Prance Around E-Minions, Prance!
Aug 08 '01
The Bottom Line Blah.
Some suggestions that probably won’t be liked...
(By the way this isn’t going to be a formal essay)
Now I don’t know if these have been brought up before, but then again to be perfectly frank, I don’t care. I’m not apologizing for speaking my mind. I've had enough of trying to walk on egg shells around the people here. These essays are not even a dime a dozen, they’re a penny. Actually no ,no they aren’t even that, so I doubt you can whine about this even being abuse...
That brings me up to this subject I keep hearing whenever I decide to login to Epinions, you read it in articles, you read it in profiles, you read it in angry emails.. it seems the natives are restless. This essay isn’t going to analyze why people abuse the system, or even what abuse is, as to be even franker, I don’t give a damn. But I do have a solution for it.
Negative E-credits.
What’s the current system? You get a penny per rating? And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been Highly Helpful to Some what Helpful as long as someone’s rated you, you get that shinny copper. This doesn’t seem very fair, what then is the incentive of trying to be truly helpful if you can write half as much and still get the coin? Why should I try so hard to get a HH and write twice as much as other people who get it anyways just because they’re on some list?
Yeah sure, its because people will trust you, because you’ll look better in the epinion community, bla bla bla bla bla, lets just cut the b/s here.
This only works for the good majority of people, who :
A) Fall into some clique with other Epinionators. Such as the Mommy circles, Grandmother groups, Nazi Rubber Stamper Police, and all the other cliché stereotypes one can think of. If you can fit yourself into some category and bond with these people you’ll do well even if you write mostly garbage.
B) Have a gimmick, the loudmouths, the smart asses, people who normally you’d love to slap, some how achieve great literary merit at this site. If you can fake enough originality, you’re bound to get some readers.
C) Are so average, that’s your thoughts are just accepted for their mediocrity. Ie. Socially Acceptable
D) And lastly the truly talented, though to be honest, I haven’t seen that many on here.
So if you don’t fit into one or all of these categories, like I don’t, you’re pretty much screwed. That brought me to thinking about the truly bad epinions I’ve read and how I would un-mercilessly deal with them.
Negative ratings equal negative credits, yeah you heard me right. This is what I mean:
Not Helpful= (-2) credits
Somewhat Helpful= (1/2) credit
Helpful= 1 credit
Highly Helpful= 2 credits (or cents)
Now this isn’t perfect, but I think it’s a little better then the exact same reward for every type of opinion. If this is a consumer products site, meant to help me purchase some type of goods, then I want the Not Helpful opinions to be punished for wasting my time. The Somewhat Helpful opinions would basically count as half, the Helpful would get the full credit and the Highly Helpful would have that extra nod it deserves.
If you wrote garbage and received a Not Helpful, then you’d be in the hole the 2 credits, meaning if you continued receiving Not Helpful’s the amount of positive reviews you’d have to write to get out of the negative would grow. That way the true abusers who just write a few lines then proceed to fill the rest with gibberish, would not be making any money on this site period. The ones, who laugh because just as long as the opinion is rated they make something, wouldn’t have much to laugh at any longer.
Of course this could make revenge rating more painful, but if a person has received a majority of H/H’s then this shouldn’t be that tragic. Perhaps if a writer received enough N/H’s then they would be penalized with the loss of the ability to rate other reviews.
Check off list before hitting the H/H button
Another thing I find frustrating is the lack of common rating systems, so what I think would be helpful is if you choose to rate a review, a page containing a list should pop up and based on the things you check off a rating between Not Helpful and Highly Helpful should be averaged out automatically by the variables you’ve selected in that review. It’d at least slow down the rubber stampers or even better yet the accusations issued from the self appointed Epinions police force. It would provide some justification to why this person has viewed your review in this manner.
Rating Reviewers themselves
If you’ve ever been to a site like ebay, then you know what I’m talking about. Personally I don’t like the web of trust, sure its helpful, but its also flawed.
It does not work for everyone, I’ve seen writers who write very well but their opinion is not widely accepted and they have written over 60 opinions and still only have maybe 4 people trusting them. It’s the curse of the clique again. Lets be honest once again, some people have large WOT’s and large lists of people who trust them, yes some of them deserve it, but a good percentage have either milked the outside club sites or mailing lists.
What would be better I think, is if on each member’s profile, there is a way of rating this person in the community. Now by that I mean as how helpful, and truthful they are, not by whether or not we like this person or if they are our friends. What I would like to see is out of a scale of perhaps 5 stars, what this person rates as with the average being worked out in the end. Plus the ability to leave comments there about the individual in their profiles which would serve to report abuse or faulty information. Or since this site is supposed to be about providing info about products, there should at least be a section saying if the reviewer has swayed people into buying or not buying a certain product. That way instead of waiting for epinions to deal with these reports, everyone could see what this person has done and then based on their rank/ and rating decide to trust them or not. Sort of like a guest book of shame or fame.
Yes this is a lot more work, but I think from the general feeling I get from the epinions community, most people truly care.
Instead of advisors, reward the individuals who do well here with higher ranks, that way everyone has the opportunity if they write well and informative articles of achieving something. I’m not comfortable with the idea of even the term of Advisor on the net. Sure a lot of these people who achieve this rank are informed about the subject they’ve chosen to review, but I would under no circumstance ever label them advisor. They’d have to get a lot more personal then that. If epinions was anal enough to change the wording of recommeneded to helpful, this isn't that much different. Plus, one would have to take into consideration, that what you consider very helpful others and I may not. I find the current system far too generalized.
I want out: Or the ability to donate the credits to charity
This is perhaps what has bothered me the most, if you don’t live in the States you have to earn 100 dollars just to get the check sent, now for the average mediocre reviewer such as myself...reaching 100 dollars will take forever. Frankly I’ve been here over a year and have just barely reached the 18 dollar mark. Now this has been through a lot of hard work and stress, and I’m defiantly beginning to think its not worth it, yes I could just leave and forget about the petty change sitting in my account, but I’ve worked far too hard just to get there. What I would like to see is the ability on epinions to donate this money to charity, that way this wouldn’t have been just a waste. Perhaps once a month for people deciding to get the hell out of here, there could be a day where all of the points that they don’t want could be dumped into an account which has been set up for maybe the s.p.c.a or some similar organization.
Anyhow these are just some thoughts, maybe not particularly well thought out ones, but just some of the more palatable ones I’ve mulled over.
(gurgle)
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Epinions.com ID:
MagickCat
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Location: Canada
Reviews written: 44
Trusted by: 10 members
About Me:
[Snow Miser]
That's right!
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