Exactly..You can’t even speak against your boss/organisation…If you do you will lose your job next day!!

People who leave bad comments are not writing about you they are writing about themselves. Ignore it and just know who you are in RL.

I think you’re right, it will matter less in a few years, but what until then? It scares me and angers at the same time, that people can anonymously say prety much anything, and mostly it’s bad things.

We must keep our pride. Without that we are nothing. I’m right?

Maybe more accepting of reputation, but what political dissent and repression, also much more individually identifiable. It doesn’t look like that is becoming more accepted.

even though we are all now much more exposed, I see these developments as a more true reflection of society. people will always talk and gossip, might as well know what they are saying.
yes, some of it would be plain lies and vindictive stuff, but then again, free access to sharing and publishing information has also led as to great campaigns helping each other (the recent Haiti campaign just one example). let’s hope that the majority chooses to share the good things.

But if you share personal stuff on Web then you are going to be in trouble..

Good luck with that Mike when one of the big media moguls decides to monster someone in the tabloids.

Yeah, any idiot who tries to do a Tiananmen Square on your car is sure to be branded for the rest of his life. Seriously– sometimes imfamous is almost as good as being infamous. I think the rate of noise and information flow is accelerating so much that it’s going to become “harder” to find the potentially bad stuff. That’s life in high resolution– with cameras all around.

Smoke dah weeeeed till dah eyes bleeeeeeeed!

So why didn’t you post those photos from high school then? :-)

Good thing I use anonymous profiles to say what I really want to say.

The next step will to make an application to collect all these public statements of people in a meaningful and systematic way, to create a visible public “karma” for each person. Reputation systems like these are already an important part of sevices like couchsurfing, and i think in the future these can become an important part of our our everyday social life. E.g. checking someones karma to see if they are trustworthy enough to rent or borrow them your car or flat for a short while.

If you really care, don’t publish the story about that start-up next week. You have the power…

“Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years”

And how did you come to this conclusion?

Depends really on what you share…

Glad to read the last paragraph. Saves me from having to write that here. :-)

That is a possible outcome, but I prefer an alternative: increased use of facebook (connect), linkedin, etc. that is a real-life online identity. This way the anonimous rants won’t disappears, but the opinions backed by a real person will matters more.

It’s all good and well but what happens when moral panic ensues? and the gov’t passes some privacy laws that kills this sort of thing and hampers innovation?

Not until a new era of self-thinking, computational reasoning machines arises will we be able to consolidate individual life datasets into humanly understandable terms.

The reasoning machines will serve as our legal advisers, as the media’s “playground politics” unmasking aides, and as our individual free-choice corroborators.

It is until that time comes, however, that our post-modern society will be limited by the time and effort of our own human investigative capacity to uncover the flaws of our own nature.

The semantic web will rise, the computational reasoning era will build its empire as an infrastructure within our own, and the guilt of our own indiscretions will ultimately leave us with a raw humility for what we’ve become.

>Because there are a few pictures of me in high school and college that I’m tired of trying to keep off the Internet. Let’s just get it all out there sooner rather than later, and move on.

Come on Mike, put your Michael Phelps style bong hit photo up! Maybe we can compromise with a photo of you drinking some kratom tea?

maybe he meant “our brains”

FB forgot about opening up this little monster did they?

A NEW upside down “F” will mark the new “F-it” symbol or be the “F-U” web symbol moving forward.

Imagine, we used to only have a credit FICO score but now we will have a global “Social-ICO” score. Simple as thumbs up or down and count with the new “un-FB’ product.

Roman coliseum, Emperors come to mind. Social Gladiators and Web Exterminators to the rescue please, I have webrats coming from everywhere.

Sorry, you need 500 thumbs up Social-ICO score to enter our linked-in group, website, business or become our friend.

I can see the Geo company’s brainiacs going, hmmm, can we map thumbs up/down across the globe in real time?
Will the new FB “Like” be a new way to vote for our politicians?

Wow Michael, I have not check under the bed for monsters in an awful long time, thanks!

Privacy: dead.
Reputation: dead.

What’s next?

[...] full post on Hacker News If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it! Tagged with: Dead • [...]

You said the same things about google buzz, but it didn’t turn out to be great.

Interesting (and mostly quite valid) view. However, it indeed sounds a bit like wishful thinking, too. Everyone that had to compile a CV at least once in their career will have learned a bit about twisting the questionable items in one’s curriculum to one’s advantage. Like the usual gap in the work history spent on, no, not an extended vacation, but international travel to broaden our cultural horizon to prepare for a more diverse workforce.

However, there will always remain a residual history that’s hard to tweak to the positive side. Sniffing cocaine to free your mind and open it up to business innovation, anyone?

So, let’s not fool ourselves here: Beyond the give-up-and-wave-hands strategy, two old strategies will become still more important to counter the increased public exposure: (1) give away less information (yes, even on Facebook); (2) behave better. http://bit.ly/aeO5up

Mike, the thing that bothers me about your scenario is that the majority will define what’s politically correct or not. And that political correctness will be defined by morale, not by laws. Smoking pot is fine (most people did it once in a while in college), having kinky sxe is not (only a small minority of the society likes it). Both is usually illegal, both is a purely private matter, neither hurts other people (and if, rather smoking pot than having kinky sxe).

Also, by not actively defending our right for privacy, you bascially issue a blank check to those sick companies like Facebook who earn money by systematically violating our privacy.

I don’t like that. And I don’t think it’s inevitable as I don’t believe in the supremacy of free markets anymore. The people should always have the last word, not some evidentially faulty system like a “global free market”. If we as people simply forbid those “gray area” practices as used by the data giants like FB, Google and co., the world would be a much better place already – for hundreds of millions of people.

Sounds like a mass public version of TheFunded.com. …. How’s that doing, anyway?

Very true. Mr Arrington couldn’t be more wrong here. No matter how many details about public people have come to light in decades, people never got tired of hearing about them. It’s a natural thing, if you’re a public figure, everything about you matters.

Oh, and societies and ethics don’t adjust to technology, it goes the other way around

english?

This is bullcrap: I deal all day trying to help people whose online reputation has been defamed through various means. Some of them are suffering really badly from this.

There should be a law forbidding any Website to optimize its webpages (title tags, meta tags, …) with the name of an individual (except for social profiles). We see too many examples of online publications generating extra page impressions through the optimization of someone’s name, and this situation is not funny when it happens to you.

=== popurls.com === popular today…

yeah! this story has entered the popular today section on popurls.com…

For some reason, I doubt that hard-wired human instincts will just change in a few years. There is going to be huge value in privacy and reputation management for years to come.

I see this being a very big problem for people with social anxiety disorder and/or depression. In fact, that could be what ends up causing it to have laws enacted against it. Just wait until some high school kids get a bunch of anonymous bullies putting things up about them and they hurt themselves or others. It’ll be just like the little girl who killed herself over her MySpace crush that wasn’t even a real person.

Isn’t that what Wikipedia does?

xavierv- you are correct- However, it is what it is and nothing will alter this progression.

Laws to prevent these issues are great but as many of us have found out the hard way, costly in every way to enforce. Once you have won there is little glee as you find your foe has nothing to repay by any means for your loss- time, grief, money and most important, they cannot clean the stain the internet tattoo leaves behind.

Negative comes before positive on the web and why I don’t know. There are no Web-Mops to clean up behind tantrum throwing jealous people.

Rule of thumb- make sure whenever you get trashed that you only go after only those who have cash- otherwise you end up in the dumpster along side the others.

I don’t see a centralized anonymous defamation website ever lasting very long. The reason? Because as soon as someone posts something negative about me I’m going to post 100 things worse anonymously about myself. And there will likely be coordinated efforts to post horrible things about everyone. Everyone’s had an affair. Everyone’s done hard drugs. And we’ll be back to square one: no one will give a damn unless you make yourself known and come forward with hard evidence.

Reputation is not a single thing like a grapefruit. It’s the sum total of a lot of different things. Trying to redefine reputation because it’s inconvenient for some folks is silly and more than a little self-serving — most people don’t put themselves out there online in a way that’s embarrassing later on. For those that do, they’ve learned a valuable lesson (hopefully).

So you can’t just say, “Let’s get over the small things.” Reputation isn’t just some high school photos. It’s the sum total of all of those small things which demonstrate one’s judgment (or lack thereof), and all weighed in context.

Obviously most future employers won’t much care about a youthful indiscretion. But they will still care if they find you have a hot temper through your online postings, and that may influence their hiring of you.

Wow, this is brilliant. It is likely the most wise thing I have read in the online reputation space, and I am afraid I have read far too much.

I think you are spot on with your prediction. I think we will all just have to get over it. There will be scarcely anyone to do anything. Those that are left will be likely just boring uncreative and lifeless

I also like the line about grandkids and great grand kids, etc reading this (hi there grandkiddies et al) – I have had that realisation for a while and I often leave them little messages.

Imagine the fun they will have when they find out about their ancestors. God, we get excited when we hear the smallest thing about any of our long gone relos. They will have my FaceBook, Twitter, etc, etc

So, yes, great bit of writing.

Jimi Bostock
PUSH Agency
Brisbane | Canberra | Sydney | Australia
jimi@pushagency.net

I like this one of Michael:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2663498086/

We, as humanity, made it up to this point by being identifiable parts of groups and society. Anonymity is something not very human evolution friendly, not in a sense of Chatroulette but more of Dunbar’s number socialization

Is the website failin.gs?

I think we all need to see those photos, Mike :-)

The post I wish I’d written. I hope this all comes to pass as well. Perhaps we should rethink the meaning of a certain pop record blowing up right now: The Fame Monster. In a way it seems like we’re all famous and will become increasingly so via the Web. Exciting and unsettling at the same time.

Who’ll have a worse online presence, someone who behaves badly or someone who doesn’t? Both may get anonymously flamed on social sites, but the former may also have pictures and verifiable accounts of their bad behavior floating around (for example, Phelps). Isn’t the appropriate choice just to not behave like an idiot and point out that the screeds against you can’t be confirmed? It’s not like anyone is forcing you to help the flamers by providing them material.

In case it’s not clear, I’m tired of the attitude that everyone went a little crazy in (high school, college, whatever) illustrated by this:

“Because if there are pictures of the person hiring you smoking pot in college online, and there are pictures of every other candidate smoking pot in college online, it just won’t be a big deal any more.”

There are no pictures of me smoking pot in college, nor of me drinking to excess (or even drinking while underage). I chose not to do that, and that choice was open to everyone else, too.

[...] TechCrunchに興味深い記事が載ってました。ばっさりと要約しますと、こんな感じです。 [...]

If we continuously overlook our indiscretions, than where do we draw the line? For example porn is getting darker and darker these days, and people just shrug their shoulders…even toys are getting more and more explicit, kids are dressing up like adults these days because they are being fed all these garbage online…etc. So everything and anything goes, I think this will all go back to the jungle.

1) Maybe the problem is not with the Web showing us as less than perfect, but with us trying so hard to fake it.

2) Perhaps online info may be the antidote to the immense prevalence of “empty suits”, people who are only good at selling themselves and at playing the political game, in every organization. Obviously we’re not that great at judging the true value of people we don’t know well.

The question is how will this “Yelp for people” avoid being sued out of existence. JuicyCampus lasted a year.

There is a simple way to prevent all this shit:
1) stop using all those stupid social networks
2) if you can’t stop using them, at least stop accepting so-called friends, stop sharing everything you do in your life, put your twitter account in private, get rid of your 5000 friends on Facebook, and no one will be able to fuck your reputation anymore.

Sorry – the sky is not falling. The more things like this come along the more people will realize that technology is an enabler of what happens in the real world. We will always have reputations, and people will always be able to say things good or bad about us. They can do it online or in the real world. They can do it anonymously, under a moniker, or with their real name. The internet has not changed this. Twitter has not changed this. And there isn’t a web technology that could come out that will change us.

The fundamentals will always apply. Tech just makes the time and distance shorter.

@patrickallmond

I see a lot of tit-for-tat on a website like this. Within a year, I suspect the signal-to-noise ratio will be fairly low.

Yelp for people? That would be http://www.talkburst.com and it’s already launched.

I can’t wait to see this Yelp for people. Juicy Campus had a similar concept except nobody posted anything favorable about people on the site. Basically, people posted anonymous rumors about people that they hated on the site, and eventually it shut down.

http://juicycampus.blogspot.com/2009/02/juicy-shutdown.html

Guess we’ll need to RE-DEFINE what an indiscretion is. Maybe this will level the playing field somewhat and get the stupid stuff we are so concerned about today – OFF people’s radars.

Hi Michael – thanks for the thoughtful post. I hope you’re proved right – you certainly should be, seeing as there are so many classes of indiscretions (youthful and otherwise) that are essentially ubiquitous. Openly acknowledging that and moving on would be a real advance.

I also like to think that we will see the rise of systems that allow online reputation and trust to evolve. If so, such systems could to some extent balance the ease of creating and finding negative commentary, or at least commentary that’s not well considered, not reliable, etc. That’s obviously going to take some time to put in place, and such a system has itself to evolve (i.e., it probably can’t be put in place by fiat, though attempts will be made).

My own spin on this is (of course) FluidDB. FluidDB has an object for everything, including its own users. Anyone can add anything to any object. That sounds like a recipe for chaos, but it’s more, it’s a recipe for the evolution of trust and reputation. If I can put a comment or rating tag (with an optional value) onto the object for you to indicate that I know you, or trust you, etc. and that information is addressable (via a query language) and discoverable, then we have the potential for nice evolution. The always writable property of FluidDB objects means someone can also go to the object for someone else’s tag (e.g., michael/opinion or techcrunch.com/rating) and indicate that that’s a tag they know and trust. And the system itself can help with this. This all provides a mechanism for allowing people and apps to ignore information that does not have (from the POV of the user or app) sufficient weight / reputation / trust etc., to be shown.

Sorry if this sounds a bit vague, I’m trying to be brief. The main point is that I would not rule out some form of online evolutionary mitigation of the problem. To do it (and various other things) though, I believe you need some form of shared writable storage where reputational information can be stored, searched, combined, etc., without limiting what can be added and without the storage needing to anticipate anything.

Regards,
Terry

Let’s see your highschool pictures Arrington, if you’re saying “lets get it all out in the open now.”

LOL

The reason why this is no threat at all is that it will be filled with junk from day one, unless they have some way to filter it out.

A bunch of people, myself included, thought Third Voice was a big threat to the web when it came out sometime in the late 90s. Turned out not to be a major problem because the instant it shipped it was the province of idiots.

Mike’s page on this service, and mine, will be cesspools from the beginning. No point looking there. The other option are pages that are ghost towns.

On the other hand Yelp does work. Wonder why?

There is one website that already lets you post defamatory things about other people. It’s called dontdatehimgirl.com, where women can post just about anything in regards to their exes as a way to “warn” other women.

I wouldn’t say managing reputations is dead, I would actually argue that it is more important than ever to manage your reputation online. I would agree that the days of corporations being able to completely hide things is probably done for the most part but there are still opportunities to be able to shape the message if you are already active in social media, blogs, and so on. Handling the problems that pop up before they get larger is also key.

Good Article, rightly stated – in future people wouldn’t/shouldn’t care.

Arrington, don’t you read the news? Rapleaf? iKarma?? What century are you living in?

How is it you’re unaware of formspring.me? Or Alexis Pilkington (the popular Long Island h.s. soccer player who killed herself last week, after a blizzard of vicious reviews of her appeared on formspring)?

On reading that I asked my 14 y.o. daughter and learned she has a formspring account, as do many of her friends.

I felt a bit out of the loop, since I this was the first I’d heard of that site.

If I’m out of the loop… where does that leave Techcrunch and a supposedly pro journalist writing an article about this very phenomenon?

Michael, you used to think Rapleaf was going to be as significant as Facebook and LinkedIn (Before Twitter was much more than a pimple), and they became the bastards that sell your personal data to marketers rather than protecting your online reputation. No one wants or needs this type of service except you.

At first I thought the headline was “TC Reputation Is Dead…”, re-reading the headline made me disappointed :P

Websites that allow users to anonymously post hate comments about other people is not going to work in the long run. I’m assuming anyone can type up someones name, possibly upload a photo, then start bashing the hell out of them?

While your idea of get it out there and move on Michael may work for you, think about teen girls who care about what anyone says. They can’t move on… This is such a dumb idea, I bet if it ever takes off it will result in teen suicides… I can most certainly say if by some unfortunate reason a girl/boy commits suicide over hate comments posted on a site like this, the parents will sue the hell out of them and I hope they’d win too.

Sad thing is similar stuff’s already happened, a girl attempted suicide over a ‘gossip girl’ type blog in New York.

$1 says the founders of this website were the bully’s back in high school.

[...] to the episode this afternoon while cleaning. Funnily enough just this morning I read this: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/ which deals rather nicely with exactly the same [...]

Corrupt Person: Trust no longer matters. Reputation is irrelevant.

Honest Person: Fuck you.

We have been thinking had about this issue for some time, and in fact, originally built a “personal reputation monitoring tool”. Although today it is focused on businesses we could easily re-purpose it for individuals. You can check it out at http://www.StepRep.com (shameless plug).

Michael, you make a decent argument but I think we need to focus on what really matters. Reputation has always been what others think of you, CHARACTER is who you actually are. If individuals focused on their character and having integrity regardless of who’s watching or not watching, then the world would be better place and we could all hold our heads a little higher knowing we did what was right because it was the right thing to do instead of worrying about what others thought. Just an opinion…

Interesting article. One of things we are creating that truely could be more significant than Facebook and LinkedIn. Killer domain name, multiple revenue streams, essential daily communication tool. Stay tuned.

[...] Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions [...]

This is the same conclusion i came to in my article Forgive Us Our Facebook:

http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/09/17/forgive-us-our-facebook/

We’ll need to have some sort of generational amnesty, or possibly a bad behaviour cut-off point, like a juvenile record. “Anything you did on the Internet before you were 22 doesn’t count.”

- Ryan

great piece! It’s already happening. In the 80s no politician could admit they’d ever smoked pot in school. By the 90′s Clinton managed with “tried it, but didn’t inhale.” Now it’s no big deal. At one point having been divorced (or getting caught having had an affair) would disqualify you for office. Now divorce is basically a non-issue and few pols can even get away with admitting they had affairs (not that it won’t effect them, but it’s possible). This trend pre-dates the web but the Internet is probably accelerating the shift in our culture. Great article.

I hope this plays out as such as well. It’s healthy on a human level to move out of repression and being artificial to being honest. The web is really powering this movement.

This is one of the most interesting posts I’ve read in a really long time.

This article reads as a sort of preemptive move… Something may be coming up against TC.

IMHO TC today is not even half of what it used to be as an excellent source of valuable information in IT. With a few notable exceptions, TC articles now are written by the uninspired, misinformed, confused. egocentric, self-agrandizing, wannabes and sel-appointed “experts” on everything. You know the names.

Personally, I used to read every article here, but now, I have to scroll down deep until I find something ot true value. Who knows, maybe all that advertising money has brought carelessness to the surface or maybe all that California “not-so-medical” smoke found everywhere in the Valley…

Talking about reputation, Mike, you could still get back the “goog” kind to TC. Think about it before you delete this comment…

…Sorry, “good” kind to TC…

[...] med fokus på att vi behöver vara lite mer tåliga. Uppdatering: Mycket tänkvärd artikel på Techcrunch om internets “minne” och hur vi antagligen måste bli mer [...]

You don’t suppose there’s a remote possibility that people might adjust their behavior to avoid such future embarrassment?

Naw.

We have given up the idea that we can effectively manage all negative comments and we do the best we can to keep adding positive. I’d love to have the day where I get see 5000 positives and 200 negatives per day online somewhere just so we are in the news more.

When it comes to your reputation, it starts with your character. Getting invloved in a dubious situation which you either failed to properly investigate or willingly accepted as such begins internally.

The circumstances we find ourselves in are a direct result of how we live our lives, how we consider courses of action and, ultimately, how we think. If we have no regard for others, then we will act in ways which will demonstrate this character flaw. If we are generous, thoughtful, considerate, altruistic these character strengths will come out in our actions too.

What bothers me is the idea that one must defend their character (the real issue here) in the wake of unsubstantiated attacks. If a character flaw emerges, then we must take responsibility for it. We can neither defend it nor allow others to defend us.

I don’t know the story behind Zynga and I don’t really want to address it specifically. The general feeling I have about the “free” marketplace is I think the sincere lack of integrity which exists will be its undoing. A return to premium services, wherein, paying subscribers should have expectations of quality, will result.

Long live the good side of capitalism.

In the online world, this is what’s happening. In the offline world, people are so sensitive to what people are talking about..

Whether it’s online or offline, I believe that everybody should just focus on the future, and not focus on what people are talking about…

[...] Reputation is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indescretions A post at TechCrunch wishfully thinking that we have reached the apex of transparency and it is now safe let it all hang out without repercussions. I think the more accurate reality is that there is no longer a separation between personal and professional life, so party like your boss is there. [...]

This is a clever idea, the timing seems right and people are eager for data and reputation and trust. I think this has the potential for being big. Wish I had started it.

Now, the true killer app will not be *trust* but *belief* on the Internet. The Internet makes it easy, for example, for anyone to post multiple “sourced” research on, say, global cooling. Believers can easily rate this as good and reputable, even if it’s bunk. If someone could figure out how to clear out falsehood, provocation, lies, deception and stupidity off the Internet now that would be a trillion-dollar business.

“I firmly believe that we will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time.”

I can agree to that, the question is, what threshold can people take, before they think that person is doing something mischievous already?

Right now, even if you have a stellar-reputation, someone can easily make a story out of you, to ruin your credibility, this can happen not only in online but in real life as well.

Whatever the case may be, scammers will always be scammers and netizens should keep their nose up whenever they sense one.

Second that !
TC should get back to its grass root in tech journalism …
Your site has a bunch of noise and less signal these days ..
You reporting hires are not talented

I would hope that TC redux, brings back the true essence if “tech voice”

What about not publishing documents that you know to be stolen?

-maybe that kissing two guys in college pic is about to be released.
-today the skeletons are not just on the porch, they’re dancing in the streets.
-locator guy ran the gaunlet of TC only to be vehemently pummeled and stoned by a bunch of lame ducks that cant compete against my startups “promise or potential”. instead they resort to vile anonamous attacks.
-TC aids and abeits these clowns by not requiring user comment authentication. without user authenticity they contribute to the delinqency of jackass’s.

Good morning, Michael.

For what it’s worth, I wrote about this in two posts last October:

http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/comments/recruiters_shouldnt_care_about_that_facebook_picture_of_your_beer_pong_game/

and

http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/comments/follow-up_those_damn_gen-yers_need_to_get_off_my_lawn/

Well that’s one way it could go. Alternatively we could look to the only real-world example where gossip spreads easily and people care about it:

small towns

The Internet holds the promise of making us all live in a small town, where reputations are established by the indiscretions of youth and haunt us throughout our lives, inescapably.

Small towns have had this dynamic for a long time, and it’s never gone away – it’s never been something people have come to terms with. Lives are ruined early and often. Options are restricted by petty squabbles from years past.

Of course I hope that we just no longer care about stupid stuff but I am not sure it’ll happen like that.

I think this fear is flawed in a few ways.
1) when EVERYBODY is on a site with ‘somebody’ saying something nasty about them, or showing a picture, or whatever, doesn’t that mostly bring everybody down to a level playing field? I suspect we’ll be saying ‘yeah, whatever’ to things like, Mike flipping somebody the bird.

2)I suspect that part of the attraction of gossip isn’t the actual defamation, but the sharing of something supposedly secretive.

Will this become a site of nothing but flaming of another person? If so, would you go to it and trust it? If you are going to write a positive review of a person, aren’t you going to do that on LinkedIn? or post a comment on Facebook?

The reason defaming sites for non-celebs likely hasn’t taken off may be that they lack quality content.

We’ll see if this new site is any different?

It’s a very disturbing trend, that people who have some issue with you, can go out and really damage your reputation. It’s astoundingly easy these days to completely destroy the reputation of someone you barely know. People spend a lifetime trying to earn a “good name”… and that can be ruined overnight by one person.

believeth in me and i shall not forsake you.
(apps 3:12)

I agree. However, it is higly unlikely that it will happen anytime soon. With the exception of China and other “advanced” places, the Internet is a widely open field of freedom, and as such, it could be even more dangerous than the seediest streets of New York, Rome, Moscow or Bucharest.

“The Truth Will Set You Free” – as the saying goes. Ideally, honesty and the “truth” will make things better at any level, in real life and on the Internet.

The fundamental problem is [sigh] *us* humans and the corrupting allure of money and power. Unfortunately, the devil is us.
Whenever I have the chance, I recommend the book “The Lucifer Effect” [a misnomer] by Phillip Zimbardo, a Stanford Emeritus Professor of Psychology. Great work, but it should be read carefully…

What makes the internet fun also can make it a burden.

The day is approaching when liability and such things will force sites to adopt different policies.

Some day we will all be automatically required to register our national id’s and get a license to drive the internet so to speak.

These times will be considered the good ol days.

… you may have to review the concept of “the greater good.” Those who don’t may put themselves in the “ethical extremists” category… a very uncomfortable way to live.

[...] Source: TechCrunch [...]

This has no chance of working. The founders are naive to think that because they are theoretically on reasonable legal ground that nobody is going to sue them. I hope the investors don’t mind having their money spent on legal fees. In the end, an individual’s privacy is far more important than being able to discover someone’s reputation through a website.

@Tyler

Well theres the public interest (not what the public is interested) defence. Even that can have unfortunate ramifications eg the Suicide of David Kelly over the WMD leaks.

Selling personal data has become a fashion, right?

These services will not really work as they often get filled with too much noise and no matter who you are; if you get sued you have to defend yourself and it will only be a matter of time before certain businesses or individuals take these guys to court. Politicians and high profile people are subject to this type of scrutiny and you’ll never be able to clear / clean your online reputation across the broad internet but a focused site just creates a big target for many to attack. I can think of lots of ways this idea will fail like the others. However, I do agree with MA’s general thesis here.

[...] Arrington / TechCrunch: Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions  —  Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming [...]

[...] je lis un autre article sur TechCrunch paru aujourd’hui intitulé Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions, avec comme phrase dans le premier paragraphe : It’s time we all just give up on the small fights [...]

Does this mean one of your college buds finally scanned in his stack of party pics from back in the day…. and some action shots are about to be released? Hehe :)

In physics they teach that to observe is to change. See we really need to extend the acting genre to the internet.. comments, blog posts, tweets, videos are all a form of entertainment….

until then simply use your porn name online..

See I have an interesting life.. and I was struggling emotionally with depression. So I created a character from a paralell reality who has multiple personality disorder which allows me to get out all the craziness.. to say what I really want.. and I can claim it is cyberacting..

Not that it is that big a deal cause rep is overated… you get called gay everyday online.. and far worse things.. on youtube some kid wanted to cut out my heart with a rusty knife..

This is a great discussion. I posted a version of this on Fred Wilson’s blog, as well:

Fred, as a guy who staked his career on his reputation, the concept in question is little more than writing on the bathroom wall. (I think that’s what one judge said when he ruled against a hedge fund tried to sue some message board posters.) This type of personality-driven defamation, of course, has been done on financial message boards for years. And there are sites dedicated to rating teachers and professors.

The trouble with a site that will widely be used to defame others to is obvious: There is no accountability. None. Zero. Zip. At least on Yelp or Tripadvisor you can track a person’s posts to determine whether their reviews are credible (or in line with your own tastes!).

When I was attacked publicly with lies and innuendo by what appeared to me to be an emotionally ill CEO who was trying hard to divert attention from his company’s troubles (hmmm, I wonder who that could be?) the media lawyers said, “Just let the truth win out.” And it is. (His company is in a heap-O-trouble.) I spent an enormous amount of time on my blog, when I had one, debunking the critics (especially those associated with that nut) and set up my own rules about who I would allow to post. I chose to allow the critics to post UNTIL they refused to engage in CIVIL discourse. (You simply cannot argue with crazy people.)

Based on principle, I actually consulted with two attorneys about possibly filing libel suits against the CEO, but the upshot from them and Dow Jones — my employer at the time: Journalists don’t sue for libel and libel suits aren’t worth the hassle. (Right on both scores.)

At some point, however, if personality defamation is ENCOURAGED via a public site I believe that in time, there will be (or should be!) the libel suit from hell that will remind people that reputations DO count and are somehow protected against lies and innuendo. If not, my prediction: After an initial frenzy of interest, the defamation site (because that’s what it really will be, even if people say nice things as well) will turn into a cesspool whose stench will cause its popularity to fall as quickly as it rose.

Can’t wait to see who the venture firms are backing that thing.

i enjoyed this

depends how you share it..

totally uncool!
I wouldnt want to accept something if it is not true or I dont understand it/cant relate it because it is anonymously posted… and than afterwards to discuss on the profile page itself is totally shabby.

a platform/service like will be so spammed that it will lose any value!

People look to much on their reputation.

If you are like “man you have a problem, lets handle this face 2 face” (also in the discussion level!!) – you would go crazy with something like this….

totally bullshit, this will shape our reality again in direction of bullshit like in present through agencies who work on yelp, amazon, blog, forum … entries…

Has anyone seen this? Like Yelp for people.. sorta http://www.speedyword.com/

[...]  They are putting some trust in the person and deserve to know the truth.  I can see this authors point of view why some things might be overlooked and a more liberal work attitude prevails.  Being professional [...]

Good article, Mike.

But like Adrian said above, a lot of how we feel about things is hardwired and not something we can easily think ourselves out of.

In the same way that our desire for food and sex is now completely disconnected from survival and procreation, I believe that changing our ancient ideas of what constitutes appropriate behavior in a tribe, is not going to be that easy.

I think it’s more likely that the next generation – who fully realize that everything they do might become public – will be very, very careful.

TC, you’re killing me! One big player in this online rep problem is Facebook. That is to say, the website’s privacy features, which have been modified incrementally over the years to free more and more personal information, are what’s really to blame. People have always had personal things they would want to conceal from others, it’s just now there are pressures from the internet (like you, TechCrunch) who want to make people think social privacy standards aren’t relevant in today’s world. Why do we not care anymore?

As someone who has hired hundreds of folks over the years, and who has definitely had some really bad apples, I think this could be very valuable. If they can keep out the noise and get honest, non-vindictive, and conversely, non sugar coated feedback from *proven to be credible* sources – I can’t wait.

Also, as someone who has fired a couple of dozen people, I fear for my own reputation from a possible vindictive past employee but can’t wait for feedback from everyone else. The vast majority of feedback, I believe, will still be constructive – so again, from both angles I think this website could be really valuable.

It will become valuable to have a common name that cannot easily lead a searcher to an individual.

The simple workaround is using common sense, stop broadcasting every inane thought that goes through your mind if you don’t want to end up with an embarrassing record of stupid acts.

Yes I know, common sense went out of style some years ago, whoring your thoughts everywhere isn’t as cool as you think though.

centralization doesn’t work. there is no single truth. truth is in the eye of the beholder.

culture is about to become superfluid. the singularity is at hand. when the right superconductor internet app goes live, awareness (not to be confused with information) will transfer between individuals with zero resistance and zero latency. I give it 5 years, tops.

I thought that the Hutton inquiry established that David Kelly was indeed murdered. I will look it up.

Anyway, contrary to the [erroneous] liberal opinions that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD, he certainly did not use soapy water to massacre thousands of Kurds… it was mustard gas, as in a “weapon of mass destruction” of human beings.

Who wants to be employed by someone who attaches any value to anonymous comments regardless whether they are positive or negative. They are not going to deal well with any kind of accusations or conflict in any case.

Oh, are we all so Narcissistic.

Tell me, barring a handful of celebrities, politicians, sportsmen and musicians, who really cares what the rest of the millions and billions of us said or did in our past ?

Nobody.

Even that friend, co-worker or therapist that you think “cares” about you or your reputation, really doesn’t !

So this is not applicable for 99% of us. So move along !

Oh great, now the internet is going to make it a social norm for doing idiotic things.

Why would anyone use this? Unless it van link to someones fb page without their permission, how will it track all the John smiths of the world?

“That picture of you making out with two guys in college up on Facebook. ”

That was a private matter between you, me, Steve Gillmor and the people who had the misfortune to attend that panel at OSCON 1998. I can’t believe you told everybody.

Good article Mike. You may also be interested to know about the launch of pownum.com in April. This will aggregate ratings of organisations to give a de facto measure of public sentiment. If @mikebutcher is kind to us we may launch both pownum.com and the iPhone app at London Geek’n Rolla.

You can follow developments at:
twitter.com/pownum
http://pownum-blog.blogspot.com/

Marty.

[...] a similar topic, I ran across this article this morning in TechCrunch that says that a Yelp-like product is coming very soon that allows people to rate each other’s [...]

Something incredible about facebook

http://danpatrascu.eu/2010/03/28/cuvinte-pentru-suflet-despre-resentiment/

Reputation may or may not be dead. I think Mike makes a good case that hypocrisy regarding reputation is dead.

Great article Michael. I have a feeling the more you try to hide, the more you’re going to stand out. If you let it all go, you’ll just blend in..

I find this posting so ironic as Michael you are one of the biggest offenders who frequently blindly without much thought attack people and harm their reputations. You slander countless companies and executives and then simply hide behind the comment “hey it’s just my opinion!” Meanwhile it is viewed as a factual story when someone does a Google search on an individual because techcrunch ranks well.

If you want to lead in this space maybe you should start by actually becoming a reporter, check facts, present both sides of stories instead of just spewing half trues and opinions.

Just my two cents.

Oh, that’s English. Just maybe too much English for you to comprehend. :P

I have various personas – I’d say about 95% of them are good – the 5% covers bad things I may have done in the past – I don’t think I got zapped on camera doing any of this group sex thing so that is okay x_X

The aggregate opinion will be more important than individual complaints. Hopefully this “personal Yelp” site will account for info from 3rd party sites as well.

@tweetprivate..

do you know that you can lose your job, via Facebook now? let this teenage story be a sample: http://bit.ly/facebook-used-to-fire-a-girl

“…. and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.”

I stopped reading right there.

Anon is good.

Network Misinformation is another good strategy. Seed the network with all kinds of misinformation about your identities of choice.

Make truth impossible to discern. Say outlandish things, horrible things, normal and boring things, exciting things, edifiable things, disparaging things, anything and everything. Tell lies, Mix in truth, add speculation, dispute and counter annotate, and deny deny deny… and affirm all of it and none of it all the time.

Source must matter. Stupidity does not require that source matter. You hear me Gen I?

Freedom and power are “NEVER” expendable. If the internet can not be utilized as a value-producing tool… it will die of irrelevance.

Making the web into the red light district is a choice you live with… all of us, together.

“So what will matter? Hard proof of being a bad person… That kind of thing.”

There’ll be some loosening up, but it’s a matter of degree more than anything.

In this sense, here in New Zealand we’re living in the future.

It’s a small country of around 4 million. Although we don’t know every other person, there are considerably fewer degrees of separation. In practice it’s not so different from Facebook.

This means a person’s youthful indiscretions and mistakes are much more likely to known about by potential employers and their circle of friends.

In practice, it means employers might overlook a bit of dope or one or two drunken incidents. As you say, serious criminal activity is something else. Above we look for behaviour patterns and whether people learn from their mistakes.

Someone who is consistently badly behaved, frequently in trouble or a serial drunk/stoner/troublemaker will face problems.

Technology will destroy this world. Of course iphones and twitter are cool, but the college level concerns like who knows about me smoking weed does not begin to highlight the problem. Bad financial markets of the last decade are already associated with atomation of trading. Destoying any pricacy in this world will destoy lives and turn social fabric into a waste land. Just wait for the flush mob to show at your door because you did not like a matress you purchased last week and you comments were overheard by some twitter looser.

hahahaha, assuming he isnt smoking hookah or k2 and has that bowl packed with quality ganja :)

The rule of law should be that you can’t talk about someone with their real name ( or reference personally identifiable info) anonymously.

The world is a stage and there are no retakes!!!

So those pictures of you sucking off the entire frat finally leaked?

I don’t care what anybody says about you Michael, you give the best blowjobs ever.

ooh please consciousness is like a canvas easily shaped conditioned and influenced by the environment (living conditions/economy), the media, and our peers. your sense of self is ultimately filtered by your ego and is nothing more then an aggregation/organization of stimuli projected upon you during your life.

Identity and reputation is a much more interesting space than location. There’s already some interesting players here with how much raw data facebook and google have and how nitty-gritty http://www.dirtyphonebook.com is and how spokeo and others are gathering info.

[...] Is More Important Than Ever By fxshaw Yet again comes the “death of” meme, this time from Mike Arrington. The headline grabs, but Mike, IMHO, is not really saying what the headline does, he’s making a [...]

[...] Do the same in your personal life.  Michael Arrington has some good tips at  Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions. [...]

Concur. Intolerance of differing views is a problem that can lead to some seriously bad behavior by those who are intolerant. What is needed is a more Jeffersonian perspective, e.g. “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The late, great Groucho Marx had a refreshing attitude about one’s personal reputation: “I could never belong to a club that would accept me as a member.”

Except for when you get fired for something you say online — happened to me for being critical in a blog post of a new initiative my employer was launching — got fired and they threatened to sue me for libel – and being as naive as I was then, I believed they had the right to so I deleted the blog.

[...] matter and so do the indiscretions that happen to get posted.What do you think?Comments welcome.Source google_ad_client = "pub-7561297527511227"; google_ad_width = 300; google_ad_height = 250; [...]

This idea is flawed. The comments won’t be anonymous at all. You’ll know exactly who they came from and friends of yours will as well. That’s one of the great things of the social internet revolution, anonymity is dead. Everything is public, even if it doesn’t say your name right on it.

I think this is actually good. The spread of this sort of thing will mean that no one trusts online reputation systems and verification of actual reputation goes back to the things Mike is saying (criminal records) or, even better, to actual phone calls and due diligence with leg work involved. The Web has amazingly made so many people in so many fields feel that due diligence is push button simple. But garbage in, garbage out.

Steven Horowitz from Harvard Law School suggested in 07 a DMCA sort-of-take-down-notice for these kind of anonymous internet defamations aka ‘Google bombs’;

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=982849

“This short essay suggests a notice and takedown solution modeled after the DMCA’s similar provisions. I argue that such a solution is much more effective for the Google bomb problem than for copyright infringement because the parties involved are much more likely to have similar legal resources than in copyright disputes.”

Original, brilliant and thought provoking. Unfortunately society feeds on negativity, tragedy and the lapses of judgment prone to so many, including celebrities, and now the amazing gym built hotties of the younger generation. I am amazed at how many people, especially those in college, are posting nude and compromising photos in public forums. A lot of these people are extremely good looking. They are not thinking about their future.

Then there are thousands of 18 – 28 types who are doing amateur sex gigs for a few hundred bucks because jobs are scarce.

Yet to surface in mass, are the nude photos being exchanged on cell phone cams by the millions everyday. Just wait until some enterprising creep starts buying these off-shore and posts them online for the world to see.

With facial recognition software already perfected, matching all of this up to individuals is relatively easy. Unforgiving puritanical hypocrites will peddle this data for profit long into the future.

There are at least two different issues here.

1. Your personal behavior and accountability. I’d like to think it’s still important to conduct oneself appropriately. Sure, I know many of us have done some stupid things over the years, so I think we have to cut everyone some slack from time to time, but overall I’d like to think most people know what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable and we should have some standards.

2. What people say about you. We don’t have much control over this and the web will allow people to make up stuff to hurt us. Yes, we’ll have to learn to be media savvy and learn to take everything everyone says about someone with a grain of salt. Will the people who defend us outnumber those who don’t? I hope so, but you can get into a mob mentality where some people are victimized just because. Remember junior high?

[...] med fokus på att vi behöver vara lite mer tåliga. Uppdatering: Mycket tänkvärd artikel på Techcrunch om internets “minne” och hur vi antagligen måste bli mer [...]

Imagine being a politician with the social media environment we live in now!! With the lack of privacy that now exists, anything can be uncovered with relative ease.

The reasonable people will evolve and see everyone as imperfect humans. It will be the hypocrites who make a big deal about ancient stories and pictures of you in the past.

As Corneil du Plessis (and perhaps others in this thread – it’s getting long) has noted, sensible people don’t pay attention to anonymous reviews or comments. If you’re unwilling to state your name, I’m unwilling to take your opinions seriously, unless I have good reason to believe you’re being anonymous to avoid serious danger (e.g., the kind witness protection programs exist to mitigate). As the web becomes more and more filled with trash talk, employers and others who ignore anonymous reviews and comments will gain a greater and greater advantage, because their hiring and other decisions will be better informed.

Of course, it’s possible to impersonate people on the web (although most trash talkers seem to prefer anonymous cowardice). Accordingly, there are opportunities for companies providing identity certification. Google already offers a weak form of identity certification for Google Profiles – you give them a credit card, and they verify that the name on the card matches the name on the profile. Facebook Connect constitutes an even weaker but not entirely useless form of identity certification. Much more could be done, and I’m surprised Arrington didn’t mention this, because the business opportunities are substantial. For example, Disqus, IntenseDebate, or some other such service could offer to verify your identity using the same kinds of procedures used by offline companies (e.g., banks; to my knowledge, no comment aggregator offers such a thing at present). When you left a comment using the service, it would be displayed with a badge indicating that your identify had been verified. I suspect the service could make money selling this feature.

A site launched about 2 weeks ago that does this already http://www.dirtyphonebook.com
it’s a great site, with very funny content

[...] Michael Arrington escreveu no seu editorial de domingo que com o fim da privacidade na internet a reputação de alguém acabou. Ou pelo menos o conceito de reputação como a concebemos. [...]

[...] via Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions. [...]

It´s about the context.
In LinkedIn it makes sense, on social networks in general but that what you @arrington here prdict of the upcoming *** sounds like mess.

Interesting thoughts, I posted an article on the exact same subject a couple of weeks ago.

http://invinocommodo.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/privacy-in-the-new-age/

The loss of privacy may have further reaching consequences for society than what we currently see. Even good ones!

http://www.dirtyphonebook.com/ already exists why not write about this company

Instead of writing about theory of reputation on the internet and future sites that are coming out you should review what is out there and how it is ruining everyone’s life. You about a month behind the site like DirtyPhoneBook.com came out strong in the beginning of March and getting a lot of coverage and it is a nasty, vile place that must be stopped. Even though I enjoy your articles this one is stale and one month too late.

would be happy to see what the new idea is… Rapleaf and iKarma no longer focus on B2C though…

It’s already been launched…Have u seen http://www.dirtyphonebook.com ??

[...] Techcrunch is saying that reputation management is so impossible to control and limit that it’s pointless to even try, much like big labels trying to fight the illegal sharing of music (see Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions). [...]

Yet another reason to keep all profiles private and take down anything even slightly offensive

I have made a point to clean off my facebook profile of pics, statements, etc…and to google my name, email, etc…and to make sure nothing terrible pops up (which there isnt)

[...] Arrington of TechCrunch stirred the post today with a post titled Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions. The premise [...]

Anonymous will always have a place, but source will always triumph.

I understand being worried about anonymous shots at your reputation when you are at the beginning of your career – but by the time it is having any type of lasting effect on you and/or your life, you should have developed a plethora of evidence that contradicts and ultimately outweighs an anonymous website packed full of bitter frustrations.

[...] a recent blog post, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington pondered whether, in light of the ever-increasing number of [...]

Spot on and this (and Fred Wilson’s piece) me to blog in response at http://www.any.biz/2010/03/online-reputation/ – bottom line is the real-name web is leading to the Internet of people and reputation, trust and influence are all increasing in importance.

Michael,

Great post, really thoughtful.

But how can you tease us like that about the photos without posting them?

-Scott

The context for this is that reliable reputation measures would transform the global economy. The reduction in transaction costs that we’ve seen through the rise of the Internet would pale in comparison to what would result from having a good sense of a person’s or company’s context-specific reputation before dealing with them. Far more sophisticated reputation measures will be required for this to be valuable. A forum for gripes would be useless.

I’ll comment more when I see the actual launch, but from what little Arrington has said about the forthcoming service, I doubt it will be an important enabler of the reputation economy, or successful in the long-run, though it could well get a lot of hype and interest for a while.

I’ve blogged in more detail about this:
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/03/personal_reputa.html

good post, i always thought “reputation management” was silly

This is already happening where idiots at a website recently published home addresses and phone numbers of people they wrongly accused of being associated with murder suspect john gardner in the Chelsea King case in San Diego. I do think we should fight the good fight and get these statements taken down when possible but agree once it’s out it’s out and does little to no good in the long run of things.

This site has been running for about a year and has 85 million profiles. Its called Jerk.com.

Herb

Years ago you reported about a CEO with TYCO Dennis Kozlowski. I just need to say thanks for the report. You safed my 401K. I sold 3/4 of my TYCO

David

I think people will always fear for their reputation, but the fact remains that we live in a society that people will love us and people will either hate or dislike us.

The second you start worrying about that is the second you walk away from being you and start adopting the persona other people expect of you.

Now this is fine if it is fine for you, but it is detrimental if you are just doing it to conform.

Does anyone here honestly believe Balmer, Gates or Jobs sit at home at night worrying what people think about them? OK the IR guys at their companies probably do but those guys look up at the ceiling prior to going to sleep and say “fuck it”. When Edison was inventing the light bulb people thought he was crazy as bat shit, but he held course and fulfilled his potential.

How many other industry disruptor’s -and lets face it there is a fine line between disruptor and loony- allowed the world to tell them “no” or were influenced by what other people thought?

I would say that the truth lays somewhere between what Michael said and what Fred Wilson stated on his blog.

[...] Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions. [...]

I think technology will soon grow to the point when everybody on the internet will be identified with a kind of digital signature that will have some biometric elements imbeded in it to identify you and automatically assign your digital signature to every post you make online.
The biometric feature will be a combination of your finger print (when you type with keyboard), Your voice, Your retinal and your body temperature. By then, it will become useless to even try making comments anonymously as you will be identified by your central online identity.
No hope is lost, I strongly believe so.
Cheers Everyone!

You’re missing the point. This isn’t about celebrities, but average people. There’s no reason the existence of a picture of you doing something everyone in your workplace does should reflect badly upon you, unless they already don’t like you and are looking for an excuse. That’s actually the situation in most of the more well-known incidents. I think modern companies are already aware of the reality this article talks about, and recent hiring situations I’ve been a part of would also indicate this is true.

Agreed… But I think that the world will finally have to accept that people are human and do things that other people do. In our company we do social media marketing and create social media assets and to some extent we develop online reputations.

You see this commonly with politicians. As I dont condone this for “role models” but you have to think of your friends and what they do…Other people do the same things…Just a thought…

You rocked this article, Michael! I have the same vision as you that it will all NOT matter anymore as far as reputation is concerned, within the same contexzt you wrote about that is…I thing the positive thing about “leaks” and what have you is the fact that there is a big REVEALING FACTOR that shows how imperfect and human we all are. I believe that because of that Revealing Factor in society, we will grow as a community and as a people in a more understanding way then years prior.

[...] Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight [...] [...]

So this is warning before Arrington and TC’s reputation take bigger hit with this new site that will be launched?

Yeah that site is hilarious but also has privacy issues because there’s no way to temov your phone number off of their.

This is very, very bad. I’m starting to believe that some people should have their right to freedom of speech revoked, let alone access to a centralized venue to spew.

Too much of our new-ish technology (the Net itself) is naive and based around the assumption that people are fundamentally good. That may be true, but the problem is that it takes only a handful, empowered by that same technology, to cause grief for the many.

I run an online, membership based company that is extraordinarily honest. We go the extra mile to do the right thing and beyond, sometimes at significant cost to ourselves. If I listed some of the things we do for our members, most business owners would think us insane.

But, with thousands of members, you’ll find that handful who are completely irrational. They make unreasonable demands that you cannot possibly satisfy and sometimes try to out-and-out defraud you, then threaten you with defamation on public forums, blogs, etc. if you don’t comply. It’s effectively extortion. They know how valuable your reputation is and they use it against you.

The bad part is that people are so eager to believe the worst and so reluctant to believe the best. Any reputation-based site that “succeeds” will be full of nasty, untrue, vindictive nonsense spewed by people who feel protected by their anonymity.

I actually had an idea for a business like this, but didn’t bother because I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I was empowering abusive bullies and profiting from misery.

Privacy is dead. Reputation is just beginning.

What I find scary about this trend is the potential impact that this may have moving forward in term of lack of creativity and drive to compliance.

Creativy requires intimacy to explore new things. This level of intimacy happens sometime at a friends or at a family level. If you can’t experiment anymore including being drunk with friends without facing the risk of having an indelible black mark, you just won’t try anymore and if you don’t try, your development will suffer.

I don’t buy the fact that people will learn not to care. This is wishful thinking at best. In a competitive world, recruiters will choose the safer choice and the person with the drunk picture will be disadvantaged.

If you don’t have intimacy and you are faced with the pressure to comply, this is starting to look like a very orwellian world with the crowd as Big Brother.

I see more people self regulating themselves, hence those type of businesses being short lived. And if they don’t, I am hoping that regulators will chime in to adjust the legal system to make this world a better place.

Thanks, David. You can imagine what the message board posters were saying about me in those days!!! Now, imagine, they’ll have a site devoted to defaming people!

[...] o potencial de falar sobre nós na web. Tanto que há até quem fale no fim da reputação. Li no TechCrunch que está chegando um momento em que relevaremos cada vez mais má notícias sobre reputação. E [...]

If you think that Mike, then maybe you can stop *forcibly* logging people on to Facebook Connect every time they land on this page to *force* them to comment with their RL names, and *force* them to log out and comment with an avatar’s name like me.

I’m not an anonymous, but it’s my right to be, and lots of people who criticize you need to be, given how vindictive you are.

[...] more on TechCrunchTags: Dead, Indiscretions, It’s, Overlook, Reputation, time Posted on 29th March 2010. Filed in [...]

[...] tengo la autoridad para juzgar a Mike Arrington. El no está equivocado cuando llama a ajuste social en términos de medios sociales. Tal como [...]

right on mike!
I’ve been telling this story myself for years. The problem in our society is much more about hypocrisy than it is about people behaving outside the norm. It’s that our society refuses to face what is really the norm, and social and legal proscription is applied selectively to a few of the participants usually for reasons having nothing to do with the behavior for which they’re punished.

We are, after all, not so different from one another, with the same weaknesses and foibles. If we don’t see each other’s rough spots, and our society tells us they’re uncommon, we only feel secretly guilty. A transparent society is one in which reality informs our mores.

Gee, I wish I was cool enough to smoke pot and have affairs. Then maybe I could get ahead in this world.

@shields up!

I smoke weed every day and still execute heavily. I love BC Canada.

I agree with this and always refused to clean up my online presence for hypocrites – http://www.songzige.com/to-the-fear-ing-for-your-privacy-an-introspective-inquiry

[...] *Por Michael Arrington, para TechCrunch [...]

[...] favorite essay published this weekend was Michael Arrington’s post on our increasingly public reputations, and his hopes for increasingly forgiving attitudes about the youthful bong hit or the disgruntled [...]

I think that search engines should take more responsible for what they index.

I think there should be a dispute button to protect yourself from cyber bullies.

If you can prove someone is trying to defame you by putting your personal information online in a derogatory way then site/post/whatever should not be indexed.

Cyber bullies are the cancer of the web.

I seem to agree, people will not take this kind of ‘anonymous’ opinion seriously and lets hope, even Google will find ways not to crawl those kind of contents.

John-

I was not at all impressed by TechCrunch hand wringing and shallow point of view.

The bulk of the comments were of the same caliber until your well reasoned / thoughtful comment appeared.

Thanks

great piece. my friend, who is not in the online space but a stock broker came up with this idea a few years ago. we talked about it for weeks but couldn’t imagine building a platform like this as a life/career choice. i’d hate to be the person that brings it into the world.

Paul-

Thanks for your comment. I’ve never been much of a TC reader but this latest post…….

Where’s the substance?

Weaklings!

You reap what you sow by conforming to idiotic web 2.0 services.

Internet is freedom and from a technical standpoint this has been possible since before www.

People simply didn’t do this kind of stuff… OR DID THEY? (of course they did, but the scope was notably smaller back then and average joe lunkhead didn’t know what or where… or did they?)

PROTIP to “journalists”: You just told me many things i didn’t know or care about but could possibly use in bad deeds if i felt like it.

Internet is freedom. You have the freedom to do somwething and you have the freedom of NOT doing something.

I do agree that the mainstream internet has been going downhill as more and more casuals have been steadily getting access to it.

INTERNET = SERIOUS BUSINESS

The internet and freedom can only go so far until it’s time to take a few steps back.

One step to avoid bad stuff is to disregard it completely. People’s opinion only has power when you let it. Again this is your freedom to accept it or not.

For example companies will only do harm for themselves if they are caught trying to undo a bad review on “some random ass site no one really cares about”.

Back to the 2.0 bit, i wouldn’t register to FB or anything with REAL credentials if i don’t have a REAL reason to do so. And no, most of yours are not. i guarantee it. Basically this whole social media thing has been pushed through by mainstream media, which i find particularly interesting. Also snowball effect lol

TL;DR = you join 2.0, you lose. you care, you lose. you reply to obvious trolls, you lose.

Web 1.0 = fun, safe, distant (in a way), non-personal screen names
Web 2.0 = unfun, unsafe, inyourface, personal details

FREEDOM = edge are on both sides, user decides how they handle it. standards, morals etc. virtues even, they now matter more than ever. Use them wisely.

Paul-

Power and money do not corrupt….they merely reveal.

cheers

[...] Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions [...]

Cheryl-

I seriously doubt that a robust, accurate, “good” reputation can be ruined over night by one person.

A person’s reputation should (& nearly always does) flow from their character.

A dishonest person typically has a bad reputation (& justly so).

An ebay seller with 5000 positive reviews has their reputation ruined by a single (or even a few) negative review?

cheers

here here!

YEA! FUCK FREEDOM OF SPEECH!

LET’S THROW THESE FUCKERS IN PRISON AND STEAL THEIR MONEY!

Congrats. Best post yet Mike. Echoing my thoughts exactly.

Arrington, you are advocating a paradigm shift (new constant of acceptable morality or ‘truth’) based on data that surfaces online.

but ultimately, information has been and shall forever be, only as credible as its source no matter the medium. (you know this as a journalist)

As such, anonymous comments (like this one) are ultimately irrelevant without evidence.

assuming all defaming remarks are supported with evidence (‘pics or it didnt happen’), were really not causing a paradigm shift, but revealing the ‘real’ level or morality/truth thats always been there.

for instance, i can say Arrington has a micro-p3nis – no srsly, but would have to be cited on CNN by “CommentingINstealth” on TC comments and no one would take it srsly.

i know you know this and reading b/w the lines here. i think YOU ARE worried about something about to come out and attempting to marginalize it…which is nothing new either (but most people write about it in a book before they run for office ;P)

Michael Arrington is actually promoting this site. I cannot believe you dum nerds are going for it. The name has been leaked on other blogs DirtyPhoneBook.com. He is obviously involved and will financialy benifit from the sites success. I refuse to help this scoundrel. If you cannot tell the name of the site why write about it. We are not kids. So in the conclusion f*ck you Michael Arrington you fat pig.

[...] post is titled Reputation Is Dead, It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions and his point is that as more and more of our personal history gets put online if we are going to [...]

[...] post is titled Reputation Is Dead, It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions and his point is that as more and more of our personal history gets put online if we are going to [...]

This problem is trivial compared to the determent caused by purveyors of Public Record data mining as “reliable” background checks. A common correlation in these searches is to used the combination of all or part of your name combined with your birthday. All too often this results in criminal records, judgements, tax liens, and other derogatory data being associated with your name in the hiring screening process that actually, and fairly obviously belonging to someone else. That doesn’t keep it off the report or the “thumbs up/thumbs down” risk assessment that these companies provide your prospective employer. These reports include disclaimers that the data may or may not be correct – but doesn’t help when you are not asked to come in for an interview.

anyone else notice that he’s hittin a bong? aha

Masturbating Furby?
Wow, funniest Name I’ve seen on here . ! (:

[...] Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access. [...]

[...] Arrington posted an interesting piece yesterday on reputation. I encourage you to read the piece in full, but, in short and in part, he thinks and/or predicts [...]

I can’t say I find much to agree with in this piece.

It is an interesting concept but I believe you’ve taken the premise to the extreme, that society will gradually and necessarily lower its standards of expectations because… if you can’t beat em, join em? I find that anticipation to be kind of a dismaying and defeatist.

The Internet age has made everyhting much more transparent, but I believe — as Gary Vee states in his book Crush It! — that it will only help weed out the frauds and con artists among us.

While every human is indeed imperfect and commits discretions, if you resign yourself to committing — or brazenly contest that they may some day become a “badge of honor” — I’d say those of us who disagree with your indifference are going to have a long fight on our hands.

What we needed, a place besides twitter for 1938media to flame scoble.

As the recent posts have suggested, your reputation is not going to be static. We are all going to have to work hard to ensure there is some good press about us, to keep pushing the less glowing feedback to the bottom of the search rankings. By leveraging social networking, and actually doing something good for society and the world at large, we might be able to show that our recent successes are far more important than past failures.

It sounds just like corporate politics. Though I have to say that I’m happy that digital cameras on cellphones were not around when I was in college!

Great post! I added some thoughts on the RD blog by way of “response”. Thought it might be of interest. Thank you for initiating the discussion on the topic.

http://www.reputationdefenderblog.com/2010/03/29/michael-arrington-techcrunch-on-reputation/

or if that doesn’t work

http://tinyurl.com/ydrubab

this site allows you to say anything about anyone and be anonymous. You can even say F.U to you boss
http://ACardGameWithAttitude.com/sayitloud

It is up to us to build such a tolerant society. Let us contribute.

I have nothing to hide! I will say what I want to say. It’s the people who have something to hide that are the whiners. It’s the people who need health care that are crying about it. Wake up people! The bad will always try to take the good down! Search my name, I will stand by it forever. See what you find. I have nothing to hide!

[...] March 29, 2010 at 10:40 am · Filed under Social Networking From Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions] [...]

[...] Mike Arrington posted a story about a start-up who later this week will be launching a service that’s effectively a Yelp for [...]

I see some things I’ve been thinking about for some time now (3 years or more, I’d say). Agree with the explained trend. Agree with the 24x7x365 honesty attitude.

The old saying “It’s A Free Country” and “freedom of speech” no longer apply. Everything has to be politically correct or someone or some group sees fit to rake you over the coals. I for one don’t give a rats ass about being politically correct and neither should anyone else. Kinda compare it to listening to radio or TV. If you don’t like the content, change the damn channel.
http://misfit120.wordpress.com

[...] If you dig deep enough, you can uncover embarrassing dirt on anyone. But I would like to respectfully disagree with Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington’s assertion that “reputation is dead.” [...]

[...] an article over on TechCrunch, Michael Arrington addresses some very common discussion points about social media. How much does [...]

The weekly public radio show “On The Media” has been covering this issue for years. The podcast from 4-8-09 called “The Net Effect” is amazing. It is an interview with Lee Rainey (head of the Pew Internet and American Life Project) in which he summarizes trends in how the Internet shapes our lives.

http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/craig-newmark-on-the-webs-next-big-problem/

This interview was on March 18th….

scotty? lol

I would suggets a new kind ofbusiness, not a honest one, but still a business: reputation insurance, to cover you from disasters.

Amen!

[...] threat to managing your online reputation: a startup launching next week that will function like a Yelp for people, letting users post anonymously about anyone. In the wake of Yelp, Facebook, and Twitter–a [...]

I think privacy less so, but I definitely agree that there is major value in reputation management, especially for the hiring process. Having professional feedback aggregated in one place where you can escape the “noise” (of the inappropriate Facebook photos, details of college indiscretions and other things that really have little to no bearing on one’s capabilities as an employee, save I guess for serving as an indicator of judgment at one point in one’s life) that will allow employers to view feedback on professional merit is hugely valuable from a time-saving and potentially a hiring-accuracy perspective.

[...] According to Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, our wish for a Yelp for people is about to be unleashed on the interwebs. [...]

[...] According to Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, our wish for a Yelp for people is about to be unleashed on the interwebs. [...]

[...] Arrington recently posted an article on TechCrunch discussing online reputations. Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions seems to be Arrington’s way of laying it on the proverbial line, and giving up the ghosts of [...]

you can already defame anyone using twitter or thousands of other sites… bfd

it won’t matter, it’s all “noise” and will become part of the spamosphere, nobody will pay attention past the first few dirty jokes… then it’s all just a waste of time…

I am comment 248 and a few days behind – it was my Birthday, which now means a day off (the web)

Personally the rant and rave I have just read misses some critically important points for me.

1. the web is a live feedback model – what is described above is the old print model, linear; in and out. The web is feedback, hone, improve, context and build.

2. reputation is not just about “PC” in whatever form it is, generated data, it is about unique mobile data and mobile is way more important …..”get over it”

3. Reputation is an output from analysis – not an input

4. reputation is partly about what you say, do and who you do it with and when, but also and importantly what others say and do about and with you. Who do you influence and who influences you.

5. Reputation is not about control – it is about the ability to trade and barter – your reputation is more that your pictures, it is “key” or “passport” to services and value

6. Digital data, Digital Footprint, Digital reputation, Digital Identity is about collecting data, analysing the data and as a business creating value for the user. Taking the feedback from immediacy of use (web value) from you and your social crowd to improve or create new.

Therefore part agree, no control and don’t bother trying, however disagree, this data is the next battle ground for the web.

Topic I love as author of http://www.mydigitalfootprint.com

[...] – und welche Rolle spielt der im Internet verbreitete Ruf eines potenziellen Arbeitnehmers? Die Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Online-Reputation gewinnt an Bedeutung. Denn offenbar ist sie ein wichtiger Bestandteil der eigenen [...]

[...] like identity theft, and losing a job over material posted online. Michael Arrington writes Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions and discusses this [...]

[...] Arrington posted an interesting piece yesterday on reputation. I encourage you to read the piece in full, but, in short and in part, he thinks and/or predicts [...]

I wouldn´t consider bad anonymous comments as a valuable thing. If you have something to say that can be true, you should show yourself and why you´re saying it.

Regarding this startup, I don´t think it´s a good idea and it could find pretty much issues on the way as others have found before. I´ll be waiting for the post here on TechCrunch.

In the meanwhile, I recommend small business owners to go through Startups.com and join some business related conversations!

I feel as if this has been around for some time already and is where companies such as Reputation Defender and Brand-Yourself.com came from. A few years ago when the company, Juicy Campus came about college students were taking the anonymous route out by blasting their peers online in an open forum.

I am interested to see how this Yelp for people will do in the market. I have no doubt that they will get a lot of press and a lot of people will most likely and sadly use the service to ruin the lives of their colleges, friends (ex), and so on.

I do not think that reputation management is dead. I think that we are undergoing a fundamental shift regarding how we make decisions about people and how first impressions are crafted, our perceptions of content that is published is also shifting accordingly. It is naive to think that just because I have seen 1000 drunken photos of job applicants that the 1001 will not have an effect on me. I would push the point further to say that people need to be more careful about the content that they publish, and the activities they partake in on a Friday night.

I would think that with these shifts, people would be more apt to take the route of making better decisions and be more cognitive of the information surrounding their name rather than just saying “eh who cares, everyone has it.”

Awesome article! I think you hit the nail on the head, but unfortunately it will be a real mental challenge for many people to overcome.

For example, when admissions councellors at Princeton University admit that slight indiscretions on Facebook can affect a person’s opportunity to attend… you know it’s a BIG problem.

[...] there’s a new service launching in a matter of days that allows people to review other people… [...]

Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions – Welcome back Tiger, I hope you win the Masters

I hope you’re right, because for now, it’s too easy for people to commit extortion via SEO. Ed Magedson has made a whole business out of it with ripoffreport.com, a fake “consumer advocacy” website that optimizes for Google search around the names of small businesses and individuals, puts on a populist front to attract complaints, and then extorts the individual to pay fees to have the complaints “mediated.” It’s quite repulsive.

[...] } Over the weekend, Mike Arrington put up an interesting op-ed on the state of the reputation on the Internet — and Techcrunch then followed up with a fairly negative review of a site ( [...]

[...] Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions [...]

the hell…???

[...] the weekend, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington predicted that, someday soon, reputation online would be a dead issue. In essence, Arrington argued that the Internet will soon become so full of review websites and [...]

[...] TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has just done me one better with a thoughtful piece on the evolving nature of online reputations and how, according to Mike, we all need to just lighten up and embrace our indiscretions. While I applaud Mike for his somewhat Zen-line perspective on how to navigate a world increasingly open to mischief when it comes to reputations — one’s own and other people’s - I question some of his prescriptions. [...]

I think you’re directionally right about the evolving social mores around discretion and reputation, but what these experiments will mostly prove is that the value of an anonymous comment is less than or equal to the reputation of the (anonymous) poster, which is effectively zero.

Celebrities of all sorts have been subjected to anonymous flames and attacks for most of recorded history with little consequence absent verifiable proof.

[...] Michael Arrington kam jüngst zu dem Schluss, die Ära, in der sich eine ausschließlich positive Reputation aufrecht erhalten lässt, sei tot. [...]

” “Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years”

And how did you come to this conclusion?”

From starting every morning by hooting at the monolith in his backyard…?

I dunno. Just went kind of visual on that for a moment.

[...] no point in worrying about your reputation anymore, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has decided; everything will [...]

[...] Arrington wrote a post last weekend titled “Reputation is Dead,” contending that “Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is [...]

is this true? or is this just a setup for a brilliant and elaborate April fools Joke from our friends at Tech Crunch…if so, nice set up…

[...] no point in worrying about your reputation anymore, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has decided; everything will [...]

[...] the weekend, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington predicted that, someday soon, reputation online would be a dead issue. In essence, Arrington argued that the Internet will soon become so full of review websites and [...]

Hooray political negative advertising for the masses. Congratulations.

Where do I start first, Hhmmm That’s it my ex-wife’s attorney, then I’ll work my way down.

Cheers!

for those that take life too seriously and my great great grand children, this was a comic comment, your great great grandfather loved to laugh, Have Fun kids!

ignore it all!

I stand corrected – I meant the monolith he has on his desk.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/monolith-action-figure.shtml

[...] Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indescretions (TechCrunch) – Michael Arrington claims our online reputations will soon be at risk, thanks to anonymous attacks that will show up on any number of sites that can be tracked back directly to our personal brands. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the opinion of cowards hiding behind the veil of their personal computer will carry much weight, but what do I know? [...]

[...] Amanda’s pick: Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions, TechCrunch [...]

[...] Is Dead? In Ephemera on April 5, 2010 at 12:57 pm Well, this could get interesting: Next week a startup is launching that’s effectively Yelp for people [...]

As I see it, online reputation is more alive than ever. It is true, trying to control, or even manage it is becoming increasingly difficult. That’s why do-it-yourself tips or various online reputation services/tools will not solve your problem, as long as you are new to this complex field. Moreover, if you are trying to solve your online reputation problem alone, it could backfire against you and your company. Hire a specialist.

Why mention Reputation Defender, a company with major reputation issues? If they can’t handle their online and offline reputation, how could they manage my rep? Ex-customers characterize them as scammers.

Reputation is not dead. We shouldn’t overlook neither minor nor major reputation threats, such as: online defamation, anonymous whistle-blowing, disclosure of private facts etc., especially when it comes to corporate reputation.

[...] cyberbullying, intermediary liability, and so on. If you read these two TechCrunch articles [1, 2], you’ll get a good feel for the heated debate that will follow, which I’m sure [...]

[...] do you think?  Is the the next logical step in social networking, or will it be a trashy place where cyber-bullies will have a chance to [...]

[...] Arrington's piece on "Reputation is Dead" [...]

[...] care about online reputation”), publicado en Financial Times, en el que se refería a un post* de Michael Arrington, aparecido en Tech Crunch, en el que afirmaba que “Tratar de controlar, o incluso gestionar, la [...]

Bottom Line…Don’t EVER have pictures of yourself out there to even GET on the internet in the first place. (better YET)…DON’T do the behavior in the first place!…Problem solved before it even had to start!

[...] tipsar om en ypperlig artikel på TechCrunch i just detta [...]

[...] de leer el irónico post de Michael Arrington, en Tech Crunch, sobre la reputación on line, la verdad es que no me puedo sustraer a reconocerle [...]

[...] however, social media (Internet usage) augments and supports existing relationships. What is missing are the tools for establishing trust, reputation, and authenticity online. The majority of the data continues to [...]

[...] Want more? Read Mike Arrington’s brilliant post on reputation and indiscretion. [...]

[...] threat to managing your online reputation: a startup launching next week that will function like a Yelp for people, letting users post anonymously about anyone. In the wake of Yelp, Facebook, and Twitter–a [...]

Just to share an expirience:

I digg a way to rip YouTube movies. Some of are web sites where you put the link from YouTube and it gives you file with strange extension and small size. Some are really complicated.

My way was to use moviesherlock (moviesherlock.com or sm like this – please ask me – will rememeber). Really simple utility, that just works, and only 1 button in software.

[urlhttp://download.cnet.com/3001-2140_4-75065920.htm...
I downloaded even HD movies!

But it looks too easy, has no player, but just works. It downloaded ~12 concurrent movies for me and actually slows down my system. Its possible to do search in [url