I admit the benefits of a large anonymous community for describing, categorizing, and scoring the apps, but I would never delegate high risk decisions to such a thing.
I want somebody who would be hurt (reputation wise) by saying something is safe if it isn’t; somebody with a name or a pseudonym: a permanent identity with a track record.
I believe we’ll come up with ways to store and search a generic triplestore on SAFE in the future, and then we’ll be able to state things like:
- “this is an app description describing this app, and we think it’s cool” – signed by random individual
- “this is an app endorsement saying this app is secure” – signed by famous reviewer most people loves and respects
Our “AppStore” will then not have to be more than a search run against these statements that are floating around the network, created by anybody and everybody. A huge mess, but I think we’re decentralizing so that’s cool.
By the way, reviewers could form groups (e.g. “SAFE Review Magazine” could be a group of people reviewing apps) and, if one’s comfortable with the idea, she could just say “I trust anybody from this group.”