Reputation is a very important problem worth solving. However, I'm not sure your app tackles the most important part of this problem, which is connections between participants.<p>For example, let's say I started a business and I need first customers, which I cannot get without the reputation. One cheat is to simply create 100 accounts on your website, each referring to each other and giving points to each other. Even if you manually check each account, which I think you wouldn't be able to do at a certain point, I can game the system and gain fake reputation.<p>An alternative would be a system based on connections. For instance, if my friend or a friend of my friend gave your account some points, then I can be more sure of the validity of your reputation. The more connections you have to me and the shorter the route, the more reputable you appear to me. On the other hand, if all your points come from your own fake accounts which have no connections to any of my friends, your reputation appears 0 to me, even though you have 100 points.
I'm reminded of a game I used to play in middle school called MapleStory. It was a pretty generic, grindy MMORPG but one of its more mechanics was a 'reputation' stat that each character had, with no ostensible uses besides to tell who was well-liked and who wasn't. You could 'fame' someone and 'defame' someone once per day, similar to this system.<p>As one might expect, the system never was as honest as you'd hope: you'd have massive "fame trading" rings, because what's the point of giving away your fame for the day if you don't get anything in return? And, more maliciously, there would be guilds and clans who'd designate targets to 'defame on sight': forty people defaming you over the course of a week would usually put you into the negative hundreds, sort of ruining that stat permanently (unless, of course, you 'bought fame'.)
I know this is well intentioned, but it might have the opposite effect. There has been a lot of study done on rewards and motivation. It turns out that giving external rewards can undermine motivation. For example, giving stars to children for their drawings will undermine their natural motivation to draw. The same can be said about monetary rewards. Moreover, people who do deeds for an external reward are usually less satisfied compared to those who do deeds for their own sake.<p>A lot of this research is done under Self-Determination Theory.
Either I have a really good internet connection right now (which is unlikely), or this app seems really fast! Good job! (Also the colors look great).<p>Are you doing anything special on the backend?
Maybe I miss something, but why would I want to get reps? I mean what is the objective of it. Is it to incentivize people to help others? Or just an ego boost. I can help people without giving reps.<p>In my opinion this would be a feature of a larger product. It would be cool to implement it in Hacker News. Where you can get Karma for helping others here. But it would still be an add-on. The focus of karma in hacker news is to incentivize people on submitting better articles. What does it mean for me to have more reps ?
Props for the clever privacy policy and simple language used, (I wish more sites would take that approach) but it doesn't say anything about sharing information collected with third parties. Given the nature of the site, it would be nice to understand whether the site intends on monetizing collected personal information.<p>BTW, that isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is an important aspect of the sites privacy policy.
On the front page - if you make an element that looks clickable, people are probably going to click on it.<p><div class="hpar"></div> should probably be clickable. I probably clicked on it 5 or 6 times before i had to scroll down.
Anyone else think the UI looks very Heroku-esque? I'm not one to sue over superficial differences and "purple" is not a trademark, but I thought pplrep was a Heroku product at first.
Finally, there's a question of openness. If you store your DB of connections and points on your own server, I'd trust it less than if it was stored publicly, like the Bitcoin blockchain.
>Each time you rep someone, you are rewarded with 2 rep points of your own.<p>Uhh I'm no expert but it seems like rep points don't really mean much if you can award them to yourself.
Edward Snowden currently on top of the leaderboard. Hmm.<p><a href="http://pplrep.com/leaderboard" rel="nofollow">http://pplrep.com/leaderboard</a>