Trust and Karma: Three Scores Explained
Trust and Karma: Three Scores Explained
Karmyq tracks three reputation signals as you participate on the platform. They look similar on the surface, but each measures something distinct. They do not feed into each other — by design.
The Three Scores at a Glance
| Score | Layer | What it measures | Who can see it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Karma | Community (Layer 1) | Accumulated contribution — how much help you've given and received | Community members |
| Personal Trust | Community (Layer 1) | Current trustworthiness as a mutual-aid peer | Community members and admins |
| Provider Trust | Services (Layer 2) | Reliability as a professional service provider | Anyone browsing providers (public) |
Karma — The Community Currency
Karma is the unit of exchange within mutual-aid communities. When a match completes, both the helper and the requester earn karma points from a shared pool. The split is configurable per community (typically 60% to the helper, 40% to the requester).
Karma decays over time with a 6-month half-life. This means recent contributions count more than old ones. A member who helped ten neighbours last month has more active karma than one who helped ten neighbours three years ago — even if their raw totals are the same.
Karma answers: How much have you contributed to this community, recently?
Personal Trust Score — Relational Reputation
Your personal trust score (0–100) reflects how much your community peers trust you as a mutual-aid partner. It's computed from:
- Depth: How many interactions you've completed in the last 12 months
- Breadth: How many distinct people you've helped or been helped by
- Feedback: Weighted average of helpfulness, responsiveness, and clarity ratings
The score is community-specific — you may have different trust scores in different communities, reflecting different participation levels. A cross-community carry system gives you a starting floor in a new community based on a decayed fraction of your best score elsewhere.
Personal trust answers: How reliably do you show up for your neighbours right now?
Provider Trust Score — Commercial Reliability
If you register as a service provider (rides, trade work, tutoring, etc.), you earn a separate provider trust score. This is public-facing and tracks:
- Star ratings from post-match reviews (60% of the score)
- Completion rate — the share of accepted requests you followed through on (30%)
- Response rate — how quickly you respond to enquiries (10%)
Completion rate is updated automatically every time a match you were part of completes. Provider trust is specific to your provider profile, not your community membership.
Provider trust answers: Can I rely on this person to deliver a service they've committed to?
Why They Don't Blend
You might expect a high personal trust score to boost your provider trust, or vice versa. We deliberately keep them separate:
- A community elder with years of mutual aid may have low provider trust because they're a new driver with few reviews.
- A highly-rated professional provider may have low personal trust in a community they recently joined.
- Blending the scores would penalise the wrong people and reward unrelated behaviour.
Each score answers a specific question. Mixing them would make all three answers less accurate.
Related
- Neighborhood Service Layer — how Layer 2 provider services work
- ADR-043: Three-Score Model — the technical decision record
Living Trust Models
Trust parameters are initial values, not permanent settings. Members can opt in to automatic calibration — their model adjusts gradually based on what actually happens in their exchanges. The goal is accuracy: a model that reflects lived experience, in whatever direction that experience points.
Your numbers are yours (Reputation Disclosure Boundary)
As of Sprint 112 (ADR-082), your exact reputation is self-only. The platform standardizes on two self-facing terms:
- Reputation score — the canonical 0–100 score, shown with your tier and the community it's scoped to.
- Current karma — your community-scoped karma after decay, shown with the decay half-life.
You can always see your own Reputation score, Current karma, and recent activity (last 30 days). What
you cannot see is another ordinary member's exact numbers — not in the belonging graph, not on a
trust card, not in invitations, governance, or community exports. Those surfaces show belonging
structure and a qualitative relationship state (strong · warm · fading · nearly forgotten),
never another person's score.
Two deliberate, clearly-labelled exceptions remain public:
- Provider rating — a service provider's stars, completion rate, and provider trust score describe an opted-in service role, not a person's private mutual-aid reputation.
- Community health — non-identifying community aggregates (only when at least five members keep them from being traced back to an individual).
Karmyq can show how people are connected; it does not turn members into public scores.