blog post #7 vincent davis

I am a member of an online community of artists, musicians, and designers called Look Book (http://lookbook.nu). It is an ‘invite only’ website where people can garner free exposure for their clothing design and/or photography and showcase their personal style, essentially a ‘hot or not’ for artists and entertainers where they can post pictures of themselves and the clothes they wear. The Look Book community is actually already maintained through a surprisingly structured reputation system.

Trust is important to LookBook because thousands of people from across the globe put themselves in a vulnerable position when placing a picture of themselves/their outfits in a public forum to be critiqued. The makers of look book wanted the site To “bring together diverse, aesthetically talented and open-minded people around the world and showcase the best in international street fashion” users are encouraged to post their own ‘looks’, but also comment on other users’ style and help vote for which members will appear on the front page of the site at any give time through voting for, or ‘hyping’ that person’s look. Look Book thrives because users are held responsible for their photo-posts, comments, and ratings; the combination of the number of individual posts makes, the number of comments they give/receive on looks, and voting for or ‘hyping’ someone’s post, the combination of all of those factors translates into the users ‘Karma Score’.

A Look Book user is rewarded for their ‘good behavior’ with a good Karma Score, every LOOKBOOK.nu user affects one another's karma equally, and this is how members reward each other for posting looks that are stylish, unique, and interesting. The front page of the site shows the most popular outfits posted throughout the day, the default setting organizes the rankings by combining how many votes or ‘hype’s a look has received with the Karma score of the user who posted it. Being featured on the front page is essentially the goal of every user, it allows one to promote their website/boutique/design firm, etc as well as obtain their 15 minutes of e-‘fame’.

It is very difficult to manipulate the current system because every member’s activity is influenced to a large extent by the actions of other members of the community. A member of the community can only ‘hype’ a particular look once which stops people from artificially ‘hyping’ themselves to the front page.