Yahoo!’s new reputation design patterns got me thinking - what makes a reputation? When I browsed through the 9 design patterns lumped under the title of ‘reputation’, my first thought was that these are interesting and valuable, but they are not reputation elements.

But then, step back. A reputation system is a substitute for personal experience. It provides you with the information you need to make a determination about someone (something?) else without having had to go to all the trouble of getting to know them. Traditionally, that determination has been about interpersonal trust. eBay’s reputation systems is the best example. I don’t know anyone who’s selling blidgets on eBay, so I don’t know how likely they are to cheat me. eBay has found a formal way to represent the likelihood that I’m dealing with a seller who will meet my expectations.

So, the reputation design patterns aren’t like that. They’re not about trust, at least not directly. But, they are signifiers that help me know someone better. Just like my score on eBay represents something about my behavior, so do achievement badges, rankings, etc. They encapsulate information about the type or volume of my participation in different ways. And this information, in turn, may help me figure out something more about trust. Certainly, in an indirect way at least, these things act as elements of a reputation because they substitute for my personal experience with someone else’s contributions over time. If I’d been there to see what they did myself, I wouldn’t need the badge or the level information.

Still, if we take this view, is my age reputation information? My address? After all, that information saves you the trouble of having to be around to count the years, or having to travel to my town to check where i live. (I’m going off the deep end now!)

More importantly, why does any of this matter? Who cares whether it counts as a reputation. Well, there’s a bit of truth in that - maybe reputation is in the eye of the beholder, at least in practice. But only sort of. When it comes to design patterns, I think the important thing is to realize what badges or points are good for. So, certainly my badges and levels help others figure out how to assess my contributions when they don’t know any better. But they also work as incentives that make me feel valued, like my contributions count, like I’m making progress, and like people think of me as an expert. They give me a goal or a quota to shoot for, or a status marker that tempers my insecurity.

I think Yahoo! gets this. But the patterns kind of mix up the part that’s for you (the reputation) and the part that’s for me (the incentive). If the point is to understand your users deeply, design incentive mechanisms with them in mind, then breaking those two apart is essential, and there’s a lot of good work to be done there. Anyway, as I said, I’m somewhat conflicted. Comments welcome (as always)!