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I've seen some good, but these days, Its been very badJun 12 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Please Epinions, I beg you, address some of your problems, the community is supporting you, it's all up to YOU.
Being my 50th opinion, I decided to write on my experience over the past year (and a couple of months) at Epinions.com . I have not used epinions throughout this entire period, I have started, stopped, started again, stopped again, but now, I have returned to this community. Epinions.com to me is a place where I can practice my writing skills (if I have any), share what knowledge I have and make a little bit of pocket cash. Over the past year, I have seen a couple of things happening, some good, most bad. Epinions.com as a Consumer Resource site The purpose of Epinions.com is to provide consumers with reviews of products by other consumers. I am not quite sure if it is entirely successful. I would like to know the numbers of people who ACTUALLY just come to epinions to get reviews on products. The entire Epinions community if very twisted. I am very unsure that the average person can wonder to this site and get good information. Epinions is not that user friendly as it appears. There are so many problems with this site. From the continuous downtime to the duplicate product listing, it’s sometimes frustrating to receive sound advice. Even after the consumer finds the product, the entire “ Rating “ system (And Trust system too) is not exactly that effective as it should be. The opinions at the top of the product categories are not exactly the best. They are supposed to be, but they are not. I see many of the “ Old timers “ here say that if you write good opinions, you will do well. This is not really true. It depends on how many friends your have on Epinions that determines how well you do. Let’s do Scenario 1. This is an almost true example that happens everyday. Nonameepinioner writes an epinion on a game, his opinion is fantastic, well over 2000 words, truly detailed, extremely helpful. He is lucky to get about 30 very helpful rates. Then someone like Ptiemann, you all know him, the guy with over 2000 people trusting him (including me) writes an opinion on the same game. The opinion is about 500 words, its somewhat detailed, good enough to get/scrape a Very Helpful rating. Because he is Ptiemann, he has a following, and well over 100 persons will immediately rate his opinion. Instantly his opinions soars to the top of the category and passes Nonameepinioner’s opinion. I do not intend to bash Ptiemann, he writes great opinions, that’s why I trust him, I’m just using his name as an example. From that scenario, we can clearly see that since Ptiemann has writing some great opinions in the past, if now he writes are very simple opinion which can scrape with a Very Helpful rating, he can instantly get his opinion up the ranks in the category. Now you could say this is fair, because he built a name for himself, his opinions are now first. But then again, is it fair to the person who just arrives to the site looking for sound advice? No it isn’t. They go to the product’s site, visit the first opinion, the most rated opinion, which is really not the best opinion. To find the best opinion on the majority of products on epinions, you need to get the list of all the epinions on the product and find the ones in the middle of the Very Helpful batch. Is this an effective system? Besides that problem, I wonder how Epinions.com gets its name out as the place to get consumer information. I read on their company information area, that they really depend on word of mouth. Well, I know word of mouth is a very good way of getting your name out there, but I question some of their previous decisions. Instead of their 30cents/visit introductory eroyalties rate in the earlier days, which everyone knows for a fact probably drained a lot of their venture capital funds, why didn’t they spend that money on advertising, like a TV ad or something so. I for one believe Epinions should be trying to get partnerships. Partnerships that drive consumer TO the site, not away from it. I believe Epinions should be trying to make a deal with CNET or ZDNET where those megasites will link to epinions. Epinions is a good idea, but I am very optimistic at how they will achieve profitability. The Abuse I read in many of the chat scripts where people were asking about the abuse problems and the CEO simple answered that abuse doesn’t cost that much and its not that big of an issue as we consider it to be. I think he’s just playing it down. The multitude of duplicate accounts, stupid reviews and things like that cost quite a bit of money. If you check the just in page, sometimes a half of the reviews are Helpful or Very Helpful, and many times even less. I see that as a big problem. And its very easy to solve. We, the community have already provided them with all the information they need to get rid of abuse, because we see it first. For e.g., on June 08, a real waste of epinion’s space, howdymaam wrote about 17 opinions. Visit his profile and see his opinions, this is clearly stupidness, he deserves to be deleted pronto. I reported the abuse on June 08, I actually reported the abuse after he wrote his 10th opinion. Its June 12th, I see no ticket, no nothing. Did they do anything yet? I doubt it. How hard is it to look at his profile and issue the tickets. Less than 5 minutes of work. I am quite sure many more people than me also reported him, they have the information, why don’t they do something about it! The Downtime When is the last time have we seen the site status saying that everything is working properly, its been a while. I understand that there has been job cuts, but little things can prevent these problems from happening. One of the biggest mess ups I think they do is running the maintenance on the Thursday at 6:00pm PDT. Now, Epinions basically serves the United States, so this should be the guide used when running maintenance. Lets look at this logically. When Epinions goes down at 6:00pm in California, it is also going down at 9:00pm in Miami. Why do the run maintenance during PEAK TIME? Is this how they cut costs by saving themselves bringing workers in late at night? So they inconvenience all their users during peak times? Maybe they should change their motto to: “Before you buy anything, Make an Informed decision, 6 days a week “ Well, this is a VERY bad decision. Lets see this, if they run the maintenance at 12:00am PDT and the sites is down for 1 hour, that means that California would be affected from 12:00am – 1:00am and Miami would be affected from 3:00am to 4:00am. Don’t you think that makes more sense? Most services try to do their maintenance during NON peak times. Epinions seems to be attempting to do their maintenance during the heaviest of peak times. Why? I don’t want to imagine. These are just some of my thoughts on current issues affecting Epinions. You may have different thoughts than me, but I just wanted to let my voice be heard.  |
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