reputation

[tribble@xanadu.com (E. Dean Tribble)]

	 What's to stop you (once you have some "reputation") from creating 250
	 other pseudonyms or "identitites", giving them all a "reputation", and then
	 create another identity, and have these 250 all give this one as much as
	 possible, in effect creating an identity with a lot of "credibility" out
	 of thin air?

Even in the simple system I described, there's probably sufficient
feedback to discourage that.  If the identity you went to so much
trouble to promote turns out to be a bozo, then the original identity
loses credibility as a source of recommendation.

Further, the positive recommendations aren't just for filtering,
they're also for sorting.  By spreading the credibility of the first
identity out over 250 others, those 250 identities just don't carry
much weight when my mailer is ordering messages for me to read.  If
reputation is a conserved capital, for instance, they together carry
only as much weight as the first identity that recommended them.

dean