Dfinity rating system

From official sources we know that Dfinity offers reversed gas consumption model. Gas is paid by the dapp maintainer instead of individual users.
For me, this is a great decision that will play a huge role in technology adoption by public. But Dfinity team is not the first one which made this decision. For example, there is a Gas Station Network pattern for Ethereum that offers the same paradigm.
Such apps (which pay for their users’ actions) should somehow implement spam protection to resist intentional gas waste by “hackers”. GSN guys suggest to implement rating system. If the user behaves badly, the app just lowers her rating and the user is unable to send more transactions until she proves her loyalty again.

What’s Dfinitys take on this problem?

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That’s an interesting conundrum here. I suppose it’s fair to give the user a ‘karma’ based system. But how would one ‘prove their loyalty’? And is that process mutable? Can it be decided? Who decides?

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It can be absolutely app specific.
Let’s suppose we have a distributed twitter.
When you create 10 posts per second (for example) - it’s definitely a bad behavior that can be detected automatically and you lose karma.
When you create a post that is liked by many other big karma users - it’s a good behavior and you restore karma.

Anyway, my question was about Dfinitys approach on this.

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Good points, and good questions. I think there are multiple layers to this and I don’t know how/if Dfinity themselves can do this. Maybe the developers of the open system you’re referring to can put protocols in place to do exactly what you’ve just said. But a lot of thought would have to go into what’s ‘good’. Because if it’s trivial, it could cause individuals to illegitimately achieve ‘good’ status e.g. getting lots of friends to upvote them constantly regardless etc.

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I agree with you - this is the complex topic to discuss, and this karma rules should be applied very carefully.
One of the solutions could be the next principle: loss fast, gain slow. There is nothing wrong with a good person receiving lots of likes from her fans (in fact this is how we and social media work), but a popular person never would execute a spam script to destabilize the service she use. So the punishment can hit very hard almost zeroing months of gaining karma.

This karma paradigm is also hard to implement because it needs some kind of sybil protection to present on the service.

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It is also useful to note that by ‘bad’ or ‘good’ actions the developers of such a service should understand only actions which do abuse or do not abuse service’s gas usage. If one behaves normally and just use as much resources as normal people do (e.g. 100 txn/day limit) - this is fine. Problems start when one exceeds her daily limit.

Now I rethought my own message and the concept of daily txn (or more transparent - daily gas usage) limit seems very suitable for me. It also lets the developers to predict maximum gas usage and make assumptions on service’s monthly costs and other budget-related stuff.

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