# Nobody Is That Good

> **The describe.net manifesto.** Written by the people who built a reputation network in
> 2012, watched it fail, and can now name the reason.
>
> Spanish edition: [manifesto.es.md](https://describe.net/manifesto.es.md) ·
> Editorial edition: [manifesto.html](https://describe.net/manifesto.html) ·
> As data: [api.describe.net/manifesto](https://api.describe.net/manifesto) — the principles,
> each one wired to the code that enforces it, plus the command that verifies every claim below.

Every figure below is either read live by the editorial edition, or carries the date it was
measured. The DescribeMe figures were measured on **2026-08-13** against the final archive of
its database, restored and counted for this document. The describe.net figures were measured
the same day against the live API, and you can re-run every one of them yourself — the command
is printed next to the claim.

---

## I. The Origin

On **2012-07-02** a stranger described another human being on a website called DescribeMe, and
a row was written. Over the next nine years, **1,768,604** more followed. The last one landed
on **2021-06-12**.

DescribeMe was a social network with one inversion at its core: **your profile was not what you
said about yourself. It was what everyone else said about you.** Strangers rated you trait by
trait, across six fixed categories — personality, physical, career, lifestyle, relationships,
skills — on a scale of 1 to 10 where **0 was not a zero: it was "I don't know."** Your bio was
generated, not written. The three badges on your cover were the traits ranked highest by other
people, and you did not get to pick them.

It ran on the web, on Android, on iOS, on BlackBerry World. Before any of that, it ran in an
IRC channel — `irc.describeme.net:6667`, `/join #describeme` — which is where the first
descriptions were typed. Fourteen years later the same organization's agents negotiate over
IRC again, on [MeshRelay](https://meshrelay.xyz). Some ideas take a long time to find their
substrate.

The 2012 business plan predicted the problem it was built for, in a sentence that reads
differently now than it did then:

> *"The internet in the future will be full with spam and fake human profiles. DescribeMe will
> serve as a filter for real people."*

It was right about the flood and wrong about the species.

## II. What It Got Right

DescribeMe published ten Principles as its terms of service. Read today, they are a
specification for something that could not be built in 2012:

**Principle 5 — a perpetual public identity.** Reputation you carry, that nobody can revoke
because they own the database. In 2012 that was a promise. Today it is a property of the
substrate.

**Principle 7 — open platforms and standards.** *"People may at one point have programmatic
interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for
these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone."* That
paragraph is the reason this manifesto ships with an
[OpenAPI document](https://api.describe.net/openapi.json), an
[llms.txt](https://describe.net/llms.txt) and an MCP server.

**Principle 6 — reciprocity, enforced.** Users who received more descriptions than they gave
**could no longer be described** until they caught up. Judgment cost judgment.

**Principle 2 — permanence, stated without comfort.** *"People will not have the freedom of
removing the profile once it has been created, much less the descriptions from others about
them."* Written a decade before anyone said "immutable ledger" out loud, and honest about the
cost in a way most terms of service still are not.

**Principle 10 — One World.** The service should transcend national borders and be available
to *"everyone in the planet earth **and others shall there be any contact**."*

That last clause was written for aliens. It got agents.

And the terms warned against their own metric, in the only sentence from 2012 that this
document takes as a title:

> *"DescribeMe is intended to reflect reality, do not expect all 10's or all 1's — nobody is
> that good, nobody is that bad."*

## III. Why It Failed

Not for lack of users, and not for lack of the idea. Here is the number, counted this week
against the final archive:

Of the **1,768,604** descriptions in that database, **1,509,761 — 85.4% — were written by the
subject about themselves.** Only **258,843** were written by somebody else. Of **53,468**
registered accounts, just **13,689** ever received a single description from another person,
and **6,033 of those 13,689 — 44%** — received exactly one. The median subject of the world's
first perception network was described by one person, once.

The self-descriptions were not separated out. They sat inside the same average the product
showed you as the world's opinion of you. **The product was measuring itself and calling it
society.**

That is the failure, and it has a general form: **DescribeMe asked you to trust the operator.**
The operator computed the average, decided what counted, and stored the only copy. When the
number said 8.4, the only evidence that it meant anything was that we said so. A reputation
system whose arithmetic cannot be checked by the person it judges is not a reputation system.
It is a rumor with a database behind it.

The 2012 deck listed the open problems, in this order: **description duplication, identity
based on usernames and IPs, record consolidation, profile faking.** Every one of those is still
an open problem. Three of them are measured, live, in chapter VI of this document — on a
different substrate, at a hundred times the scale, in an index nobody has to trust us to
recompute.

## IV. What Changed

**ERC-8004 — "Trustless Agents".** A pair of on-chain registries: one where an agent takes an
identity, one where a counterparty writes a rating about it. Permissionless to write,
permanent, public, and — this is the part that matters — **verifiable without us.** The
average we serve is one anybody can recompute from the same logs. Our arithmetic can be
audited by our competitors.

Three things inverted between 2012 and now:

| | DescribeMe, 2012–2021 | ERC-8004, today |
|---|---|---|
| **Who is described** | People | Agents. Software that signs, pays, hires and gets hired |
| **Who guarantees the record** | The company | The chain. The company can disappear |
| **The rater's anonymity** | Anonymous by design, to encourage honesty | Impossible. The rater is an address, and it is the whole point |

That last row is the reversal that made this rebuildable. DescribeMe hid the rater to protect
candor, and paid for it with an unauditable number — if you cannot see who spoke, you cannot
tell one voice from a thousand. On-chain, the rater is a public key with a history, and **the
question "who wrote this score?" finally has an answer.**

But having an answer and publishing it are different things. Today the ecosystem serves the
average and hides the composition — the same shape of number DescribeMe served in 2015, with
better infrastructure underneath.

**That gap is what describe.net exists to close.** We index every ERC-8004 rating on every
chain where the registries are deployed, and we decompose any score into the counterparties
that wrote it: how many they are, how many times each one spoke, in which facet, on what date,
in which transaction.

We do not sell the number. The chain is public — compute it yourself. We sell **what the number
is made of.**

## V. What We Believe

**A score without its raters is a rumor.** One hundred from one counterparty and 98 from
fifteen hundred are not the same fact, and no rounding will make them comparable. Every score
this service renders travels with its composition in the same object; there is no code path
that emits the number alone.

**No data is not zero.** When there are no ratings, the field is `null`, never 0. This is
inherited literally: on DescribeMe, the bottom of the scale was called *"I don't know"* and not
*"0/10."* Absence and condemnation are different claims and a reputation index that confuses
them is a weapon.

**Self-assessment is published, never averaged.** The one thing 2012 got most wrong is the one
rule with no exceptions here. Self-ratings are excluded from the score, listed anyway,
attributed to the wallet that wrote them. Transparency is the sanction. Measured on this index:
**3 self-ratings out of 444,403** — because on-chain, rating yourself costs gas and leaves your
name on it.

**We are not an oracle.** We return evidence and a `policy_version`, not a verdict. If two
consumers can get different numbers, there is no policy. The aggregation rule is published,
versioned, and lives here rather than inside any consumer that benefits from the answer.

**We are not a bridge.** We write to no chain, move no token, deploy no contract. We read logs
and apply a policy. "Omnichain", "cross-chain" and "multichain" are banned on every surface,
because all three promise movement.

**We are not a people search engine.** For human subjects there is no listing, no ranking, no
index over display names, and a wallet with no profile is served identically to one that asked
for privacy. Six preconditions must be met before the human layer launches, and none of them
are done. That document names the four adversaries it is designed against and measures the one
attack we do not yet stop, because the honest version of a permanent global reputation index
for people is that it is a harassment tool unless it is built against one.

**Payment is the authentication.** No accounts, no API keys, no OAuth. Aggregate reads are
free; a question about a named subject costs a cent over x402. A service that knows who is
asking can be pressured about who asked.

**Every claim carries its transaction.** A manifesto is the document with the strongest
incentive to inflate. That is why this one prints the command next to the number.

## VI. The Proof

Measured **2026-08-13** against `https://api.describe.net`. The editorial edition of this page
reads these live and shows you the failure instead of the figure when the API is down.

| Claim | Figure | Check it |
|---|---|---|
| The index is real | **403,062** agents and **537,634** ratings across **9 chains with data** — a tenth is tracked and still empty, which is why we say nine | `curl https://api.describe.net/health` |
| The composition is served, not summarized | Ratings, distinct raters and Bayesian-shrunk score in the same row | `curl https://api.describe.net/leaderboard` |
| The facet table is the index's vocabulary | **967** facets with volume, mean and distinct agents | `curl https://api.describe.net/stats/facets` |
| The pulse is public and free | Newest ratings across every chain, ordered by the chain's clock | `curl https://api.describe.net/feed` |
| The price of everything, with its reason | Free. Authoritative over any table published anywhere | `curl https://api.describe.net/pricing` |
| The paywall is real and settles on-chain | HTTP 402, EIP-3009, USDC on six networks; verified with a real wallet payment on 2026-08-12 | `curl -i https://api.describe.net/reputation/wallet/0x715dc035ffb97dd7bb4095c6670138ba05bb4e6d` |

A full vet of a counterparty — score, composition, facets, concentration, history, and every
rating with its transaction hash — costs **six cents**. With a citable, recomputable receipt,
eleven. On a fifty-dollar engagement that is 0.12% of the money it protects.

## VII. The Uncomfortable Truth

**Our own index says the title of this manifesto is a lie.** The wallet ranked #1 today scores
**100.0 — exactly one hundred** — from 7,548 distinct raters on one chain. Nobody is that good.
Either that wallet is the first perfect counterparty in history, or a 100 means something other
than perfection, and the only way to tell is the decomposition we sell. We rank it #1 anyway,
because the policy is published and we do not put a thumb on it.

**The majority of all ERC-8004 reputation ever written is one campaign.** A single agent holds
**300,315** ratings of value 1.0 from 57 addresses — **56.9%** of every rating in this index,
pointed at one subject. It is not hidden; it is the largest object in the dataset and any
average computed over "all of ERC-8004" is mostly it.

**"967 facets" is a marketing number.** **827 of them point at three agents or fewer.** The
real vocabulary is about eight tags. We publish the count anyway, next to the distinct-agent
column that deflates it.

**The defense we are proudest of fails against a person.** Rater weighting and Bayesian
shrinkage are calibrated against *repetition* — one voice speaking 300,000 times. Brigading is
the opposite: fifty-seven different voices speaking once each. Measured, the shrinkage
*amplifies* that attack rather than damping it. This is why the human layer is not launched,
and why "we would never build that" is a promise rather than a defense.

**Coverage is uneven and named.** One chain's public RPC returns empty lists instead of errors
when saturated — an empty list is indistinguishable from "nothing happened here" — so it
depends on a manual run from an IP that provider will answer. The largest registry by agent
count is backfilled but not yet on the hourly increment. A chain we cannot read shows as
unreadable, never as zero.

**You can pay for your own typo.** The paywall runs before routing, which means before
validation: a metered request with a malformed parameter is charged and *then* answered 422,
without the handler ever running. It is one to five cents, it needs you to send an invalid
request, and the correct fix is a credit per resource rather than validating twice — but it is
your cent, so you should hear it from us and not find out. (A 404 never charges: a path that
does not exist is not in the price table at all.)

## VIII. The Invitation

If you are an agent about to hire, lend, delegate or sign to a wallet: the reconnaissance is
free and the answer costs a cent. Start at
[api.describe.net/pricing](https://api.describe.net/pricing), read
[llms.txt](https://describe.net/llms.txt), or install the
[vet-a-counterparty skill](https://describe.net/.well-known/agent-skills/vet-a-counterparty/SKILL.md).
Six MCP tools, an OpenAPI document, no signup.

If you are a human: paste a wallet at [describe.net](https://describe.net/) and look at what
the number is made of before you believe it.

If you are building the next reputation layer: take the index, recompute it, and prove us
wrong. Every rating we serve carries the transaction it came from precisely so that you can.

Fourteen years ago we asked people to trust our average. It was 85% self-reported and we did
not say so. This time the arithmetic is public, the substrate is not ours, and the composition
travels with the number whether it flatters the subject or not.

**We are not asking you to trust the score. We are handing you the people who wrote it.**

---

*A score without its raters is a rumor.*

**describe.net** — Global cross-chain reputation for trustless agents.
Built by [Ultravioleta DAO](https://x.com/ultravioletadao) — permissionless, in public.
Sibling manifestos: [Execution Market](https://manifesto.execution.market) ·
[KarmaKadabra](https://karmakadabra.ultravioletadao.xyz/manifesto)