Karma lets you link multiple accounts - Airbnb, Facebook, Ebay, Etsy, etc - all to a single reputation profile to verify your good identity across the web. Interesting concept if they can get adoption for it - I would have loved the boost of letting someone see that I get good reviews elsewhere when trying to rent my first Airbnb (it was a long weekend for a large group of 20 somethings & I had no reviews yet).
They also have a Chrome extension that shows you people's Karma scores as you browse the web - the example they use is seeing scores on Craigslist, which would save me so much time & hassle... but assumes other users have opted in to system. The on-boarding actually suggests you ask people on Craigslist & elsewhere to sign up for Karma when doing business with them, which feels like it could work for big things (renting a house) but not so much for smaller ones (selling stuff for $50). Curious what their plans are to get more usage.
@ecetweets SUPER interesting, have had some conversations about this last week. "Who owns the reviews that are about YOU"? --> YOU should :)
Like you said the first time experience is where this will be most applicable, but the biggest obstacle is partnering with these platforms right? There's a similar service with 15M+ people in it - can't come up with the name... :(
Also apologies for not introducing myself @ecetweets. I'm one of the co-founders behind Karma and happy to answer any questions from you and the PH community.
@thegutrbal What strategies are you guys thinking of to gain adoption for this? And how would the extension work for sites like Craigslist where user's email addresses are generally obscured?
@ecetweets Taking the second part first, when someone who has installed the extension posts on Craigslist, the extension will prompt them to link that post to Karma. Then whenever another Karma user sees that post on Craigslist, they will see the original poster's Karma Score. On the other side, let's say you've found a bike you really like on CL but that person isn't using Karma. A "?" will appear next to that post instead of a Karma Score. You can then click on that question mark and the extension will prompt you with your unique invitation code, allowing you to copy and paste it into a Craigslist message saying, "I use Karma in order to make my Craigslist experiences safer, here's my Karma Score. Let me know what yours is once you sign up."
That second bit is one of the things we think about to drive adoption. As we being to scale, the majority of listings in search results of any of the platforms we support will return question marks, but allowing users to easily invite any of those people into the system will begin to turn that around. Think about the Airbnb host that has just received a request from a brand new user; the host can say, "You're interested in my place? Sign up for Karma so your reputation elsewhere can speak for you as a potential Airbnb guest."
One final thought on this matter and related to adoption. It seems as if the providers (hosts on Airbnb, drivers on Lyft, Rabbits on Task Rabbit, etc.) are the ones getting the shorter end of the stick as these platforms grow like wildfire. We believe that Karma can begin shifting that scale back in the provider's favor, allowing them to have their reputation power themselves as they sign onto new platforms going forward.
Very cool! I just signed up. For one small bit of feedback, some of the Facebook analysis content could use a little tweaking - the assessment that "After analyzing your Facebook account, we found: You don't have many friends" seemed a little harsh :).
Thanks @spressto! Completely agree and thanks for catching this. Logged and will fix with the next push. The only excuse I can come up with in the first place is that @mikejstein didn't have his coffee that morning :)
@thegutrbal Haha, sounds good. And no worries. At ~1500 friends I'm not exactly a hermit, so that @mikejstein must be quite a popular guy.
Love the idea again, excited to see how it continues to evolve. Per the comment of @andythegiant happy to have a call sometime to explore how it might work for an online dating use case if it's useful. Cheers!
Thanks for the onboarding comment @andythegiant. We spent A LOT of time on that one.
In regards to online dating, yes we have thought about and discussed it a good deal. While we don't necessarily think it's a good idea to have reviews about dates populate your Karma Score, we do see an ideal application of examining the Karma Scores of potential dates. Say you're being messaged by someone on a dating platform to go out on a blind date; it would be great to know whether that person was a good guest on Airbnb, whether they were a great dog-sitter on DogVacay, etc.
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