using reputation to augment explicit authorization
Online social networks are formed when web applications allow users to contribute to an online community. The explosive growth of these social networks taxes the management capacity of human administrators. The continued health of an online social network depends upon the identification and utilization of users who make positive contributions to the community, but finding these individuals can be difficult. In addition, these contributing users must be explicitly granted authority to help maintain and grow these networks. Automated reputation calculations based on user contributions and behavior can be used as an effective substitute for explicit authorization, giving online social networks greater flexibility and scalability. In this paper, we examine the underlying principles of online reputation, introduce Pythia, a flexible reputation system framework, and demonstrate the use of reputation calculations to augment explicit authorization in a web application.
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