EIP-7: Neutralize Spam Reviews

Summary

Reviews detected by Ethos to be "spam" will have their score impact neutralized. We will start with reviews that indicate they are "review for review" only and the subject and author likely do not know each other.

Motivation

Ethos currently overly rewards leaving reviews for strangers, anticipating a review back ("review-for-review," or "r4r"). Because reviews are free, the perception is there is 'nothing to lose' by doing this. Previous EIPs penalize misplaced reviews. This EIP attempts to remove the benefit of spam reviews.

Specification

While calculating the impact for each review, Ethos will begin to take into account the likelihood that a review is "review-for-review." This will be evaluated as follows:

• Identify all reviews received by an Ethos profile
• Identify how many of those reviews are reciprocated
• The first 10 reciprocated reviews count as normal
• For each non-reciprocated review, one more reciprocated review counts as normal
• All reciprocated reviews after the above count (10 + non-reciprocated) do not contribute towards score

Considerations and Safeguards

Nobody will have score reduced or removed due to this change. It will only set the impact of a review to zero.

Future Considerations

Ethos will continue to monitor and tweak the spam detection algorithm without further EIPs. This will only apply to Review based score impact.