---
name: Reputation
slug: reputation
type: distributed_ledger
status: running
version: "∞.social.3"
released: "before writing"
maintainer: everyone you have ever met
dependencies:
  - time
  - memory
  - other_people
  - consistency
  - luck
license: Commons Clause (you do not own this)
tags:
  - social infrastructure
  - identity
  - trust
  - invisible architecture
  - soft power
---

Reputation

What it actually is

The story other people are telling about you when you are not in the room.

How it works

Reputation is a distributed system with no central server. Every person who has encountered you holds a local copy. These copies diverge immediately. They are updated asynchronously, without your consent, and cannot be rolled back.

The writes happen constantly. The reads happen when you are not watching.

What you did last Tuesday is in there. So is how you handled failure that one time in 2019. So is the small kindness you offered without thinking, the one you do not even remember.

That last one matters more than you expect.

Features

Persistence: survives account deletion, job changes, and moving cities. Degrades slowly, not all at once.
Portability: travels ahead of you via word of mouth. Often arrives before you do.
Compounding: small consistent signals accumulate into a durable signal. Works in both directions.
Asymmetric recovery: damage accrues faster than repair. This is not a bug in the system. It is a feature of how trust calcifies.
Locality: your reputation in one context is a foreign key in another. Schemas rarely match.

Known bugs

Observer effect: trying to manage reputation directly often corrupts the underlying data.
Cache staleness: people remember who you were. Updates propagate slowly, if at all.
False writes: things you did not do get logged anyway. No patch available.
Single-incident overwrite: one vivid event can shadow years of consistent behavior. The human memory index is not fair.

Configuration

# You cannot edit this file directly.
# Submit behavior. Wait for propagation.

reputation:
  source_of_truth: other_people
  write_access: indirect_only
  read_access: public
  backup: none
  rollback: not_supported
  ttl: decades

Edge cases

Posthumous reputation is writable by others indefinitely. Some of the best upgrades happen after death.
In very small communities, reputation is nearly real-time. In large cities, it fragments into parallel versions that never reconcile.
Children inherit a partial copy of their parents' reputation before they do anything at all. This is one of the quieter injustices in the system.

FAQ

Can I start over? You can move somewhere new and get a temporary grace period. The file comes with you though.

Is reputation the same as identity? No. Identity is what you know about yourself. Reputation is what the network has cached. They overlap occasionally, which is always a relief when they do.

What actually builds it? Showing up. Doing the thing when it is inconvenient. Being the same person in the easy moments and the hard ones. The system is noisy but it is not stupid. Over a long enough horizon, it tends to get you right.

Changelog

∞.social.3  - added internet layer. propagation speed: catastrophic.
∞.social.2  - printing press accelerates staleness problem.
∞.social.1  - first village. first gossip. system goes live.
0.0.1       - unknown. maintainer list too long to render.

drafting spec…