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Insert inflammatory, odious subject here. Or just use that nifty "cut-n-paste" method.Jan 24 '00 Write an essay on this topic.We have all reaped the benefits from the increasing traffic that the Epinions site has received. Not without cost, mind you. There are an alarming number of users at the site that seek only to take what money they can get out of Epinions without contributing anything at all of value to the site. Abuse cannot handle every fraudulent user, due to sheer numbers. Have you seen an increase in the number of completely useless reviews? Posts that simply read "a a a a (repeat until 100 word minimum is met)"? Or reviews that repeat the first sentence or two without any additional content? How about reviews that are exactly the same as other reviews posted by the reviewer in question, save the name of the product? What about the large number of blatantly offensive posts? There are quite a few reviews that present homophobic, racist, sexist or otherwise completely intolerant ideas. Some promote violence-- reviews about baseball bats that are good for cracking a person's head open, or food processors that are good for chopping up disobedient children. Others are supposedly written by minorities-- poor caricatures of what some miscreant thinks the minority in question might sound like in ASCII. What about all those lovely comments? There are quite a few users that take the comments section to mean that we're allowed to openly insult each other. I'll admit to posting the occasional pointy comment. I'm no saint. If you cannot take the time to capitalize or check your spelling it's really going to grate on me when you insult my intelligence. *sigh* I wish we could edit our comments. What about the rise in outright copied work? There are a number of reviewers that have no problem whatsoever with stealing another reviewer's work and passing it off as their own. I strongly doubt that anyone that copies anyone else's work intends to part with those stolen eroyalties. What can be done? You can contact abuse@epinions-inc.com with your concerns. I don't know if it'll do you much good at the moment, considering how swamped the site abuse and customer care staff seem to be right now. The Epinions abuse and customer care folks have done a stellar job of taking care of user concerns up until recently-- but the volume of e-mail that they have to deal with is more than they can promptly handle. You can rate the reviews in question "not recommended", which is almost certain to earn a barrage of like ratings on your own reviews. You might even get a number of nasty comments, or, joy of joys, an angry e-mail or thirteen. A bit counter-productive, isn't it? Especially if what we're trying to do is write the best reviews that we can. Epinions needs to implement some sort of identity verification system, as well as a better way to delete abusive or plagiarized reviews. Why? To keep its existing reviewer base, and to keep the site from sinking into grey, mediocre internet oblivion. I realize that Epinions doesn't want to censor the reviews-- this is supposed to be a site for reading honest opinions of products and services. Reviews written by ordinary people. However, the number of people taking advantage of the Epinions site will destroy the usefulness of the site for the everyday consumer. How useful is it if the first review (hypothetically speaking) of "AOL Server" that I see simply reads, "aol sucks. its a ripof and onlylamerz use aohell. (Repeat until minimum word count is met.)" This is not only a review of the wrong product-- it says nothing of value to the consumer about the product in question. (A note to plagiarists: if you are completely and utterly incapable of typing a paragraph without misspelling a word or five, do not copy someone else's review. I read a review about Yahoo! Companion that mentioned a possible Linux version in the works-- intrigued by this person's writing style, I continued on to their profile. The next piece posted by the reviewer in question would shame most third-graders-- terrible grammar, and an inability to convey a coherent thought in plain text. The Yahoo! review was obviously not written by the same person. pharder wrote the original review.) Epinions could block users with anonymous e-mail addresses (Yahoo, Hotmail, free web-based e-mail domain of your choice) unless the person will verify their identity with a credit card. People under the age of eighteen are not allowed to participate in the eroyalties program. Faking a credit card number is a much more time-consuming endeavor than getting those "user1@hotmail.com" ("user2, user3, user123, user12, user23...) accounts. It's also going to help convince some of these Epinions abusers that a few dollars aren't worth getting caught for credit card fraud. Many of us have already given Epinions our names, addresses, and phone numbers. Social security numbers as well. Epinions requires the least amount of personal information of *any* company that's ever reimbursed me for my efforts. Why not make a form similar to a job application in order to become an Epinions reviewer? Have a separate form that won't ask for payment/tax information, if you never intend to collect eroyalties and only plan on rating reviews. How about disclosing user e-mail addresses with a valid user ID and password? This way, if reviewer_a has a question for reviewer_b, reviewer_a can get in touch with reviewer_b directly. Allow users to hide their e-mail addresses from general view, but not from a valid username/password combination. I'm not even going to discuss the "you read and trust me, I'll read and trust you" nonsense. Continue to cheat the system, and you will lose out in the long run. Some sort of editorial control needs to exist-- the credibility of Epinions as a valuable consumer products/services review website hinges on whether or not the reviews are useful. With that goal in mind, I doubt that a golf ball review that simply reads "ballz" is going to suffice.  |
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