The possibilities are endless.

A scenario for some clearity:

You create an OpenID and visit the OpenKarma site. You log in with your OpenID and complete a basic verification process like CAPTCHA to verify you are a real person. Successful completion gives you your first 100 positive karma points.

A couple of hours later another visitor visits the same blog and reads your comment. He likes your comment and clicks the “add karma” which immediately improves your karma. OpenKarma records all these karma transactions and your karma is calculated based on the karma of the people who gave you karma. It may sound a bit complicated but basically it’s the same way Google’s PageRank works.

There are probably a couple of problems this approach and the biggest one is probably the fact it’s a centralized solution which means if that one company gets all evil on us, we’re doomed. So find a way to decentralize it and implement it and you may have found yourself a company.