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.
*grin*
Some online communities base reputation at least partly upon user numbers.
For example, the mere presence of words uttered by he who has a low user number shines forth radiantly upon all, bestowing in them great wisdom and happiness.
(Note: the higher user numbers are that much more removed from the Form of Wisdom and Happiness).
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.
Based on the misinformed article on Unicode the author posted before, I am not going to bother reading his current article...
Wow, almost as content-free and buzzword-driven as Jon! Care to tell us something we don't know?
Karma: Excellent (Mostly the result of successful online reputation management)
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
From the linked story:
To form an opinion based on reading Epinions or Slashdot takes a lot more work than soaking up a newspaper headline or drooling in front of the six o'clock news. On Epinions you have to read the various reviews and weigh them against each other. On Slashdot one has to read the original article, and think, or at least wade through the posts. (my emphasis)
Which
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
If anybody was truly concerned about their online reputation, slashdot would have no posts.
Trolling is a art,
"For example, the mere presence of words uttered by he who has a low user number shines forth radiantly upon all, bestowing in them great wisdom and happiness."
Don't forget post count, that Anonymous Coward guy is extremely active on Slashdot!
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
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
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
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!
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.
---
Open Source Shirts
SLASHDOT COMMITS UNICIDE
Slaughters all non-ASCII-speaking netizens, film at eleven
THE HAGUE -- Robert ?CmdrTaco? Malda, the owner of the popular technology website Slash Dot, has become one of the first U.S. citizens to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against typography. The Court, authorized by the Rome Statute and ratified by over 60 nations, is charged with the duty of prosecuting individuals for serious human rights violations such as genocide, torture, and sexual slavery.
With this prosecution, the Court seems intent on adding a new crime to their docket, the crime of ?Unicide.?
?What this ?Taco Commander? did to the international community is unconscionable,? U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was quoted saying. ?Yesterday, there was a flourishing Unicode-speaking population, numbering in the thousands. Today, there are none. They are all silenced. Their Unicode is either blocked by this so-called ?Lameness Filter? or silently wrenched from their messages.?
Slash Dot is home to at least 580,000 citizens, who hail from every Internet-equipped country in the world. However, many more ? perhaps nearly a million ? live anonymously amongst the ranks of registered citizens.
????? ? ?????, Prime Minister of ???? ?????????????, was outraged when he heard of Slash Dot?s decision to cleanse all Unicode-speaking individuals from their website.
The White House was dismayed by the decision of the Court to prosecute an American citizen for what the President deemed, a ?politicalized persecutorial.? White House spokesman Ari Flescher announced that the U.S. would, if pressed, go forward with their recently unveiled plan to invade the Netherlands, if this prosecution was not halted. ?This is absolutely stunning,? he said. ?That the United States would be expected to even acknowledge the presence of other character sets other than ASCII is an offense in its own right. You either write in ASCII, or you?re with the terrorists.?
Slash Dot, and its parent corporation, VA Software, were unavailable for comment.
Wait, I should *read* the article first, and *not* form an opinion based upon the article title? WTH? I've being doing it wrong!
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).
--free porn links for all my fans
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Nicholas Carroll must be from bizarro world ;)
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
After posting his thoughts on Unicode, the author no longer has a good online reputation. As a result, no one actually bothered to read this article.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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.
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.
But even with your user number of 3, you only have 56 comments...lot of wisdom you seem to be dispensing :)
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I took your advice, and googled you.
Your reputation isn't very good. I see you were involved with some hype and computer crashes a few years ago, and caused millions of dollars in damage at some companies.
Geeze, I'd never hire you! You'd be lucky to get a job as a janitor at chicken farm!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Yeah, but the content is rarely worth reading...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Ahem.
Obviously, this is some quaint usage of the term "highly evolved" of which I was previously unaware.
www.eFax.com are spammers
If I were them I would start by taking aim at your spelling skills. :)
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
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. :)
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
T'is better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
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.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
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.
I have never gotten any karma out of having a low user number on slashdot. Usually, I've just been flamed!
Damn newbs! Don't they know I was on the internet back when it ran over tin cans and string!?
At the top of the article is an image of a laptop open, and the desktop image is a huge head of a woman on the desktop of the laptop.
Were I a serial killer that decapitated my victims and then froze the heads for later perusal and admirement (is that even a word) - then I'd totally have that picture as my desktop background.
as a whole, the article raises some good points, but there were also parts that I disagreed with on many points - hell, the broad sweeping mention that the airline industry on the web was doomed from the start and then listing the reason as no face to face contact? fuck that, I disagree.
but this post isn't about my disagreement, it is about the scary blue head.
fear the head.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
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!!!
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.
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.)
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh, wait... you're serious, aren't you?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.