Locked-in reputation
Passport
- Rock
- Human networks
- Depth
- 3 · Drill rig
- Time to dig
- 3–10 years
- Capital
- ○–◐ · medium
- Solo
- ~ partly
- AI
- → eroding
- Rent
- ✗ not for sale
Essence
Reputation a user earned inside a platform — ratings, reviews, statuses, achievements — that does not travel outside and works for the platform. Different from switching costs, where the hostage is data and configuration rather than social capital paid for with years of labour, and from brand, where the trust is in the vendor rather than the market's trust in the user, privatised by the platform. A rare moat built by other people's work and held up by other people's ambition.
How it is built
eBay — the inventor of the mechanic
The feedback score of 1997 turned the trust of strangers into a number — and made the number non-transferable. A seller with 99.8% positive feedback across ten thousand transactions owns an asset that monetises — listing conversion, a price premium — only on eBay: on a new venue they are nobody again. The moat was built by the sellers themselves; the platform only issued the instrument and locked in the result.
Uber and Airbnb — a two-sided rating as a licence to earn
A driver at 4.9 with thousands of trips, a host with Superhost status: the status converts into money — priority in the results, guests willing to book without fear — only inside the platform. The mechanic is subtler than eBay's: the rating is also a tool for managing the quality of the market, so the moat retains the user and offloads the platform's moderation costs at the same time.
Stack Overflow and credit histories — reputation as a work record
Stack Overflow karma is a de facto line in a programmer's CV, but it lives only on Stack Overflow; a credit history does not travel between countries, so an emigrant with an impeccable record at home starts from zero. When reputation becomes part of a professional identity, leaving the platform is a partial amputation of a career.
How it is bypassed
Subsidise the starting reputation
A challenger platform hands newcomers what the incumbent makes them earn over years: TikTok gave creators algorithmic reach with no accumulated following, and YouTube creators whose channels took years got a second audience in months. Challenger marketplaces give defectors a newcomer boost in the rankings and reduced fees. The incumbent's accumulated score is zeroed out by the attacker's generosity — for as long as the attacker can fund it.
Portable reputation
Verifiable credentials, open trust protocols and generations of reputation-passport startups (Traity and its successors) attack the non-transferability itself, and regulators push the same way — open banking already obliges banks to share a customer's history on request. There has been no breakthrough yet: reputation is contextual, a good driver is not a good seller, and so the moat holds. But it is the only moat in the catalogue whose bypass is written into its nature — trust, by definition, wants to be portable.
Inflation and a change in the currency of the signal
Ratings inflate: when everyone is at 4.8 the signal is dead, and the market moves to another currency — a verified portfolio, spot checks of the work, AI assessment of quality instead of a count of reviews. Add multi-homing: professional sellers and hosts have long kept profiles on every venue, so the lock only holds the small. Agent workers add a threat from below — if a platform's agent performs the job, whose reputation is at stake, and who owns it?
Verdict
A moat of privatised market trust: built with two-sided ratings and statuses through which users lock themselves in. Bypassed by subsidising the starting reputation, by portability — so far more declared than delivered — and by the inflation of the signal itself.