Docs·4ff474d·Updated Mar 14, 2026·43 ADRs
Back
ADR-043implemented

ADR-043: Three-Score Model — Karma, Personal Trust, and Provider Trust

ADR-043: Three-Score Model — Karma, Personal Trust, and Provider Trust

Status: Implemented Date: 2026-03-04 Author: Core Team

Context

Karmyq users accumulate three distinct reputation signals as they participate on the platform:

  1. Karma — a currency-like score earned by giving and receiving help
  2. Personal Trust Score — a relational reputation within a community (0–100)
  3. Provider Trust Score — a commercial-reliability score for users who register as service providers (0–100)

As the platform grew across two layers (mutual-aid communities + professional services), confusion arose about how these scores relate to each other. Users, designers, and developers asked:

  • Does karma feed into trust?
  • Does a high personal trust score boost your provider trust score?
  • Are these the same number shown in different places?

This ADR establishes the canonical answer: the three scores are intentionally independent and do not feed into each other.

Decision

Score 1 — Karma (Layer 1 currency)

  • What it measures: Accumulated participation value — how much help you've given and received, weighted by community karma configs.
  • How it's earned: Completing matches awards karma to both the helper (60% default split) and the requester (40%).
  • Decay: Exponential decay with a 6-month half-life (ADR-011). Old karma fades; continued participation is rewarded.
  • Stored in: reputation.karma_records
  • Visible to: Community members — displayed on community dashboards and leaderboards.

Score 2 — Personal Trust Score (Layer 1 relational)

  • What it measures: Trustworthiness as a mutual-aid peer within a specific community.
  • Inputs: Interaction frequency (depth), breadth of distinct people helped, and weighted feedback ratings (helpfulness / responsiveness / clarity).
  • Formula: Configurable per community via community_configs (ADR-037). Default: 60% depth, 40% breadth with feedback bonus.
  • Cross-community carry: A decayed fraction (default 40%) of your best score elsewhere can serve as a floor in a new community (ADR-038).
  • Stored in: reputation.trust_scores
  • Visible to: Community members and the community admin dashboard.

Score 3 — Provider Trust Score (Layer 2 commercial reliability)

  • What it measures: Reliability as a professional service provider — whether you show up and complete what you agreed to.
  • Inputs: Average star rating from reviews (60%), completion rate — completed matches / accepted matches (30%), response rate (10%).
  • How completion_rate is updated: The reputation service listens to match_completed events; if the responder has an active provider profile, it recalculates their completion_rate on reputation.provider_trust_scores.
  • Stored in: reputation.provider_trust_scores (one row per provider profile)
  • Visible to: Anyone browsing provider listings (public).

Why the Three Scores Are Independent

Karma ≠ Trust: A community elder with high karma may have earned it all two years ago and been inactive since. A newcomer with low karma may be highly responsive and helpful. Trust captures current behaviour; karma captures accumulated contribution.

Personal Trust ≠ Provider Trust: Being a great mutual-aid neighbour (showing up, being responsive, completing requests) does not automatically make you a reliable professional service provider, and vice versa. The Layer 2 trust score is specifically about commercial-adjacent reliability. Blending them would reward unrelated behaviour.

Provider Trust does not gate community access: A provider trust score of 0 does not exclude you from community participation. A personal trust score of 100 does not lower the bar for provider registration. The gates between layers are one-way and optional (community admins choose whether to surface the provider directory, and can set a minimum personal trust threshold for listing — but that threshold is a hard gate, not a score blend).

Consequences

  • Clarity for users: Each score answers a different question. Docs and UI labels must use the correct name.
  • No cascade bugs: A bug in the provider trust recalculation cannot corrupt personal trust scores or karma.
  • Independent evolution: Each score formula can be changed without affecting the others.
  • Implementation constraint: The reputation service MUST NOT read provider_trust_scores when computing trust_scores, and vice versa.

Related ADRs

  • ADR-011: Reputation Decay (karma half-life)
  • ADR-035: Karma Allocation and Trust Score Strategy
  • ADR-037: Multi-Signal Trust Score
  • ADR-038: Cross-Community Trust Carry
  • ADR-041: Two-Layer Mutual Aid + Services
  • ADR-042: Provider Trust Score