Doing Good Gone Bad
Over a decade ago, my friend and I were cycling in Central Park when he abruptly stopped, got off his bike, and helped a blind gentleman cross the always chaotic and tourist-filled West Drive. He did it for no other reason than to help a fellow man. It was so easy, selfless, and yet noble that I saw my friend in a new and more positive light. (He was and remains an absolutely delightful person, now with a confirmed heart of gold.) But his act led me to consider how to quantify - and reward - that sort of behavior; to celebrate those who go out of their way to improve the lives of others.
Ultimately, I created a prototype app called Ballyhoo that, instead of "likes," gave out numerical rewards to individuals who'd performed selfless acts. The goal was to give everyone a score to see how they stacked up against others. (Klout did something similar, but scored how influential someone was on social media.) It worked like this:
Witness a friend doing a good deed.
Open the Ballyhoo app and select their name from your friends list.
Assign them points based on what they'd done. (Did they grab you a coffee? Give them 1 point. Did they donate a kidney? Give them 100 points - or less depending on the quality of the kidney.)
You'd be able to write in what the good deed was, assign it a category, and it would become searchable under their profile.
Everyone would have a personal Ballyhoo score. The more points - theoretically - the better/nicer that person was.
My thought was this would translate well to dating apps, the sharing economy, or hiring websites. You'd know if a guy was a creep before going on a Tinder date. You'd trust your Uber not to take an out-of-the-way route. Or, from a list of similar new hires, you'd take the more virtuous candidate. We'd develop ways to prevent users from gaming the system, and we'd let brands find ambassadors who fit their particular identities. The dream was to create a social media platform that was not self-centered, but rather selfless; one that rewarded those who bought lattes rather than took pictures of them.
Much of the work I did with Xin Chung and Miles Spencer at TrustCloud centered on creating a similar "reputation score." There, instead of real-time scores derived from your peers, we'd scrape your web data and make assumptions based on that data to assign you a trust score. It was a concept a few years too early, but in the era of catfishing, bots, and trolls, the idea of knowing just exactly who that person on the other side of the computer or mobile screen you're dealing with is more appealing than ever.
The darker side of this, and covered absolutely brilliantly in the Dark Mirror episode, Nosedive, is how such a score could be used against people. (This, of course, begs the question of what kind of society we live in where celebrating altruism becomes itself an anti-virtuous endeavor.) It's happening already, with "influencers" earning increased social status based on the number of likes and/or followers they have based almost exclusively on how well they come across on screen.
To greater and darker effect, China is in the midst of creating their Social Credit System which will use citizen's "social credit" to grant anything from train tickets to bank loans. While it encourages virtuous behavior (such as donating blood or giving to charity), it also may be a tool for comprehensive government surveillance and for suppression of dissent from the Communist Party of China - to say nothing of the absolutely caste-like effects it would have on a bifurcated nation.
All that said, I wonder if there's a small kernel of a viable idea inside this mess. Is it possible to create a community-positive social media platform? Is there a way to create this system without it infringing on users' right to reputation, their privacy, or personal dignity? What safety mechanisms should be put in place so that it's more of a game and less of a social currency? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what would the ultimate benefit of this type of application be ... if there is one at all.
