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.

Comments

Re:did you hear...

[mattACK]

I've heard of them. So have my parents. Their reputation is stellar amidst my parents' friends. If you read the article,

Many of these reputation managers involve rating methods, from Epinions.com's Web of Trust, to eBay's ratings (and huge anti-fraud department), to Slashdot.org's highly-evolved Meta Moderation system.

These seem important to devotees of those web sites, and techies in particular are entranced by voting schemes. However, compared to the vast readership of a reputation manager like the Associated Press, with tens of millions of readers, or newscaster Paul Harvey, with enormous credibility and over 10 million devoted listeners, they are but a drop in the bucket, promising though they may be.

You see, sirs, you don't count. All of you taken together, even given your collective ability to cripple almost any site on the net, don't count.

For the humor challenged, :P

Re:Reputation, Online Communities, and User Number

[ryochiji]

For anyone who cares, I wrote a paper titled Reputation Economy and the Internet. It talks about how reputation acts as a substitute for monetary worth, and also how the system compares to market economies.

Re:Reputation, Online Communities, and User Number

[$$$$$exyGal]

On slashdot, no matter how insightful, interesting, or funny your posts are, you can't decrease your userid number (unless you buy it). 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.

--free porn links for all my fans

Scary?

[tarnin]

Kinda. Why? Well, pretty simple. Its eaisy to skewer and out right lie online (in life too but to a lesser extent). In communities like /. or even ebay, you can skewer your moderation/seller rating and make it seem like your in the right. An uninformed opinion can be modded up here and a horrible seller can make it look like hes a good seller.

Also, post count is used sometimes to deem how popular or right someone is. I could flame all day, have thousands of IBTL posts, and other various ways to boost postcount on a board thus making it look like I have been around forever and that my word should be taken as face value. Not a real problem on smaller or non-commercial boards but on a site that offers some kind of service for pay, this is an issue.

Another issue with online, one person can destroy a business. Getting multiple log ins/ips to register bogus complaints againt a company is easy. Some people even write scripts to do this. The issue here is say you goto buy something from an online vendor and check out their seller rating and its 2.3. Would you buy from them? Proably not. Too bad that horrible rating may have come from one guy who either got a bad deal or could even be a competitor.

What am I saying here? Take all of the things that make someone or some company good or bad with a grain of salt. Do your own research instead of just relying on one source or someones post count.

Who determines your reputation.

[nhavar]

Unfortunately a reputation is not as much made by what you post but by how people respond.

For example I have the reputation of "a microsoft shill" or for the simple people "stupid". I have this reputation in spite of the fact that I use and like *nix products and often advocate using *nix depending on the task. My reputation came about when I started to question some of the assumptions and comments made by others. These assumptions and comments were "popular" and usually followed any discussion that included MS. By questioning the popular I became a "shill".

It strikes me as funny that in a community of "non-comformists" you can be ostracized for not conforming.

Recently I have been rebuked by some people for my opinion that Hakon Wium Lie's testing methodology and following conclusions about MS targeting opera 7 were incorrect. It was popular to say that MS is evil and it must all somehow be a conspiracy. Commentary continues to be that I am a MS apologist or mistaken, even though noone can disprove the facts I've presented.

So recently I asked the question "how does one turn the tide of public opinion". I mean if I'm labeled a MS shill because I believe (not in Microsoft but) in telling the truth. Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation? Or can I? Should I just keep quiet when anyone who is mistaken or repeats a lie about large unpopular companies.

Re:Who determines your reputation.

[SN74S181]

You just shouldn't worry about what damned fools think about you.

Many of us aren't as dogmatic as that and/or we're capable of dragging our dogmas out for amusement purposes but know how to stow it away under our seat when it's time for the plane to land.

The concept of 'online community' needs a lot more examination than it's ever received. The 'gee whiz' days when articles and interviews in Mondo 2000 magazine seemed fresh and new, and that there was a 'revolution' in human relations happening have now passed.

One of the books that I feel does the best job of debunking the concept of an 'Online Community' is 'The Future Does Not Compute Transcending the Machines in Our Midst' by Stephen L. Talbott. It was published by O'Reilly & Associates back in 1995. Talbot is one of the long term employees at O'Reilly, he's a senior editor (or was in 1995). In the book he talks about the newness and idealism, and drags out quotes from some of the most starry-eyed idealists, in the end debunking much of their hype. It's a must-read that almost nobody who has read.

Wow, I just did a search to find a good citation of Talbott's book and discovered that the full text is available online here for free. Everybody check it out. Hopefully, ummm, the fact that it's available for free online won't reduce it's credibility. It's easy these days to download something and stow it away and forget to ever read it.

Anyhow, don't sweat it that a gathering of the detris of the old battles of Microsoft vs. Macintosh, Microsoft vs. OS/2, Microsoft vs. Amiga, etc. etc. consider you a shill for not sharing their pathological hatred of the company. Their 'side' in the battle of the titans 'lost' and they'll never get over it. It's a shame that they chose Linux as their gathering place, cuz it's so cool otherwise.

Building reputation.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm annoyed by Slashdot's reputation system.

While I understand this is a company, they must safeguard themselves against terrorists blah blah blah, I get real upset when someone posts "Maybe" and gets 1 or 2 automatic points.

This is one of the main reasons I *don't* register. I want my posts to have value by themselves (have you got +5 funny as AC? it's a bliss).

But, by default, we get to read the -1 crap or the +1 from the registered folks. It's all or nothing.

I always have to choose Threshold 0 and nested and reload the entire thing. Sux!

But then there are those +2 posts worth nothing from those guys who got karma to burn.

Heck! I don't know, but could it be that some registered people post BS just to get a +1?

Re:Building reputation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I got an account here after posting anonymous for years - just like you. It took me a week or two to get my karma up to the +1 bonus. Everything changes when you have an account - you post more garbage just so that things will get moderated up so that the next time, when you DO have something intelligent to say people will take note (either because you have lots of "fans" or because of your +1 bonus, or because they've seen you around elsewhere).

This sucks, to be frank, because you suddenly become conscious of how many other posters are doing the same things. Of the 100-200 regular posters you see on Slashdot every few days, i'd say well over half of them are "karma-whoring" or just posting garbage... which is way more than i thought before i had an account. It's really sad to see that a site i took fairly seriously for a few years is much closer to a popularity contest than anything else. I never took it much more seriouly than usenet, but then i was reading usenet seven or either years ago before trolls became ubiqutous there, also.

I think at the end of the day, online forums are always going to suffer from these problems. Either everyone posts anonymously, in which case you don't get a community (plus you get lots of -1 level adolescent garbage) or most people post with an account, in which case you get the community playing favorites and the trolls coming out to play. What i think might be a nice idea is to have a filter on Slashdot to allow ONLY Anonymous Coward posts. That's it. I'd be curious to look at some of the discussions arising from that.

(Posting anonymously in the hope moderators still care about ACs.)

Re:Reputation, Online Communities, and User Number

[namespan]

I beleive her father is a rather famous physicist (Freeman Dyson, worked with Feynman on QED theory), and her mother is a mathematician. Last name came from the usual traditional way, and really, Esther's not that bad a name, and with parents like she has, she was very simply likely to be different from other kids, made fun of sometimes, and eventually, widely respected and succesful. I bet she took to the whole package just fine. :)

Online Rep same as "Local Rep" w/ BBB ....

[adzoox]

An online reputation is basically the same as a Better Busiiness Bureau Report. Both are udderly useless and immensely important at the same time.

I have 10 negative comments out of 1500 on eBay. To the average buyer this means little. To the "I sit at home all day and like to be mean on Holidays" crowd, it's a flag and they agree with the OTHER 10 people. To the second person, I have a pattern of bad customer service. This is one reason I think ebay should make it as difficult to leave negative comments; as they make getting a credit for fees. (File Complaint after 7 days from auction, Wait 10 days for a response, File Non Paying bidder, wait 10 more days, apply for credit.)

The Better Business Bureau is no different. The ONLY way to get a complaint removed from your file or get it listed as resolved is DO EXACTLY what the Plaintiff says. I don't mean, just refund, if that's the case, but compensate and send a letter of apology if the Plaintiff requested it. Some people can not be satisfied, and some people get twisted pleasure out of misery.

It's hard to know a fair system. I think complaintants should have profiles too, This is one GOOD thing about eBay, you can view the "Feedback About Others" - in EVERY CASE the users that have left me negative, A) Did so by accident, B)Have a high percent of negatives on their feedback, or C) A high percent of bad experiences (as evidenced by their "FeedBack About Others")

It's one reason I like the "Karma" on /. - one is able to moderate more, the more Karma one has. One builds Karma by getting high scores for Insightful or Interesting comments, loses Karma by posting offtopic, negative, or stupid comments.

It is the fault of the complaintant if a transaction goes beyond the one step of asking/commenting nicely "There's something wrong, how can WE fix it?"

The customer is always right no matter what AS LONG as they are rational, professional, and thankful.

Re:Oil Tankers? Talk Radio?

[Anonymous Coward]

a quick hunt on google brought up this:

http://www.populist.com/01.9.letters.html

(do a find on 'shortage')

and this:

"During the Embargo, Maine's Governor, Democrat Kenneth M. Curtis, accused the Nixon Administration of "creating a managed oil shortage to force support of its energy programs." A 1973 study by Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele, revealed, that while American oil companies were telling the U.S. to curtail oil consumption, through a massive advertising campaign, the five largest oil companies (Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and Standard Oil of California) were selling close to two barrels overseas, for every barrel (42 gallons) of oil sold here. They accused the oil companies and the Federal government of creating the crisis. In 1974, Lloyd's of London, the leading maritime insurance company in the world, said that during the three months before the Embargo, 474 tankers left the Middle East, with oil for the world. During the three months at the height of the crisis, 492 tankers left those same ports. During the Embargo, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO, whose President, Thornton Bradshaw was a member of the CFR) drivers were hauling excess fuel to storage facilities in the Mojave desert. All of this evidence points to the conclusion that there was no oil shortage in 1973."

from here:

http://www.viewfromthewall.com/59crisis.htm

Re:Most People Have Nothing To Say

[EnlightenedDuck]

Insofar as this is my first post, I think I have something to say for the mass of lurkers on forums such as /. I rarely post to forums because I rarely have any opinion or piece of knowledge that hasn't already been mentioned that I think is worth several hundred people's time to read. In a typical thread I find 2-4 comments I feel make my criteria of being worth posting (if I were the poster). Not wanting to be taken for a troll, I'll quickly add that I enjoy a substantial portion of the posts I read - just most of them don't meet the high bar I've set for myself for posting to a popular forum. Its not that I don't want to share my opinions, but that if everybody shared their opinion we'd have a lot of noise about stuff most of us don't care about, so I set a high threshold for myself. That, and I'm not in computers so I rarely have much knowledge to add to the discussions:)

Reputation, and all that

[Animats]

Much to my amusement, Carroll cites my Downside.com as "one of the more sober contrarian sites". The system there was predicting which dot-coms would fail, and when, with painful accuracy. That site got quite a bit of attention. Now it's used mostly by people who like its data mining system for SEC filings. (Type a company name into the search box and see what happens.)

During the dot-com collapse, I regularly received hate mail, and threatening phone calls. Sometimes from angry CEOs. But not because I was wrong.

There is little joy in having been right about the dot-com collapse and the ensuing depression. Things are worse than I'd expected. I foresaw the collapse of the dot-coms in early 2000 (it wasn't hard if you can read a balance sheet), suspected the trouble at Enron, but had no idea so many old-economy companies would go under. I was expecting a flight to quality.

So I have a good reputation, but as a Cassandra.

What am I predicting now? We're years away from a stock market turnaround. Stock prices are still way too high by historical standards. We haven't reached the bottom yet. That's just from the numbers; the war situation may make things worse.

Re:Reputation, Online Communities, and User Number

[t]

You're missing the point. If you utilized /.'s "highly-evolved Meta Moderation system" then you could easily mark all the low ID's as foes. Over time you get to the point where you should be able to trust any low IDs left (as the foes get massive penalties, ensuring you never see them again). Eventually those people would have to abandon their accounts and get shiny new IDs, as that is the only escape from a miserable karma with a ton of foes!

Not to mention the foe of friends, currently I don't penalize them, but I always scrutinize those comments a bit more than usual.

Perform an experiment sometime, save a couple of older stories at -1, then using grep, gawk, sort, unique, etc..., plot the distribution of user IDs. The number of posts coming from sub 100k is quite small.

PS I wish you had linked the posts you were referring to as I haven't seen any that match that description.