Facebook should give developers access to (and votes on) user reputations

April 3rd, 2008

By Justin Smith

Facebook Spam One of the big challenges of building any social service on the web is, has, and always will be spam (and, likewise, trolls). At any given point, some percentage of “users” generating content are actually marketers attempting to drive traffic to their own site or otherwise not helpfully contributing to the community.

Facebook, for its part, has invested massive amounts of people hours and technical resources into making Facebook a fairly spam-free experience. Some ungodly high percentage of Facebook’s employees are devoted to spam detection and customer service. It’s a huge problem that takes a lot of effort to fight.

For developers, spammers and trolls can be just as much a problem as they are for Facebook itself. However, most developers lack the resources to implement effective spam detection/user reputation systems. Rather than leaving every app developer to build their own, Facebook should share access to its internal user reputation scores with developers AND allow developers to contribute their own user reputation “votes” back to the system based on how users behave within their apps.

This may be a little ways off, but it would be a win-win for developers, users, and Facebook. Developers wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel, users would have better app experiences, and Facebook would get more comprehensive user integrity data.

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5 Responses to “Facebook should give developers access to (and votes on) user reputations”

DeyLonn Says:
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm
What a good idea.
I hope it will be used in the right way, not to punish users or as a revenge for a bad review !

Do you know the deadline for this functionnality ?
Jamie (non developer) Says:
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:29 pm
not a developer but read this blog for all the Facebook gossip

Why don’t they not go futher and extend this to ‘application officers’ maybe in a developers world is technical support (developers previledged users equiv to groups officers) or even the developers.

After preparations go onto other spam filling areas (Groups, Pages & Networks) – destinate a few users to be admins for these although the first 2 it should be the creator or current administration team of the page/ group that deals issues if one present)

I Agree – bad and good reviews, bug reports and requests for assistance (wall or message board)and on topic posts should stay but NO to spam and ‘hijacking’ advertisers FB wide who take over networks, fb pages and application’s walls, reviews and discussion boards and leave there cluttered waste behind.

Response if this was developed tho
Happy: FB, Users, developer (team)
Not Happy: Spammers/ Advertisters (but they don’t have rights as all the problems they cause), any member of staff (at fb or places like slide who have tech support staff aside) who could be laid off due to efficency and lack of need for them
Mark Waks Says:
April 4th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Hear, hear! As a developer of a new app that will probably have to deal with spam issues, I would *love* to be able to participate in a larger anti-spam data-pooling project. It would make life much easier for everybody…
Adam Loving Says:
April 5th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Letting users rate each other would also be nice. I think there is an app that allows this, so maybe the should just offer their own API.
Inside Facebook » Facebook Working With App Developers to Weed Out Fake Accounts Says:
October 6th, 2008 at 12:04 am
[...] few months ago we wrote that Facebook should give developers access to (and votes on) user reputations: For developers, spammers and trolls can be just as much a problem as they are for Facebook itself. [...]