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."
Thanks for the link to Slashdot or I may have never found it.
Now that's irony. (registration required)
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.
Thousands of college students use TeacherReviews.com to influence their decision as to which college classes to take. Some professors complain that they don't think it is fair that their reputation is readily available online for anybody to see (especially when their reviews on TeacherReviews.com is often the first thing Google links to), and there are professors that like it so much that they link their syllabus to the site, even when their reviews aren't so great (so that they can gather more good reviews, I suspect).
They've been around for a while and I think it's great. I still go there to read reviews before I make any purchasing decisions and they also have helpful advice articles written by nominated Experts on different topics like credit card debt or succeeding in college.
Read their history, they've been around since the dotcom boom and are founded by former employees at top technology companies. Unlike other dotcom companies, they've adapted and survived by making tough but sound financial decisions. When I first signed up, each review was awarded 30 cents per view by an Epinions registered visitor, but then people began abusing it. Slowly they've adjusted and lowered the payment rate and have implemented a new reward system.
I'm not surprised that companies are starting to quote Epinions' users regarding their products. They have a well established "Web of Trust" system and top reviewers are entrusted by the general Epinions' public to give objective reviews. Check it out!
Rangers Lead the Way!
With as much as Slashdot bashes Microsoft, It's sure to crumble to the weight of our online opinions any minute! ...
Any minute now...
http://use.perl.org
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.
Not how I remember it. No mention of the scribbling crap into your boot block or inability to install into vmware machines, etc, etc...
I switched to Tax Cut.
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