The H stands for Helpful
Jun 13 '01
The Bottom Line Lighten up. Rate epinions based on the merits of the review as you see it.
Well, here I am. 100 epinions.
As I find myself kicking my leg up toward this particular hurdle, I took some time to reflect on the world of epinions. I noticed a few things. Don't worry, there is an actual 'essay' coming, but I thought I would throw a few of these things at you first.
One thing I noticed is that I haven't written many of these 'essays', and they seem to be the way to go. I noticed that most people I trust (and who are trusted by a lot of people) have a lot of them, and a staggering number of people have given their advice on 'How to choose socks.' I can only manage... Wow!
(I haven't read any of those, by the way, and I don't intend to. Please don't be offended. I'm thirty, and if there's anything left to know about choosing socks, I refuse to know it. I rather pride myself on learning and gaining knowledge for its own sake... hence my ezine..., but on this point I'm just going to have to continue to muddle through as best as I can figure out on my own.)
I also noticed that people don't go back and read your earlier epinions. I try and get to that as much as I can, but I get wrapped up in the new ones a lot. In the past weeks as I have been going through the reviews of the members I trust, I noticed that even those who have hundreds of people trusting them only have 5 or 10 or maybe 20 ratings to their earlier work.
I don't want you to think I'm saying you should visit every single epinion a person has written (I don't really think it's a moral question), but I do find it a little strange.
Now, the final thing I noticed is that people are very touchy about how their epinions are rated. They're also a little weird about how they rate.
One of the keys I think is the word 'helpful'. Now, this may sound strange, but helpful means helpful (not exactly the dictionary definition, but just play along with me here). A long epinion is not necessarily helpful, and a short one is not necessarily unhelpful. Helpful means helpful in making a decision.
Now, let me pause a second here, and explain why I chose this as my particular rant de jour.
Much the same as many of the rants here, mine starts out... I got an email.
My email came from someone that I gave a helpful rating to for an epinion which had a slew of very helpfuls. This, by the way, wasn't someone I trusted, but someone who is trusted by a goodly number of people, and let's say I was looking into trusting them (and I still am, I hold no grudges).
I will say, that the email in question was not, I repeat not, abusive in any way. It was rather condescending, and perhaps a bit immature, but it had an overall tone of being somewhat polite. It was also long. As I read it, I wondered if the person wasn't hoping for a VH, and trying to get in 500 or so words.
This email included general things like... (I'm paraphrasing here) did you see all those people who rated my epinion VH, maybe you should learn how we rate things here. It also included... my epinion had x and y and z and etc, and when an epinion has those things you give it a VH.
Well, I shall consider myself bopped on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
It amazes me that people are so interested in how a person would rate their opinion. Of course, I want to get as many VHs as I can just like anyone else, but I get plenty of Hs and even some SHs. It's everyone's right to rate something as they see fit (as long as they don't go completely mad).
Now, I've done another essay where I touched on some of my ideas on ratings, so I won't thresh through the same field twice. But, I will say, that I look at rating an epinion in terms of helpfulness. Unfortunately (I suppose), that means that sometimes an epinion that has a lot of VHs will get an H from me.
As an example, I'll tell you why I gave the epinion from the email an H. It was a movie review. Now, I will say it had a fairly decent effort. It was of a suitable length to get the automatic VH from a fair number of people. What it didn't have was any analysis of the movie. It had a summary of the plot, and pretty much nothing else.
The key here was the fact that when I got to the end of the review, I found myself asking, "Yes, but should I see it?" A summary of the plot doesn't do anything for me, any more than a review of say a television does anything for me if it merely lists a slew of information from off the side of the packaging. I don't need anyone to read the packaging to me. I need to know if it's a good TV.
By the way, it doesn't help this problem if you include "you should go see this" at the end of your review.
So, maybe I'm guilty. Maybe this is a VH worthy review, but it isn't to me, and it's my rating. A plot summary alone does not help me to know if I want to see the movie. I probably knew most of the general plot to begin with.
Besides, why is everyone so serious? I have read a lot of reviews (since I'm on a movie kick here) which tell you hardly anything about the plot, yet were definitely very helpful in my decision as to whether or not I wanted to see it.
In fact, somewhat spurred on by the train of thought this email caused, I wrote a review of Where the Buffalo Roam. I purposely wrote this review mentioning the plot very little, and really I was rather babbling (it seemed to work in a review of a movie about Hunter Thompson)... I may change it a bit (I won't be offended if you rate it less than VH... honestly, I was just sort of messing around).
Now, as my train of thought derails and I try to carry on without it...
The use of the rating just seems to me to have gone mad. Actually, I haven't been writing reviews here all that long, maybe it was always mad. There are quite a few people I trust that write really good reviews. As I go back through their much older stuff, I find that they have a whole lot of VHs on everything. Absolutely everything. I think if you put it to some of these people they would admit that not everything they have ever written here (especially their first few epinions) was worthy of a VH.
(If you want to see some reviews incredibly worthy of not getting a VH, go back to my first three reviews which I threw up on a moments notice long, long ago. I was really just experimenting, and I have been meaning to rewrite them. Trust me, they are quite bad.)
What's so bad about an H anyway?
H? H?! What are you thinking giving me an H?!
You'd think I shot their dog.
Hs really don't hurt you much people. If your writing is really VH material, it will get many more VHs and you have nothing to worry about. Besides, if you are already fairly popular, you've got plenty of people who will zip through and slap a big VH gold star on your epinion after skimming down to see how long it is.
So, is their any advice in this rant?
Of course!
First of all, lighten up. If you get a rating other than a VH and it bothers you, ask me why I gave it to you. I'll tell you. Even if it doesn't bother you, and you just want some insight about your rating. But, really, apart from the possible constructive criticism side, why do you care? My rating is just my opinion of your opinion. What's my opinion to you.
If you write well, you will get good ratings. It may not sound like it, but I am pretty easy to get a VH out of. Did you make an honest effort, and did your epinion give me some information that would help in my decision. That's about the criteria. But you know, there are some people here who write excellent epinions, and if everyone gets the automatic VH for everything, then the VH doesn't mean much when the really good people get it.
My advice is to rate what you really think, and not just what the 87 people who got there ahead of you rated. Come up with some criteria for rating things other than, 'well, this is pretty long.'
Now, my one final point. There seems to be a general attitude here about rating people who are in your WOT. Whether it be that the person trusts you or you trust them, there seem to be a lot of people who think that means there better be VHs all around.
That's crazy talk if you ask me. I trust you (or you trust me) so now everything you do is good? Nonsense. If there is any chance that I might get an email in the future with that sort of reasoning involved, I would really much prefer you not trust me now and get it over with. Or, let me know who you are, and I will stop trusting you.
Certainly there is a good chance that I am going to rate your epinion with a VH (else I wouldn't have trusted you), but I'm not obligated to do so.
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Epinions.com ID:
Vormancian
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: Marc Eastman
Location: Bangor,ME
Reviews written: 330
Trusted by: 352 members
About Me:
Evangeline Sylvan Betty Eastman. AKA "Cricket" 9/12/06
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