The Importance of Vertical Rating
Jan 10 '06 (Updated Jan 14 '06)
The Bottom Line The best reviews will not rise to the top, nor will the worst sink, nor will the garbage be buried, unless current users rate old reviews.
There was a time on Epinions, long before I joined the site, when the site payed a few cents of Eroyalties for each view of a review. You could, or so the tall tales go, buy a cast-off chateau in the French Riviera (River Area) by simply posting on the Web for all to see a little piece saying that amaretto tastes like almonds and is quite yummy on the rocks. Write about the latest cellyphone, and you could buy your own Arab Emirate, oil not included.
Those days are long gone. Eroyalties bit the dust soon after the bottom fell out under the Web advertising market, and income share is such that you'll have to settle for a small wheel of French brie or a quart of possibly Arab motor oil, instead.
Writing standards on Epinions went the opposite way, perhaps due to the departure of those looking for free (free as in lunch) money and the decline of rubber-stamping sewing circles and lousy-reviewer mutual aid societies. As a result, there are a good many reviews from the old days of Epinions rated VH that ought to be rated H or SH, and worse yet, off-topic reviews ranked above on-topic reviews and the occasional good review without any ratings at all.
Today I ran across two off-topic reviews placed arbitrarily in Korbel Brut--written by the same author!--as well as some in Freixenet Brut de Noirs and Mondoro Asti, by the same culprit. I've in the past found reviews of competitors' products contributing to the star rating of quite a few housewares, quite a few fratboy-style "this likker gives you such a buzz" reviews in Restaurants and Gourmet, and reviews of brick-and-mortar stores in Online Stores.
Most of these were written before the system of Advisors was set up and thus never got rated by Advisors or those trusted by Advisors or Leads. They're ranked based on old standards where a mediocre review could be VH. They need to be rated by current advisors and by people in the WOT of current Leads and Advisors for Epinions's sorting process to work. The best should float to the top, and the worst should sink to the bottom. This practice of rating all or a significant number of the reviews of a product or service is called "vertical rating" on Epinions; the history of the term is documented by user sleeper54 in his opinion on the matter.
Vertical rating will also help cut down the noise level on Epinions and help you to write better reviews, for vertical rating also entails vertical reading. It pays to see what others have to say about a product or service. You may find, as I have on many occasions, that I have nothing more to contribute, and decide to not write the review, or you may find yourself better defending your point-of-view because you know what other perspectives exist or seeing things that you missed on first consideration of a product.
Others have disagreed, saying that it creates the appearance of dishonest rating, but I believe the best time to do vertical rating, and at the very least the most convenient, is just before writing your own review. (If someone disagrees with your rating of "competing" reviews, the proper thing for him to do is rate them himself!) If there are less than ten other reviews, reading and rating them all is easy enough. Otherwise, I recommend reading a sample of the top few, largely for your own sake, of some rated Helpful--perhaps you would rate them VH or SH--of some rated SH, and keeping an eye out at the bottom for reviews that, for some reason or another, haven't been rated. Read all the headings--unless there are hundreds--watching for blatantly OT reviews that aren't ranked NH.
Vertical rating is easy and the time it takes--not much--helps Epinions's rating system work.
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Epinions.com ID:
bkalafut
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 in Restaurants & Gourmet |
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Member: Bennett Kalafut
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Reviews written: 259
Trusted by: 43 members
About Me:
Stretching single molecules for fun and profit.
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