I have been coding a prototype of this in my free time over the past couple of weeks. It's fun, but I'm not sure it actually makes lots of sense.
Not only is it really hard come up with a model to convert currency from many places into a "standardized" format (or even to allow for OpenID-style distribution) - it'll also not be easy to provide data to other sites that allows them to do useful things easily. Tags might be as good as it gets.
One other thing Y-people might not like: this SHOULD NOT have a revenue model, I think. Freemium completely screws you and ads on a reputation site would just feel wrong. Besides, it's a platform.
That's why I keep thinking about open-sourcing what I have, especially in order to try to solve the distribution problem before an alpha site might go online. Being a hopeless idealist I really want to see a service-decoupled reputation service that is NOT facebook/google FC.
Please let me know if any of you'd be interested to join me in playing around with this.
I just don't see how it is technically feasible, as most sites don't provide a way to transfer karma? Or is the idea more that of an independent karma service that other sites could plug in to (like gravatar does for profile pictures)?
That's a perfectly good application of a reputational economy. There's pretty much infinite possibility. I'm not sure if it has been explored in fiction better than Doctorow's Down and Out Magic Kingdom, about a post-scarcity, post-singularity society with a reputational economy. http://craphound.com/down/ Available free online under a CC license.
gnus email/news-reader already provides, such a fature via scoring. You can score somebody up/down. At a configured threshold, you dont get to see the posts/articles from such folks anymore. love to have something like this in gmail.
This is smart but I'm not sure what the fundamental transaction on such a market is. Keep in mind that there is no rivalry for karma (in an economic sense) and that people always keep their karma after giving to others (or possibly even increase it).
Not sure I agree; I think people are already using ad hoc methods to "price" karma; for instance, I have used such methods to "price" a Hacker News karma point as 1,000,000 reddit points.
The side effect of the market would be to rank discussion systems by credibility, or signal/noise, in real time.
It's also geeky enough that I think you could keep liquidity, even though there's no dollar value to karma.
