the strange "new and improved" Advisor selection process
Sep 27 '00
I don't want to be an Advisor. I don't have the time; some days, I barely have the time to check my e-mail, much less contribute anything meaningful here. As I understand it, an advisor has to read many, many reviews and help writers, and I think of Epinions as more as a hobby or fun diversion and therefore, don't really think I have enough to give.
Moreover, the whole concept leaves sort of a bad taste in my mouth. Advisors are kind of an elite; a group of people who supposedly have more talent and are rewarded with a higher royalty rate and greater review-rating power. This, in my view, is contradictory to the whole purpose of Epinions. We're all supposed to be here to share our thoughts and opinions; why are some thoughts more valuable than others?
If I were ever given the chance to be an advisor, (ha!) I'd have to turn it down, and I wouldn't feel bad about it. If I live to be a hundred and never get to be an advisor, that's fine. I do realize, though, that many members have lobbied for advisor positions because it was, for one reason or another, important to them. Before the selection process was changed, it was flawed, but pretty fair. You could fire off an e-mail to a section manager and have the manager mull over your reviews and decide of you had the talent (or whatever) to do the job.
I don't fully understand what's going on now, but it's apparently something like this: you can't ask anyone for the job or even be nominated by someone else. If the big people like you, they'll call you. I think they want us to think that they'll read a buttload of reviews every single day and somehow manage to isolate a few good writers out of thousands.
That's ridiculous.
I thought Epinions' goals were to get rid of the few who were abusing the perks of advisorship and make the whole thing more equitable. The same old cliques and circles will still apply; they'll just take longer to be apparent. The good reviews will be buried under a pile of the same old sub-par stuff with bad punctuation written in ALL CAPS. Good writers work just as hard as bad ones, but they're often not as prolific. They're sometimes controversial, too, which makes them even less visible. How is some random pick-and-choose method supposed to net you a group of really good writers who consistently produce good, interesting reviews? The process is even more arbitrary that it was before.
Go ahead and call me a snob, but if we have to have such an elitist system in place, let's make sure the elite are selected according to real standards. A potential advisor now has to have written a "minimum number" of reviews. They don't tell us what that minimum is. More than three? A hundred? Who knows? It could be thirty for someone and fifty for someone else. That is, if someone gets around to reading your reviews.
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Epinions.com ID:
kilinahe
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Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Reviews written: 74
Trusted by: 23 members
About Me:
"In your face, Space Coyote!"
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