Building a trust system into a social app
tokenadult: Likewise, I also want both the system and other users to be able to implicitly and explicitly recognize those users that should be trusted, based on the value of the content they have submitted.I don't know what the subject matter of your site will be, but if this is your goal it will be very important to seed the initial membership of your site with persons who are known, on independent grounds, to have strong subject matter knowledge. I presume there will be back-and-forth among participants so that if one person says "Freedom is slavery," another person can disagree and say, "Actually, freedom is not slavery." But presumably your site will be intended to benefit visitors who really can't tell the difference about much more detailed and debatable issues.I'll give an example. There is a site about college admission anxieties, College Confidential,http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/in which many participants make factual claims about how to reverse-engineer the college admission process. One common way for people to attempt to gain credibility on that site is to insinuate that they used to be admission officers at some highly selective college. Because the site is "confidential," that is its users use screen names rather than real names, it is often very difficult to verify such claims. It has not escaped my notice that users with chutzpah and a refusal to acknowledge push-back from other users can often be believed by onlookers even when making quite incredible and unverifiable statements. If you think this would be a problem on your site, you might want to think about how to designate verifiably more accurate and honest users in some way that is visible to all visitors.In general, I think the initial seeding of the membership of an online community is very important. That is one thing that HN conspicuously got right.