“You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.”-Anton Chekhov

Trust. The common issue brought up when discussing peer-to-peer businesses like Craigslist, Ebay, AirBnB, Lyft and Uber.

“Why get into a car with an Uber driver? I don’t know the guy, that’s dangerous.” or “Let someone stay in my house while I’m away? Won’t they go through my things and potentially steal or damage my property?”

Trust has evolved in many ways since the days where you knew everyone in your town and any visitor’s action was watched by the community. A time where your community (village, tribe or town) had your back and you knew everyone and everyone knew you. Homes were shared and multiple generations resided side by side to manage the family and family business. Sure, that still exists in some parts of the world, but it’s rare.

Then, we moved into bigger cities, left our families and we no longer knew the name of the owner of the corner store, the town’s doctor and eventually, any neighbor in your apartment building. We also saw the rise of suburbia, where the bigger our houses and lawns were the more space between our neighbors and not only can they watch in amazement and jealousy at your wealth but also feel as if they can also retreat into their private home without ever engaging with you. Homes filled with mom, dad and 2.5 children.  

At the same time, our options began to increase--more stores, more doctors, more hotels, more people to not get to know. Populations increased, greed and crime increased as everyone strived to survive and the improved communication and press shared all the latest stories of burglaries and murders birthing distrust for your neighbor.

This could be the reason we’ve stepped back from “the” community around us and learned to first and foremost trust our immediate circles. Unless, of course,  the unfamiliar people around us earned our trust. But why bother? Your circle is enough for you. Until you need them.

Until you need an emergency babysitter for your child while you race a family member to the hospital. Or someone to keep an eye out for a delivery you’re expecting. Or a hand moving a piece a furniture or a watchful eye on your property from your neighbor across the street while you’re out of town...the list goes on. Without admitting it, we realized we somewhat need to trust our peers to live our lives.

So, what about peer-to-peer business?

In every scenario mentioned, the common theme is people. Your trust is often dependent on someone else’s trust in this person or group. Referrals and peer recommendations are the most powerful form of influence on your ability to trust. From your hair stylist to your doctor choices, we trust what our peers say.

The future of trust in peer-to-peer is peer group analysis. The moment everyone’s reputation and behavior in various specialized peer-to-peer marketplaces can be verified or vouched for, that is when the trust game will change. When bona fide members of a community or marketplace begin to vouch for other peers, when ratings and reviews of my behavior on a dogsitting marketplace can be shared with a carsharing marketplace, then there is an added level of depth to why you should trust me. When the online community of peer-to-peer marketplace users says you’re trustworthy and this verified over time, then you are trustworthy.

At Near Me, we are building hundreds of peer-to-peer marketplaces and we want to make sure that users of each marketplace are verified, vouched for, reviewed and rated in a way that can be shared with other marketplaces. We think you’re either trustworthy or not. To be trustworthy is not dependent on the type of marketplace but more about the information about a person and the peers within their network and then sharing that across all platforms.

Overall, it’s up to the users to decide if they’d like to trust you. And to us, that’s like putting the power back into the village (or community) just like we, as people, did a long time ago. The best part about that, is most users will do whatever they can to not anger the community, knowing full well that if you treat one person or his or her belongings poorly,  you will be poorly reviewed and potentially lose privileges of participating in such marketplaces.

We’ve come a long way since our small trusted village-like communities. But that doesn’t mean we can’t recreate it online.  And in a way that your trust profile can follow you everywhere.