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: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

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: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.