Slashdot Mirror
NYT On Online Reputations
prostoalex writes "New York Times analyzes the importance of online postings for the company images and product success/failure rates. Intuit's TurboTax DRM "feature" is mentioned as one of the bad ideas, that was quickly and vociferously opposed by the Internet folk. The movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding got quite a nice cash flow even though the advertising budget was low, but opinions on the Internet regarded the movie highly. Rating systems of Epinions and Slashdot are also discussed briefly."
Considering that a NYT article on second-superpower got outranked into oblivion by Googlewashing in just 42 days, online reputation is tough to achieve, even over a short period. Secondly, most online opinions are always critical, and outnumber 'shills' hands down.
Try getting your hands on an article on Microsoft and Schnazzle using Google and you can see Online Reputation at work!
And on the lighter side: Karma - Excellent; Reputation - Whore!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The article mentions that online reviews and word of mouth are reducing the effectiveness of advertising. Advertising is what the compnay *wants* you to know about their products. Of course, a really gutsy, ethical company wants you to know the truth about their products, and enjoys the enhanced word of mouth the Internet provides, because perhaps they can save some money on advertising.
There have already been reports about gag orders over product criticism. I wonder when the alarm bells began ringing in the advertising industry, and how their response will develop. (Astroturfing Slashdot?)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I happily continue to buy movies, music, and Blizzard games to this day because in the end, when you get through all the griping, they're quality products. What's the alternative? But if you looked at the amount of complaints online you'd think these industries had been run into the ground by upset consumers.
I'd buy from the nice companies, but they've been run into the ground by pirates.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Your example reveals a problem with reputation-based systems: who is assigning reputation.
This was obvious to me this weekend, when I went to a food flavor contest, and the items that won popular vote were the most bland and boring in every category.
The problem with reputation systems--including Slashdot--is that your reputation can be based on the opinions of individuals who are not necessarily the best for assigning reputations. They may be unknowledgable, unduly biased, etc.
In the case of classes, this gets to be a problem because students don't always like material that's necessary for them to learn. This has become painfully obvious to me as a university statistics instructor. I lecture in a department where statistics is required, but not the primary focus of the undergraduate major. My ratings tend to be good, but stats class ratings tend to be much lower than that of other classes on average, simply because the students don't want to be taking statistics. There are plenty of times when, in order to learn, the students must do something they might not want to do or not see reasons for at the time.
And so it goes for things like food flavors, movies, music, Slashdot topics, and so forth. Even within fields you see this: the majority is not always best. Popular opinion is not always the best index of quality, just what's popular. Many of us see this on Slashdot, I'm sure--a certain opinion being reinforced because it's majority, not because it's informed or insightful.
This isn't a new phenomenon of course--it's something people have wrestled with since the dawn of man, I'm sure--but it seems to have become more salient to me recently. It has become especially relevant with popular anti-critical-establishment inclinations in many domains of culture, such as music and movies, and also in online social sorting mechanisms such as Slashdot.
while that's an interesting concept, it seems impracticable, for several reasons:
1. most sites don't use a comparable method to rate karma. the slashdot staff describes how the karma system was homegrown in the article, and i'm sure that's true of each site's analogous feature.
2. even if these systems used some kind of standard rating system for users, i strongly suspect that user behavior and reliability might vary from site to site. f'rex: i'm not really an IT guy, which shows in the comments i make. however, i'm a serious movie fiend. accordingly, users here should not necessarily take my thoughts on technology matters, but i can speak w/ much greater authority on IMDB.
3. let's assume, for the sake of argument, that all the various sites whose user opinions are well regarded (slashdot, et al) agree to develop a method such as you propose. there would still be 2 separate and mutually exclusive methods: either a highly decentralized method (likely to be the favored tool here) or a highly centralized method. naturally, the latter would be susceptible to exploits, etc., and the interested site operators would therefore split into (at least) 2 camps, thereby rendering the universal solution impossible, IMHO.
ed
I hope that those e-commerce sites won't abuse the online fora, to increase their own sales etc, by word of mouse, as this article calls it.
:)
Because I think that would lead to a downfall of the quality of those services, and they would cut themselves in the fingers.
btw, on a side note, I find this quote rather funny:
"I think that, now, the power of the Internet is captured in the ability of everyday Americans to give their opinion on any product or event that they want," Mr. Gulbransen said.
As if no other inhabitant of other countries in the world uses the internet to express their opinions about certain products.
Of course I realise that this is an American Newspaper, read mostly by Americans, but still, its content is on the global internet
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I wouldn't be upset if Epinions disapeared. In fact I would be overjoyed. My experience has been that the site sucks, most new things have a listing and no reviews, and the only advocates of the site are people who write the reviews.
Maybe one out of a hundred things I search for reviews on has a useful epinions page. If only google would have a way to include '-epinions' in every search by default, I wouldn't waste so much time loading what seems like a good page from the search results but turns out to be yet another useless epinions listing with no reviews attached.
For a review site to be useful they need to have access to the things they're reviewing before they go on sale so the review is available when the product comes out, or at least shortly afterward. Epinions only seems to have reviews available for things that have become common. If something has become common enough to have a epinions listing I've probably already seen one and don't need a review. Reviews about new, unseen products are the useful ones. That makes the entire Epinions concept flawed.