I Just Dont Quite Trust That New Neighbor
Mar 30 '00
The tool of Distrust; just exactly what is it, when is it used, and how does it have anything to do with my Web of Trust?
I am sure most of you have experienced having neighbors that you wish never would have moved in. You might have even wished that you could have made them disappear from your sight. You can do just that with your unwanted Epinions neighbor.
The distrust tool is used if you no longer want to see a member’s reviews or you don’t want their ratings to impact you in any way. Your distrusted member’s views will show up at the bottom of the review list, and their ratings will not have any impact on reviews and products recommended to you. All you have to do is go to that member’s page and choose “distrust member’s opinions” on the left-hand side of their page. You can also do this from any review page.
If you are worried about them seeing that you distrust them, then don’t worry, because they can’t. That feature is automatically built in so you won’t have to change any settings before you use the tool. Only you can see the list of people you distrust. Other people, will only see the amount of people you distrust.
Something that I just recently found out was that the “Web of Distrust” is maintained outside the Epinions neighborhood. It is not associated with Epinions.com. Epinions does allow members to distrust other members, but this only affects what you personally see and what members who trust you see.
So, when you run across an epinon that is blatantly offensive, very low in quality, or just doesn’t make any sense at all, you will be able to stop having to deal with that Epinions neighbor. You are also protecting the people who trust you from having to deal with the situation also.
If you are curious to find out who may distrust you for some reason, you will not be able to do so because Epinions considers distrusting to be a private matter. There is no way to find out about another member’s Web of Distrust.
Something that I have found to be important is to periodically go back and check my list of distrusted members. Every one of them so far ended up with a ticket and then their epinions deleted. When I see that an investigation of their account has been completed, and they are no longer able to compose epinions, then I remove them from my list of distrusted.
For me, the fun part about Epinions is writing, reviewing, building my web of trust, and learning many new things. The not so fun part of Epinions is to distrust someone who is abusing the program. But, unfortunately they are out there. Recently, I have seen some outrageous language and offensive content. Then, I received an alert that I had highly recommended a review that had been plagiarized in its’ entirety. I do feel that if I am going to participate in the Epinions community, then it is my responsibility to help edge these types of neighbors out of Epinions. The only way I feel that I can participate in helping to keep the neighborhood clean is by utilizing the tool of distrust and reporting of the incident to the Epinions staff when appropriate.
If you would like to find more on this subject, you will find it in the Epinions Community Center under General Help, in the category of Frequently Asked Questions, titled “Using the Web of Trust: Trusting, Distrusting and Advisors.
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Epinions.com ID:
Lajeaca
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Location: Tucson, Arizona
Reviews written: 74
Trusted by: 178 members
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