Abstract
This paper discloses a design pattern for abuse prevention in online platforms and shared-fund applications that replaces terms-of-service enforcement, dispute resolution and account termination with disclosure: the conduct to be policed is made visible to the bounded community it affects, and that community's own response is the sanction. Three properties make disclosure work as enforcement: the visibility itself is the mechanism, the response is proportioned by the community rather than by a binary rule, and participants join knowing what will be visible. Two deployments are specified: disclosure to a family of every reward its steward receives from the family's shared fund, and per-member display of storage use within a bounded user community, a display since replaced by a storage rule that needs none. A third, a public ledger of time given and time received per participant, is withdrawn and kept as a negative case. Three conditions of efficacy are stated (a community small enough for social signals to travel, participants with relational or reputational stakes, and a visible baseline against which conduct reads as anomalous) together with a condition of legitimacy: the pattern may render only the non-performance of an obligation the participant actually incurred. The limits are stated: the enforcer is the community, so the guard holds only while the community responds; a bounded, high-stakes community can turn visibility into retaliation; and a complete record of named gifts renders absence by omission.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "Transparency as Enforcement: Anti-Abuse Without Legal Contract Machinery — Community Disclosure in Place of Terms-of-Service Enforcement, Limited to Incurred Obligations", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12043