Why You Should Be Reading And Rating Bad Epinions
Jul 21 '00
There are many people who are dissatisfied with the fact that the can "disappear" from Epinions when they have given out what is deemed an excessive number of positive ratings.
I disagree. Here's why:
Epinions needs to build credibility in order to gain market share. Credibility is in short supply on the internet, because there are many people who have a good time plagiarizing, lying or just bad-mouthing for the fun of it. Somehow, Epinions has to find a way to get around these clowns. And so we have ratings for epinions. We need to find a way to evaluate all of the reviews and decide whether they are credible, and then display them from most credible to least credible. If the site is designed that way, then people who browse it once will have a worthwhile experience and come back.
This system starts to collapse when a significant number of people who rate reviews only rate some of the reviews. Unrated reviews, especially terrible ones, are a liability to this site. Epinions has to come up with a way to ensure that the poorest writeups are labeled as such.
Yes, you *can* skip bad reviews. So could I. And yes, it would be best if we could only read the good ones. But we are being paid for what we do here, and the Web Of Trust is how they "balance the ecosystem".
If you see something that looks like a bad writeup, don't ignore it. Take a peek at it and see whether you were right. Then rate it. If everybody did this, the site would be a more valuable resource. The more valuable a resource Epinions becomes, the better chance that you will be able to write more epinions and even receive a little cash.
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Epinions.com ID:
musicinsight
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Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 5 members
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