Reputation Systems
eBay was founded on a very simple principle: people are good. Of course, after only a few months of operation, it was determined that this wasn't entirely true. Most people were honest, but a few took advantage of the new online auctioning system to rip buyers off. This was typical of the early years of the Internet; people gathered at the fringes of cyberspace and didn't treat one another with respect. Are people, by their very nature, just assholes?
It wasn't long before webmasters recognized that the problem wasn't with human nature, but with the lack of accountability. Give people a voice without holding them personally accountable for what they say and do, and the social structure quickly breaks down. eBay fixed this problem by introducing seller ratings: if you ripped someone off, the purchaser you ripped off was given the opportunity to tell everyone else about it.
If you take away anonymity, people behave better.
This is the reason that driving on roads and highways is such a miserable experience. It's not that people are jerks; it's just that we're all faceless to one another inside giant pods of glass and steel, and this affords us the opportunity to do all sorts of things in our interactions with other drivers. We can cut off and be cut off without any real consequences. The only real threat that keeps people in line is the slim chance that a police officer will catch us in the act, pull us over, and issue us a citation.
Of course, the police can't everywhere at once. You can get away with quite a bit of hullabaloo behind the wheel without getting a ticket, given the right balance of caution and frivolity. (I speak from experience.)
It would be interesting to set up a system for people to report the bad behavior of other drivers. Imagine a large, online reputation system where you could file complaints about the guy in the silver Toyota Tacoma with a certain license plate number who tailgated you for a mile, then whipped around you, cut you off, and flipped you the bird. All of these reports could be aggregated into a database and "traffic dossiers" could be built on drivers by other drivers.
It's not as crazy as you might think. Ten years ago, any plan to replace Encyclopedia Brittanica with a large collaborative project like Wikipedia would have been laughed at.
Imagine empowering every driver on the road to be the eyes and ears of law enforcement, and giving them the opportunity to file informal reports on their fellow drivers someplace where all those reports are aggregated. It might make drivers stop and seriously reflect about how well they're driving. Naturally, this kind of system would never replace actual police officers, but since they cannot be everywhere, it makes some sense to farm out their job to all drivers on the road.
Such a system would be ripe for abuse; what's to stop me from filing a report about my neighbor two doors down who has all the ugly lawn ornaments? (Hypothetically...I have no such neighbor.) Software is far from perfect, but reputation systems are fairly adept at detecting disingenuous feedback. That, and if one driver receives 17 complaints related to reckless driving on the highway from 17 different people and IP addresses, it's probably a safe bet that they're a "riskier" driver.
I've thought about building such a website, open and for public use, just to see if A) anyone would use it and B) if so, how long it would take before someone sued me over it. Sooner or later, I think someone working for some state's Department of Transportation will build one, and when it finally hits a critical mass, it will be the topic of much heated debate and controversy. Maybe it will improve things, or maybe it will just result in a new batch of problems to replace the ones it solves.
It wasn't long before webmasters recognized that the problem wasn't with human nature, but with the lack of accountability. Give people a voice without holding them personally accountable for what they say and do, and the social structure quickly breaks down. eBay fixed this problem by introducing seller ratings: if you ripped someone off, the purchaser you ripped off was given the opportunity to tell everyone else about it.
If you take away anonymity, people behave better.
This is the reason that driving on roads and highways is such a miserable experience. It's not that people are jerks; it's just that we're all faceless to one another inside giant pods of glass and steel, and this affords us the opportunity to do all sorts of things in our interactions with other drivers. We can cut off and be cut off without any real consequences. The only real threat that keeps people in line is the slim chance that a police officer will catch us in the act, pull us over, and issue us a citation.
Of course, the police can't everywhere at once. You can get away with quite a bit of hullabaloo behind the wheel without getting a ticket, given the right balance of caution and frivolity. (I speak from experience.)
It would be interesting to set up a system for people to report the bad behavior of other drivers. Imagine a large, online reputation system where you could file complaints about the guy in the silver Toyota Tacoma with a certain license plate number who tailgated you for a mile, then whipped around you, cut you off, and flipped you the bird. All of these reports could be aggregated into a database and "traffic dossiers" could be built on drivers by other drivers.
It's not as crazy as you might think. Ten years ago, any plan to replace Encyclopedia Brittanica with a large collaborative project like Wikipedia would have been laughed at.
Imagine empowering every driver on the road to be the eyes and ears of law enforcement, and giving them the opportunity to file informal reports on their fellow drivers someplace where all those reports are aggregated. It might make drivers stop and seriously reflect about how well they're driving. Naturally, this kind of system would never replace actual police officers, but since they cannot be everywhere, it makes some sense to farm out their job to all drivers on the road.
Such a system would be ripe for abuse; what's to stop me from filing a report about my neighbor two doors down who has all the ugly lawn ornaments? (Hypothetically...I have no such neighbor.) Software is far from perfect, but reputation systems are fairly adept at detecting disingenuous feedback. That, and if one driver receives 17 complaints related to reckless driving on the highway from 17 different people and IP addresses, it's probably a safe bet that they're a "riskier" driver.
I've thought about building such a website, open and for public use, just to see if A) anyone would use it and B) if so, how long it would take before someone sued me over it. Sooner or later, I think someone working for some state's Department of Transportation will build one, and when it finally hits a critical mass, it will be the topic of much heated debate and controversy. Maybe it will improve things, or maybe it will just result in a new batch of problems to replace the ones it solves.