Join me next Thursday (one-eleven) at the one-eleven Minna gallery in San Francisco to celebrate EFF’s 16th year. From 7 to 10pm. Suggested donation $20. Stop by if you’re at Macworld.

Details at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005055.php

A recent Forbes items pointed to my earlier posts on eBay Feedback so I thought it was time to update them. Note also the eBay tag for all posts on eBay including comments on the new non-feedback rules.

I originally mused about blinding feedback or detecting revenge feedback. It occurs to me there is a far, far simpler solution. If the first party leaves negative feedback, the other party can’t leave feedback at all. Instead, the negative feedback is displayed both in the target’s feedback profile and also in the commenter’s profile as a “negative feedback left.” (I don’t just mean how you can see it in the ‘feedback left for others’ display. I mean it would show up in your own feedback that you left negative feedback on a transaction as a buyer or seller. It would not count in your feedback percentage, but it would display in the list a count of negatives you left, and the text response to the negative made by the other party if any.)

Why? Well, once the first feedbacker leaves a negative, how much information is there, really, in the response feedback? It’s a pretty rare person who, having been given a negative feedback is going to respond with a positive! Far more likely they will not leave any feedback at all if they admit the problem was their fault. Or that they will leave revenge. So if there’s no information, it’s best to leave it out of the equation.

This means you can leave negatives without fear of revenge, but it will be clearly shown to people who look at your profile whether you leave a lot of negatives or not, and they can judge from comments if you are spiteful or really had some problems. This will discourage some negative feedback, since people will not want a more visible reputation of giving lots of negatives. A typical seller will expect to have given a bunch of negatives to deadbeat buyers who didn’t pay, and the comments will show that clearly. If, however, they have an above average number of disputes over little things, that might scare customers off — and perhaps deservedly.

I don’t know if eBay will do this so I’ve been musing that it might be time for somebody to make an independent reputation database for eBay, and tie it in with a plugin like ShortShip. This database could spot revenge feedbacks, note the order of feedbacks, and allow more detailed commentary. Of course if eBay tries to stop it, it has to be a piece of software that does all the eBay fetching from user’s machines rather then a central server.