Alejandro Cuevas - Carnegie Mellon University
Students: Spring 2025, unless noted otherwise, sessions will be virtual on Zoom.
The Fault in Our Stars: How Reputation Systems Fail in Practice
Mar 06, 2024
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Abstract
Reputation systems are crucial to online platforms' health. They are prevalent across online marketplaces and social media platforms either visibly (e.g., as star ratings and badges) or invisibly as signals that feed into recommendation engines. In theory, good behavior (e.g., honest, accurate, high-quality) begets high reputation, while poor behavior is deterred and pushed off the platform.In this talk, I will discuss how these systems seem to fulfill this mission only coarsely. On one platform, we were able to predict 2 times more suspensions than the reputation system in place using other public signals. On another study, we found that users with high reputation signals were suspended at significantly lower rates (up to 3 times less) for the same number of offenses and behavior as regular users, which suggests they may be impairing content moderation efforts. I will provide some hypotheses to explain these results and offer preliminary findings from current work.
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