Slashdot Mirror
The Reality of Online Reputation
Nicholas Carroll (of Why Unicode Won't Work On The Internet fame) has written a piece for Mindjack entitled "Spinning The Web: The Realities of Online Reputation Management". Trust me - the actual subject matter is a lot more interesting then the title *grin*. The essay is aimed toward companies online, but is applicable to individuals as well.
Especially when I am hiring. I learn more about people and companies via Google than via resume's and marketing-heavy websites.
Granted, I take everything I read on the Internet* with a grain of salt, but information, no matter the source, is helpful in decision making.
*Even /.! For example, the "selfish routing" story from last week. Anyone who knows BGP4 knows that article, and 99% of the comments about it were unalduterated and misinformed BS.
Seriously, though, good article, though I think I can sum it up pretty quickly: To maintain a good reputation, tell the truth and offer good service (where applicable). Whodathunkit.
The other point is the question of when/if the Web will become something that can transform opinions... right now most of the vociferous opinion-raising is of the "preaching to the choir" sort, since if my visitor doesn't agree with me, they'll probably just leave...
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
In general, it happens that the lower user numbers are more committed to the success of the site. However, just like anything on the 'net or in media at all, you need to take it with a grain of salt.
For example:
Parent post: insightful and relevant
Certain unnamed low-numbered users: immature trolls who just happened to stumble across something early on which later turned out to be big.
It still all depends on the person behind the number.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
It's funny you should say that, because I think this is a big part of the reason online fora like slashdot have such a high lurking rate. Most readers here never post, just as has always been true on mailing lists and Usenet. There's only a small core of vocal posters (the 80-20 rule, except it's more like 98-2 here).
So if people were less concerned, slashdot would have even more posts than it does. You could raise an interesting debate about whether the steady climb in posts has been due to increased readership, or increased participation (or more accurately, how those components boil down).
He doesn't touch or mention at all 2 very effective reputation management (and creation/destruction) systems online at the moment:
EBay's seller ratings and BizRate's merchant ratings.
Both use the very powerful feedback system of actual customers being able to effectively swing a vendor's reputation.
Basically instead of slow word of mouth (how long did it take for LL Bean to get its reputation? years of word-of-mouth), both EBay and BizRate allow incredibly quick dissemination of someone's preceived reputation (and unlike many others, have good safety checks and are heavily self-policing -- just like any reputation management should be).
Hmmh. Ever heard of UTF-8 encoding? If not, you probably should check it out...
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
On slashdot, no matter how insightful, interesting, or funny your posts are, you can't decrease your userid number (unless you buy it [ebay.com]). But what you can do, is accumulate a lot of fans. Yes, the number of fans you have on slashdot seems way more important than the number of your userid.
And best of all, you can do it without having to be insightful, interesting, informative, or funny -- just post pr0n!
Do you want the popularity of Tracy Lords or Esther Dyson?
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
How about this little snippet?
This person does not even do the most cursory research on his subjects. For the uninformed, Unicode assigns a unique address to every human character (i.e., letter, kanji, heiroglyph). The entire code range is 32-bit (4,294,967,296), with various text formats for addressing those codes (UTF-8 and UTF-16 being the most popular).
This person is, at best, an attention seeker. He's more likely a very public troll.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
The article made sense, in fact, common sense, but there were a few interesting tidbits that made be do double takes:
In a similar vein, at present it would probably be impossible to spread a false "oil shortage" story through the Internet, as the American oil companies and mainstream media did in 1972. In fact the Internet would probably demolish such propaganda in days. In 1972, it was not until months later that a merchant marine officer told me how his oil supertanker had been held off the New Jersey coast for six weeks at the height of the "oil shortage."
Whaaat? Anybody know anything else about this? Crackpot conspiracy theory, or little known fact? Why in the world would this have been done?
The ethnic slaughters in the wake of Yugoslavia's disintegration were largely blamed on inflammatory talk radio - and the absence of contrary opinion.
Whaaat? Anybody know anything else about this?
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Ahem.
Obviously, this is some quaint usage of the term "highly evolved" of which I was previously unaware.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Well, it could be argued that if Microsoft themselves had NOT in the past attempted to manipulate public opinion with fake "grass roots support" campaigns that they would have more credibility in the public eye, and fewer people would be inclined to suspect that you are planted here by Microsoft. However, since MS has already shown that it does that sort of thing (they've been caught a few times), how can anybody now realistically trust any pro-Microsoft information on popular forums such as /.? Microsoft has dug their own grave on this one - they've destroyed their own credibility.
And people (surprise surprise) really really do not like being manipulated and deceived - they remember it, and don't want to be fooled again - so they consider it better to distrust any information that might just be more lies and manipulation. DO YOU BLAME THEM? I don't.
Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation?
In short, you can't. Microsoft, with their past behaviour, has made sure of this for you. Since they do do things like plant pro-MS posts in forums like this, any reasonable person knows not to trust any post that resembles a "planted" post.
Interestingly, one of the ways that more savvy "geurilla marketers" now try to deal with the problem of erosion of public trust is to try make their plants look like objective reviewers that people can trust. For example, the slashdot crowd is much more likely to trust the opinion of someone who claims to be "a Unix user, BUT ... (something positive about MS products) ..".
The whole of corporate America seems to be currently digging their own credibility graves in this way. In the short-term, cheap deceitful strategies like fake movie fan sites, fake positive reviews, fake pro-product postings on online forums, fake "news" articles in television and newspaper media etc, all of these will in the short term increase brand "mindshare". In the longer term though, as more and more people start to realise they're being manipulated, public trust will erode to the point where people will no longer believe even genuine positive articles about a product.
When companies stop this BS, then maybe people might begin to trust your opinions again. Until then, its a one-way slide downhill.
In real life, you can get away with saying stuff when you're blind drunk because nobody takes any notice of you.
Trouble is, people get in from a heavy night out, check email, check slashdot, then post some complete crap that you later regret.
Moral, Don't Drink and Post.
The thing that has always struck me about people is that even though most of them HAVE opinions they're not always prone to sharing those opinions. It's the way that everyone has an opinion about poilitics and yet still only a fraction of the populace votes.
Of course a lot of silence is in people online not wanting to chime in expressedly with a "Me Too!" opinion in the presence of a well expressed position that already outlines what they would say themselves if they only could spell, write with some skill, etc. It's the nice thing about the Anonymous Cowards system at Slashdot that people can, if they'd like, post whatever weird or netiquette violating opinion anonymously without slipping in their own opinion like a bad walk with your dog.
In the end though, I think the success of an online forum's credibility and reputation depends on a couple of factors. Slashdot is very geek/tech/IP heavy in content and slant. Everyone is surprised when someone speaks out in favor of Microsoft on Slashdot even when probably 80% of the readership uses Windows at some point in a day. The **IAA's are ridiculed and revealed at Slashdot, and if we don't always hear about the neatest new gizmo from Slashdot we at least know that in the culture of Slashdot that if someone has retailed a Linux machine Vibrator that SOMEONE at Slashdot has purchased the beast and will eventually post a review on how penguins are in bed. I don't think anyone comes to Slashdot for reviews on cars, because posters at Slashdot aren't perceived as being particularly of the greasemonkey/NASCAR set usually. People will have an opinion on which spark plugs are best at Slashdot but it will be weighted against the idea that the average posters would have less real experience than say the mass of people at a classic car forum.
One of the advantages of traditional media is that even if we can know that Dan Rather probably doesn't know much about Hot Air Ballooning, we all know that before he speaks out on a story about Hot Air Ballooning that at least someone from the news department has at least implied that they have made an effort to research the sport. Of course, that implication turns on them when they don't know what they're talking about anyways but everyone should know by now that the grains of salt size difference between CNN and a random internet poster is large.
just have to say this, but Nicolas Carroll didn't write the Unicode article -- someone else did. Perhaps you should take some of your own advice about doing research before blowing off at the mouth. According to your own line of reasoning this makes you yourself a moron. Ha Ha HAW!!!