Reading Assignment #2

In Chapter 5 Rheingold talk about the free-rider This is people who use programs and take things from them such as dowloading music or videos from a certain program, but do not contribute to the program in any way. This is not good because if a big percentage of the the users are free-riders then the program will eventually be shut down due to lack of material being put into the program. There is also the flip side of the problem which Rheingold discusses as "hordes of compulsive contributors" on page 119, where there are too many users that contribute material.

Later on in the chapter, reputation is discussed. Rheingold says that good reputation must be built over time, and good reputation is needed for a program to be succesful. People build reputation by being honest sellers on sites such as e-bay and other buy/sell sites. When a persons reputation grows more and more people would be inclined to do buisness with that person. On page 127, cheating reputation is discussed. The main ways to cheat reputation are "ballot stuffing" which is to have people give unfairly high ratings, "shilling" which is conspiring to boost each others reputation, and "bad Mouthing", which is giving unfairly low ratings. A defense against this is to drop the highest and lowest and most frequently show ratings. I think that this is a good idea of how to run a site as long as cheaters are minimized.