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Why being an Advisor didn't mean much to me, and reflections on the new titlesOct 19 '01 (Updated Oct 21 '01) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line I was an Advisor once and never even managed to impress myself with that title, much less see others gape in awe. Are the new titles really more significant?
Opinion #100! It seems a good time to reflect on the state of the Epinions union, sharing with you some of my experiences as an Advisor for six weeks and what I learned from it, followed by some comments on why I have serious doubts about the importance of the new titles that recently materialized on the scene. Early March, 2001: I create an account here on Epinions and start posting book reviews to see if anyone even notices my existence. If not, I would have left in a hurry. With the exception of a few essays on topics found in the Member Center (this is the fifth), and comments on other people's opinions, I have posted nothing but book reviews since my arrival. Late June, 2001: I look in my Inbox and discover that I've been given advance notice of my promotion to Advisor in Books, to be announced in a few days along with the other results of the latest Advisor Selection. Mid-August, 2001: I look in my Inbox and discover that I've been given advance notice of the forthcoming shift from "Advisors" to the twin roles of "Top Reviewers" and "Editors" in each category. I am told that I may or may not qualify for one of those titles. A couple of days later I receive a related form letter which tells me that I didn't make the cut for either of those lofty positions, for one or more of the following reasons: (It then provided such a long list of possible factors in the decision that I still don't know exactly what I had failed to do properly in order to stay on as a Top Reviewer - why I wasn't an Editor was a bit easier to figure out). Pop Quiz, class! Please evaluate the credibility of the following statements regarding my reactions to the "promotion" to Advisor, and then the "demotion" as I lost the job again. Promotion: "When I learned that in four short months I had scaled the heights and qualified as an Advisor in books, I was overwhelmed with joy! At last, I knew, I would get some respect around here! My average royalties on my future opinions would go through the roof now that people take me seriously! Other people would kowtow to me! And now that I had gained the mighty rank of an Advisor, I would surely be able to keep it indefinitely as long as I managed to keep cranking out a certain number of high-quality book reviews which were well received by dozens of people! It was a dream come true! I invited my friends and family over for a big party in real life in order to properly celebrate this momentous occasion that meant I Had Finally Arrived!" Demotion: "When I learned that the title of Advisor had been mercilessly stripped away from my Profile without being replaced by Top Reviewer, I burst into bitter tears. I felt as if I had been cast out of Heaven? What did I do wrong, I cried? People will spit on me (figuratively speaking) now that I've been disgraced in this fashion! I'd better leave the site as quickly as possible and not come back for at least six months, by which time they may have forgotten I was ever an Advisor at all and won't tease me unmercifully about my fall from grace!" So: Did you believe any of that represented my real thoughts and deeds at the time? If the answer is Yes, you've still got a lot to learn about the way this site works. Not to mention the way my mind works. Let's try a different set of possibilities for how I reacted to the good news and the bad news. Promotion: "When I saw that the roulette wheel had spun to my name in the Advisor Selection process, I was quite startled. I thought I had done less book reviews during June than I had done prior to the previous selection, for instance, and yet that one had not mentioned my name. Well, I said to myself, I might as well take it while I can get it. After all, it's conceivable that this means I will actually end up collecting a bit more money from each new opinion now that I have that eye-catching Advisor title on my profile, although in four months here I've observed precious little evidence that it actually works that way, and there's scarcely any other reason to look forward to being an Advisor." Demotion: "So the publication of about 18 book reviews during my six weeks of Advisorship, nearly all of them well-received by dozens of people (with an average in the neighborhood of 50+), wasn't sufficient to qualify me as a Top Reviewer under the new rules. I wonder why not? Let's take a look at this long list of factors that might have tilted the scales against me. Hmmm . . . two or three things that seem slightly likelier than the rest, but since they give absolutely no specifics (such as just how many people need to be Trusting you, or rating VH on your latest reviews) I really don't know what made the difference. I only know that somewhere along the line a computer crunched some unknown numbers according to an unknown formula and rejected me. On the plus side, since I didn't notice my average number of hits per review showing any increase whatsoever during my six weeks as an Advisor, the sudden disappearance of that title isn't going to hurt me in the pocketbook. That being the case, I think I can laugh off the sudden disappearance of the word Advisor from my Profile, since I'm none too sure that anyone else ever knew or cared that it was there in the first place (and it's hard to see why they should have cared!)." Do you think that adequately describes my real reactions to each email? If your answer is No, lorendiac couldn't possibly have been that casual about it, you apparently have a very romanticized idea of just how much good it was in practical terms to be an Advisor in Books. (The realistic attitude could be summarized thus: "You're an Advisor? So what? *YAWN*") That second set of reactions is actually the real thing. My self-esteem did not skyrocket the first time and did not collapse like a punctured balloon six weeks later. Becoming an Advisor did not retroactively make my past book reviews better than they had previously been, it did not mean that anything I did while I had the title was "obviously" superior to anything I had done before - nor that I got soft and lazy and started giving less attention to detail now that I had "arrived", and likewise my quality did not take a sudden nose dive when the title was stripped away and I was now just one more commoner in the rank and file, writing book reviews without receiving any special recognition for them. I have stayed exactly the same person all along, and I know it. And my well-established regular readers know it, since I didn't notice them deserting me in droves when the title went up in smoke, as if I were no longer worthy of them. Let's discuss some of the happy perks I was officially supposed to enjoy during my tenure as an Advisor in Books. A very short list, actually. 1) I was supposed to enjoy a higher "weighting" when there were several reviews on a single book, with mine being one of them. Problem: I already had a long-standing policy of not posting a review on a book unless mine was the first review, or else unless I had established enough of a following to make it virtually certain that my review would end up with more VH ratings than any other review on the same product, thus giving me a high chance of being the first to catch the eye of any non-member who happened to come along later and start reading online reviews of a particular volume. 2) The ratings which I placed on other people's opinions in the Books category were supposed to carry extra weight. Problem: I have discovered that in the vast majority of cases, my rating tends to be the same as the general consensus of all the other ratings, meaning that whatever I put down doesn't significantly alter the average rating of that particular opinion. I do not hesitate to put "Helpful" on a review that five other people said was "Very Helpful" if that's my honest opinion (or any other disagreement with the "conventional wisdom" whether it means my rating is higher or lower than the norm) but it doesn't happen very often and even when it does, why should I really care? I don't get any more pleasure out of bestowing a triple-weighted SH rating (or whatever the weighting was) than I do in bestowing a normal-weighted SH rating when I've just perused a piece of SH-deserving material. The other things that were described as being part of the Advisor role did not strike me as carrying any real benefit for me at all. For example, I was supposed to read and rate a variety of reviews and perhaps add helpful comments occasionally, but I had already been doing that anyway, and not just on the off chance that it would snare the title of Advisor for me. There was one subgroup within the larger Advisor group that I thought might actually be beneficial to join, but I was aware that this hope could be a pipe dream: Featured Members. Whenever I connected to the "front page" of the Books section, there would be the picture of a featured Reviewer in Books staring back at me and links to some of her pieces. Many's the time in my first few months here that I wondered if being one of their august number would actually cause a perceptible increase in the average number of hits on each of my book reviews. But when I became an Advisor, I learned that to be a Featured Member I had to have a photo of myself posted in my Profile. I had never worried about that before. Accordingly, a few days later I found opportunity at a family gathering (4th of July, you know) to ask my dad to snap a few shots of me with his handy digital camera and later email the results to me. He obligingly did so, and I posted a shot of myself on my Profile and then filled out the application to be a Featured Member. Five weeks went by without any feedback on my application, and I suspected that they only updated Featured Member listings at the same time they updated Advisor Selections, say, once every month or two. Then Advisors ceased to exist, so I had wasted my dad's time for nothing. I've only left that picture up there because if I took it down now, I might conceivably be expected to put it back up again someday if by luck of the draw I was being considered for Top Reviewer. (Does Epinions still require the titled aristocracy have pictures up in their profiles? I haven't checked.) I definitely don't consider my face to be the strong selling point that will lure dozens of people into reading my opinions when they otherwise wouldn't have bothered - all right, all right, I see you all nodding your heads in fervent agreement! You can cut that out now! :) "Advisors who are also Featured Members" seem to have been replaced by Top Reviewers. Since I've never been either one, I don't know if I would have seen any material benefits if my face and a randomly selected product review occasionally popped up on someone's screen. Possibly I never will, unless I win the spin of the roulette wheel again without even knowing what I was supposed to do to make the short list of candidates. Let's sum up: Being an Advisor did not cause me to get more hits on my new opinions. Also, being an Advisor did not cause me to get bigger Income Share (as far as I could tell - Income Share is a weird subject). Being an Advisor did not give me the ability to do anything really useful for the Epinions site which I had not previously been able and willing to do. Being an Advisor did cause me to waste a bit of time posting a photo of myself for reasons which soon evaporated. In other words, in material terms, the net benefits to myself from my six-week tenure as an Advisor were . . . absolutely nothing. Losing the title did not cause an immediate reduction in my average revenues from new opinions. Losing the title did not remove any really useful privilege which I had previously possessed. The reasons I lost the title without being carried over as a Top Reviewer were not actually explained to me in any meaningful way. (The receipt of a silly form letter for all ex-Advisors at the time of the change, listing a long variety of factors, any of which might have been among the factors that caused me personally to stop being one of the titled aristocracy, did not constitute a meaningful personal explanation in any way, since it left me with no clear idea of just what I was supposed to do differently in the future if I wanted to regain a title.) The net impact of the "demotion" was . . . absolutely nothing. So the title of Advisor proved to be utterly meaningless from any practical perspective. It was, however, an empty status symbol. So empty that if memory serves, in the six weeks I possessed that symbol I never once bragged about it, nor did I even refer to it in any context whatsoever, since I knew it didn't really prove anything praiseworthy about my abilities and good character. If I had mentioned it, it would have been done very cynically rather than as braggadocio. If being a Top Reviewer is any more desireable than being an Advisor once was, I haven't noticed any clear-cut evidence yet. The presence or absence of that title has never had the slightest impact in whether or not I add any particular person to my Web of Trust, for instance. I admit that I am speaking as an "outsider" on that issue since I have never yet been a Top Reviewer, but I'd be interested if any Top Reviewers reading this opinion have actually noticed their average number of royalties per opinion showing a sharp rise since their promotion two months ago, and want to share that with me so that I know the title is actually good for something! I'll probably faint from the shock, but I'd recover eventually and be glad for the enlightenment! However, I didn't just write this opinion to let you hear me maunder on about the good old days (which were actually pretty pathetic in this case). The thing is, before I had been here two months I had an idea of what an Advisor ought to be able to do for the title to really mean anything, and that could easily be applied to what Editors ought to be able to do today. Here was my wish list for an Advisor's Powers: 1. Add new products to his category's section of the database, by inserting the ISBN number for instance, as I understand was once possible on this site. It's a cinch that the Epinions staff doesn't seem to have the time to make sure that all of a particular author's books (as one possible example) are listed, as opposed, let's say, to having half of the titles of a certain fantasy series in the database and the other half nowhere to be found, making life miserable for anyone who would like to review every single book in a certain series, in order, for the edification of his regular readers. 2. Consolidate duplicate product listings into a single listing, with all appropriate existing product reviews being merged into one long list. Again, it's a cinch that the Epinions staff simply doesn't have the time to do this, or they would have by now. 3. Edit existing product listings to remove obvious typographical errors, particularly if the product title is misspelled and/or truncated, making it much harder for people to find exactly the item they were hoping for when they carefully typed in the full-and-correctly-spelled title in the Search box. Again, it's a cinch that the Epinions staff simply doesn't have the time to do this, or they would have by now. Now, none of those things has anything to do with writing great product reviews of your own and thus "proving" you deserve to be a "Top Reviewer." However, they might make more sense as functions of the Editors. In my experience, an editor actually has the ability to actually change the words that are in front of him instead of just complaining about the ways in which someone else (the original writer) ought to improve them in his own good time. If those powers were given to Editors tomorrow morning and were vigorously exercised, I would concede that Editors are making my life easier by tangibly improving Epinions. If Epinions was afraid of abuse of power, such as somebody importing listings for lots of different products that were really different editions of the same book, they could require that another randomly selected Editor be required to audit the process and co-approve the new insertion or modification of each product listing. Any Editor who went for ten days at a stretch without proving he was still alive by reading his email, seeing what proposed changes in the database he was supposed to review to see if they were justifiable or not, and then clicking "Yes" or "No" on the appropriate screen to enact - or deny - each proposed modification, would instantly lose his job as Editor on the grounds that he wasn't carrying his own weight. (Okay, okay, I'm fantasizing again! So what? It's my hundredth opinion! I'm allowed to go wild!) In contrast, let's take a look at a quote from the Advisor Role Transition FAQ to see what the actual expections of the Editor role are supposed to be: 8. What are the benefits of being an Editor? Editors' ratings are weighted more heavily than other Epinions members' ratings. Editors help determine which reviews will be seen most prominently to ensure that shoppers find the best content on the site. Editors also receive a ratings bonus in addition to Income Share each month based on their rating quality and activity. Their ratings are featured prominently in the ratings module on review pages. Finally, community lists call attention to Editors and a special "Editor" icon identifies them on the site. Yeah, those are such huge benefits described in the last sentence. Like I really bother to look at "community lists" of titled Epinionators more than once in a blue moon. How often do you look at such lists? Do you want to know what that explanation of Editor Benefits sounds like to cynical little old me? It sounds like this: "If you want to become, and to then stay, an Editor, you should do the following things. First, rubberstamp at least two hundred product reviews in your favorite category each week. Second, to 'prove' you're not just another worthless rubberstamper (even though you are!), pick at least ten or fifteen of those product reviews each week and read them carefully and then add personal comments suggesting something that could be improved. On that basis, people will tend to assume that you actually read the other 185 opinions per week that you rated as well as these ten. By doing all this rubberstamping, you will earn extra money each month because of the high activity you have in handing out ratings. As long as you add an occasional comment, how on earth can we of the Epinions Staff possibly be expected to meaningfully measure the quality of your ratings? The only way to do that would be for us to actually read every single opinion you rated to see if we agree that some actual thought went into your rating decision, and we haven't got time to read hundreds of opinions each week any more than you do!" Don't get me wrong. I am not asserting that any Editor on this website right this moment is nothing but a shameless rubberstamper who gleefully stamps a hundred or more opinions in a single hour. After all, I don't think the rules and expectations for Editors were made clear to the public until after the first selection of them had already commenced, based on what people had been doing during the past six weeks since the final Advisor Selection process, and there's never been a second selection. I am simply saying that after reading what Epinions has to say about their expectations for becoming and staying an Editor, and what benefits he'll receive, it sounds to me as if they are practically going down on their knees and begging us to all take up rubberstamping as a fulltime activity in hopes of getting paid extra money for our trouble. I strongly suspect that if I wanted to take the effort, I could manage to grab the title of Editor for myself by doing as I suggested two paragraphs ago. I think I'm bright enough to throw in just enough useful comments at odd intervals to leave the impression (from a bot's shallow point of view) that I conscientiously had read everything I rated, scanning with an eagle eye for chances to tell someone why he got an NH this time. Fortunately, doing this would A) require that I flush my conscience down the toilet first, and B) would require that I actually cared whether or not I had "Editor" on my profile. Since neither of those things is scheduled to happen in the foreseeable future, I guess we'll never know. (On the other hand, I concede the theoretical possiblity that I could get a very nasty shock if I tried. Since I'm not going to do it, we'll never find out if I have vastly overestimated my own cleverness and my ability to actually get away with it in the long run.) Now, I don't claim that my conscience is better than everyone else's. I imagine that the vast majority of my fellow Epinionators would be equally unwilling to rubberstamp perhaps a thousand items a month just to qualify for the silly title of Editor. Unfortunately, the tiny fraction of us who would have no qualms about it are in the best position to take advantage of the rules and end up with all the prestige and additional income of being Editors, while honest readers-and-raters have to get by without. I'd feel much better if "Editor" meant you were expected to do things a bit more constructive than reading and ratings a huge number of opinions in your preferred category each month - such as doing a bit of maintenance and repair on the database to justify any extra money you had coming. P.S. In their infinite wisdom, the Epinions staff adjusted the category pages (what you see when you first click on Books, Movies, etc.) so that these pages no longer contain links to several pages of "Recent Content" listing the latest additions to that particular category instead of the generic "Just In" section that is linked from the big front page at http://www.epinions.com. However, the "Recent Content" listings for categories do still exist if, like me, you had long since made sure you had them bookmarked. In case you aren't like me and haven't been able to find them, I offer the URLs for Recent Content in Books and Movies as a public service: Recent Content in Books: http://http://www.epinions.com/book-Books-All/show_~recent_content/tk_~CB020.1.5 Recent Content in Movies: http://http://www.epinions.com/mvie/show_~recent_content/tk_~CB020.1.5 If you want to be an Editor in either category, or just want to keep current on what's happening, those are the places to go. Have fun!  |
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