The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses was just posted in /r/tech/ and there is much hand-wringing about (typically male) taxi drivers having to expend emotional labour being friendly, drivers dealing with unreasonable demands and the new structure of the labour market where customers are the bosses.
Completely omitted from this revolution is of course darknet markets, a phenomenon using the same kind of reputation economy to regulate an industry previously only regulated by sometime-violent organised criminals fighting over turf, peddling variable quality products with no refunds.
But because the economy of the darknet markets are largely unseen, I can mostly only offer anecdotal evidence that this is an empowering paradigm for buyers. As for any negative affects on vendors, well we see that every day as vendors fiercely defend their community reputations (and sometimes attack others) as their reputation in integral to their business. But these battles are with words, reviews, and community engagement, not with violence, extortion or other criminal activity (unless you are Alphabay or a carder of course).
Next time there there is coverage on decentralised reputation economies, I would expect to see the darknet market ecosystem covered fairly and factually, rather than ignored.
I'll write more later b/c this is a topic of interest.
This still happens. The DNMs are retail. They are the nice, Apple Store which hides what happens BEFORE it reaches your vendor in much the same Apple hides how they source their labor and materials. All the consumer sees at Apple are nice, modern aesthetics, beautiful and lust-worthy devices. You don't see what it took to get there. The DNMs do the same. No longer do you have to visit the hood or go to your dealer and make awkward conversation as he counts your money.
While the DNMs have changes the retail side of it, the rest of the industry is unchanged. You still have extraordinary violence, corruption, etc to get that coke, weed, pills, whatever to your mailbox.
I'm not saying this isn't progress. It is. BUT, I don't see it revolutionizing the rest of hte industry in the foreseeable future. I don't see a dent being made along the supply chain beyond the retail side. At the end of the day, we still need cartels with their violence and payoffs to get the drugs to our friendly DNM vendor. This isn't changing anytime soon I don't think. Thoughts?