The TrustFlow algorithm

[ciphergoth]

TrustFlow is a "trust metric" algorithm, which uses human-generated information about trustworthiness in a human-sized community of a few hundred people to generate guesses about trustworthiness in an Internet-sized community of millions of people; this is useful in applications like ranking search hits and preventing spam and vandalism. TrustFlow

Comments

[spudtater]

Hullo. You can have these images, if you want:

A naïve trust system (for contrast)
TrustFlow with 2 litres poured
TrustFlow with 7 litres poured

I drew them to explain to a friend how the algorithm worked.

[ciphergoth]

Those are great! Thanks!

[jofish22]

This is a nice algorithm, and I like what you've done with TrustFlow. (Hmm... maybe I should post this over there.) It seems on first glance that it works somewhat similarly to PageRank (or perhaps even closer to hubs + authorities) except with a point-source of trust.

Nice job.

[tajmahall]

Your algorithm doesn't appear to do anything to increase a popular user's influence. Each person gets just one vote to divide up, so the more friends you have the less your link to each of them counts. It would probably be better to give each person "juice" in proportion with the number of people they are a friend of or something.

I, and a number of my friends, have all been getting one user at the top of our list for no apparent reason. We all turn out to share a friend who has precisely one friend, which is this user. Thus this friend's vote goes entirely to her, while the rest of my friends have theirs divided up into tiny pieces.

[ritaxis]

I don't understand the results. The second rank of people and many of the others I know to be sensible, but the very first person with a rank of 1 only shares 1 friend with me. She's a very nice and interesting person, judging by her journal, but I don't get why she's the "closest" to me.

[hdofu]

so many enemies of mine showed up in the results