Thanks for the reference. It reminds me of when I was following the OpenBazaar team and spitballing with them a little about their product rating system, which ended up being a 5-star system along a handful of dimensions: quality, delivery speed, a few others. There was no way to make everyone happy. Something like this that seems like it ought to be straightforward from a distance ends up getting really complex, really fast, when you sit down to build it. So many choices. So many design decisions. And as a builder you have to pick exactly what is best for your consumers. Which turns out to be impossible, bc everyone has different needs and wants and opinions. And different rating systems may make sense in different contexts, different applications, for different people.

The lesson I took is that we need a system that allows the rating systems to be designed by the community. Seems impossible but I think it can be done. It’s a consensus problem: how can a decentralized community arrive at consensus on a language? On the digital tools of communication? It works for the spoken word — why can’t it work for our digital tools? This is what the tapestry protocol is designed to do. In this instance, the community might come up with multiple rating systems and your grapevine could help you select which one is the best for any particular context. Different systems for different applications. As a user you could attest to your opinion regarding the rating system, or just let your grapevine figure it out for you, depending on your level of interest.