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Dear Epinions: I ResignMay 07 '02 (Updated May 10 '02) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line I can make more money sleeping, and get fewer insults.
Subtitle: Epinions - Take Your Pennies and ... You Know! I don't have much of any right to moan and groan. I haven't written 16,425,075,334 reviews. I haven't spent hours upon days upon weeks cultivating a following on Epinions, at least not lately. Somewhere between the posting of my first article on Epinions and today, my life changed and I've just been too busy. I guess it shows. I wrote a book review and got a kind of insulting comment. Then I wrote a really long, involved article on buying a new car. I wrote it in February and to date have earned ONE CENT for it. Then, a few days ago, I rewrote an article I had published a couple years ago and got two more insulting comments. Both of these comments referred to the fact that the writers had found my article only "helpful" as opposed to "very helpful" and promised to re-rate if I'd re-write. This was one exchange: --------------------- Comment: This is very well written and you covered just about everything. If you would just add the types of equipment and classes they have, and anything special they might have (child care, juice or health food bar), etc. I'd be happy to reread and rerate. My Response: Thanks for rating my Epinion. I appreciate your commenting on making my Epinion more thorough. You may note that in many of my previous Epinions, I have been more exhaustive in my reviews. However, when 53 people read another epinion of mine which was very, very long and exhaustive, I made exactly $0.01, that's 1 cent, for writing it, and I no longer believe that it's worth that much effort. I have many times spent 2-4 hours writing reviews. I now have two jobs that actually pay me for working so I'm just offering a quick opinion here on something I feel strongly about. It is actually a rewrite of one of my first Epinions which was even shorter than this one! If you are truly interested in the types of equipment and stuff offered by Bally Total Fitness, there are over 170 other reviews! ------------- Now that I've received the second comment of this sort, I'm really upset. What upsets me the most is that I probably left some comments like these of my own on other reviews in earlier days when I was an Epinions.com cheerleader. I can't help but think that public vilification of this sort is just wrong. This sort of comment would most appropriately be conducted privately by way of e-mail. If new visitors come to the site and read this sort of comment on my most recent review, they would most likely be deterred from reading other reviews of mine. I apologize to anyone to whom I've left this sort of message in the past. I don't know what I could have been thinking. I'm sure that people interested in product reviews are not really interested in reading this type of criticism. It's not the rating itself that bothers me--it's the heavy-handed, school-marmish "correction", which seems to imply that my opinion is invalid in some way. It may have taken me a long time to get to this point but, at the age of 42, I've decided to give up my insecurities. My opinion is just as valuable as yours and, if you wish to debate some point of fact, go for it--just don't fault me for not regurgitating the vital statistics for every product or service I care to talk about when those facts are easily available from other sources. If there are over 170 other reviews of a product, I would prefer to read 170 short, unique OPINIONS than several 5-page articles which differed, basically, only by the contents of one sentence or paragraph. Further, "success" at Epinions seems to require spending countless hours reading the Epinions of others, regardless of whether you care about the product they are writing about, in order to get return "reads". I tried to play this game for awhile. I found a lot of entertaining, perceptive writers out there and even met some really nice people as a result of my involvement with Epinions but, when it comes right down to it, I'd rather spend my time reading novels, newspapers and professional journals than product reviews. I have a finite amount of free time and can only buy a limited amount of new "stuff", which minimizes my need to read product reviews. So, what it boils down to for me is this: I have made less money by writing for Epinions in the past six months than I can make sleeping for twenty minutes. I've spent much more than twenty minutes reading and writing for Epinions this year. Therefore, during the next six months, I choose to sleep during the time I might otherwise have spent reading and writing Epinions, and will thus become a much happier person. As I post this, I'll be erasing my reviews. Thanks to all of you who have read, rated, and, presumably, enjoyed them. Erika A. Lockhart  |
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