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Incidentally, I'm working on a project to spin off the reviews piece of Amazon and making it first class, with an emphasis on community and trustability. I feel
by jameslk 10y ago
Incidentally, I'm working on a project to spin off the reviews piece of Amazon and making it first class, with an emphasis on community and trustability. I feel like this is a very important part of the ecommerce ecosystem and I'm not really sure why it hasn't been done already (very well anyway, see Epinions).
- Shebanator 10y agoits not easy to do well. fraud, spam, hate speech, etc.
- SonicSoul 10y agoeasier to do when not anonymous?
- nommm-nommm 10y agoI would go as far as to say it's impossible to do well.
- jameslk 10y agoAll communities have to tackle these problems in various forms, although I believe it is possible to fix in a way good enough to be more valuable than without it. I have some ideas on ways to tackle the fraud problem, such as with a trust-based ranking system, rewarding balanced feedback, purchase verification, looking for heuristics of fake reviews, and avoiding potential conflicts of interest. It's not the primary concern of Amazon to make sure their reviews are authentic, where as it would be with a service dedicated to that very concern. In fact, positive reviews help drive more sales, so there's an inherent conflict of interest that I feel justifies the need to separate reviews from the place selling the things being reviewed.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoI'd like to see something "social", where you "follow" other reviewers (who reviewed something you bought and you trust their review) and build up a reviewer network and then factor in some sort of "trust" percentage (how much you trust the reivewer).
- jameslk 10y agoThat's an interesting idea, almost in a meritocracy kind of sense, or in other words, reviewing the reviewer. Perhaps previous trust "points" can be used a weighted boost, kind of like PageRank, but for reviewers.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoYes. But for the reviewers _you_ follow, _you_ rank them based on how much you trust their reviews. Your trust rank is factored into the reviewers who are followed by the reviewers you follow, so as you go down the line the trust gets lower and lower.
- blawson 10y agoTrusting reviewers gets really complicated quickly, as someone I trust to evaluate what makes a good blender might really hate that genre of books I enjoy.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoHaving a system with trusted reviewers is even easier to game as well.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoNo doubt. I mean trust is an aspect of any con, right? Still, I would at least like to see something like what I mentioned tried.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoIndeed. It would be a slow process, but over time, as you buy items, you select reviewers to follow who share your likes for the various items. And it being a "social" thing, there's nothing stopping you from reaching out and having a conversation with reviewers.
- jpeg_hero 10y agoBazaarvoice?