6 ms·

I'm Tired of Creating Your Content

49 points by wheels 16y ago

CoreDumpling 16y ago
On the other hand, the value of the reviews on these sites goes down the older they get. On Amazon it seems like the opposite is true. Because of their meta-review process, where users can flag reviews as helpful or not, it seems like old and classic reviews tend to float to the top, while recent ones have a significant hurdle to overcome before they make it to the front page. See for example here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530 (Admittedly, users can also be fickle and support other kinds of reviews for different reasons, cf. http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032G1S0 http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032...)
- executive 16y ago
  Yes, but Amazon's reviews are for products.. not hotels. Hotels get older and crappier thus newer reviews are more valuable.
  - panacea 16y ago
    Two words: bed bugs
  - andre3k1 16y ago
    I would necessarily say that hotels crappier as they age, but the service from hotels is elastic. The same hotel visited 2 different times could prove very different. The same book purchased twice, on the other hand, will read the same.
smalter 16y ago
It's stone soup. I benefit from participating in Yelp because I like the community (or used to) -- writing reviews and getting feedback -- and because I read Yelp for reviews (or used to). The guys/girls who sent up the infrastructure to make that happen should get some soup, too, and there's nothing wrong with that. I suppose if I were a pro user that created a disproportionate amount of content, I'd complain more. But I don't think that's the point of the above post. The article seems just to express fatigue with internet-related obligations, which I can relate to. But it's couched in this weird resentful language.
ianb 16y ago
He misses another benefit of writing reviews: rewarding good businesses. And even, in the case of a thoughtful review, enabling a diversity of services -- simple star reviews can't express the give and take of different kinds of service, and so a decrepit-but-lovable hotel can't be distinguished from a decrepit-and-neglected hotel. Reviews make it possible for people to find the right hotel (or any other service) for their wishes, and they don't have to rely on crude measures like brand loyalty. I honestly can't decide what the personal benefit is. If reviews can make a difference in a business, then one review can make a difference -- unlike "likes" or votes or stars a review is not automatically aggregated, it is specifically read by other people. So there is real potential that a review can positively impact a business you like, and provide you real benefit as a result. The negative impact of a bad review has no direct benefit that I can think of -- you will never return, and the only happiness you might derive is schadenfreude if the business's fortunes decline. Either way though there is a sense of satisfaction, which seems to be the primary reason people submit reviews.
- thetrumanshow 16y ago
  Repeat business is how you reward a business for being awesome. Its over-and-above to give them word-of-mouth recommendations or to post positive reviews. In general I don't think its wrong to ask for something in return for staking your reputation on a recommendation.
  - ianb 16y ago
    Wait... are you proposing that you get a kickback for your positive review? I'm not sure that will work so well...
    - thetrumanshow 16y ago
      "I want direct benefits....free parking, a free night, coffee for free or dessert, discounts and so forth" If you provide illiquid perks for participating in a review process, I don't see much wrong with that. If they were handing out cash, then yes, that is a grey area.
sebg 16y ago
"If you want my reviews because your business runs on user-generated-content, you are going to need to do better. Stroking my ego no longer works." I think this is missing the point. Businesses like four-square/yelp/blogs/social media/etc exist not to stroke anybody's ego, they exist to let users have their friends or random strangers stroke their egos. Complaining that a business isn't stroking your ego should tell the business that they aren't making it easy enough for your friends to stroke your ego. Facebook does this brilliantly. My friend bakes a pie and then myself an a ton of other people pile on and tell them it looks good, tasty, when are they making me one, etc.... Facebook doesn't stroke my friend's ego, facebook makes it ridiculously easy for "friends" to stroke my friend's ego.
- cwp 16y ago
  He's not complaining that his ego isn't sufficiently stroked. He's saying that ego-stroking is insufficient to motivate him to keep writing reviews.
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    fine distinction point which i somehow still don't get
rapind 16y ago
Rewards programs like airmiles are pretty successful. Seems to me you could apply similar logic here. Giving back to your contributors would motivate them.
- panacea 16y ago
  I'm not sure incentivising reviewers is the problem here. It's the respect given to 'pure' non-financially motivated advice that generates trust. The democratization of information that the internet seems to promise is in direct competition with paid-for "page-rank".
kevinskii 16y ago
His "personal benefit" comes from reading others' reviews, which he admits he does regularly.
gabrielroth 16y ago
I want direct benefits....free parking, a free night, coffee for free or dessert, discounts and so forth. I'm pretty sure that small rewards (free coffee) would make people less likely to post reviews, and large benefits (a free night's stay in a hotel) wouldn't be cost-effective.
- andrew1 16y ago
  If RandomHotelBookingWebsite.com announces that for every five reviews you write you'll earn a $5 credit which you can use for any booking on the site, why would that make you less likely to write a review? I can see that it might not make someone more likely to write a review (why bother for $5?), but why would it stop you if you were going to anyway?
  - gabrielroth 16y ago
    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html
  - mikeklaas 16y ago
    The same reason that levying a fine on late daycare parents increases the frequency that they will pick up their kids late. Monetary incentives tend to displace intangible incentives. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, IF you've designed your monetary incentives correctly...
    - frossie 16y ago
      No,it's not the same thing as the daycare example. The issue with daycare late fines is that they allow a person to "pay off" bad behavior, therefore reducing guilt and therefore increasing it's likelihood. Here the OP is discussing rewarding "good" behavior. The psychology is not necessarily the same. I am surprised at the negative comments on this thread. The feelings the OP is experiencing are real and even legitimate. The reality is that sites do profit massively from user contributed content, and an asymmetry in the perceived value of the transaction can clearly exist. Frankly it amazes me that it has taken this long for rumblings like this to appear.
espadagroup 16y ago
This is very true, honestly when you think about it you really are giving a lot of time just for "ego stroking". Implementing a nice high level tier of benefits for those who contribute the most could be great. For example if you reach a certain threshold of generating content you get entered into a premium tier where you receive a once a month voucher for things or whatever it is. Business's could give these deals to the service too since they'd be rewarding their most adamant customers who are also the ones who would be spreading the service through word of mouth. Sure it takes a bit more work for the service but user engagement would benefit tremendously.
donall 16y ago
It seems to me that providing monetary incentives (or incentives with a clear monetary value, like a cup of coffee in a specific restaurant) for submitting reviews would attract the wrong sort of crowd. An entire new class of reviewers would start using these services. One example would be people who submit a review of a place just before they arrive to get their free coffee. A more worrying case would be users who write a script to generate and submit reviews automatically. Generating text that _looks_ like a review is not difficult and, unlike spam mail, it wouldn't require plugging a product (which is what gives spam its distinct spammy flavour :)) or generating millions per day. In practice, it would be very difficult to filter that sort of thing out and there would be so much noise that the value of the site to real users would plummet.
mistermann 16y ago
I'd be happy if TripAdvisor jkust put a little effort into making theirs site useable. For the reviews, I think they are trying to minimize the content per screen (I suppose to load more pages and display more ads?) I can understand trying to maximize revenue, but the combination of increasingly poor/fake reviews with the (deliberate) bad user interface is, for me, pushing that site to the point of uselessness.
dasil003 16y ago
I empathize with the feeling here, but it seems to me like the author is detached from both the reality of user motivations and the economics of UGC sites. There are lots of reasons people use sites and create content, and I can't think of any case where they are monetary. Even something like Mechanical Turk I believe has a significant non-monetary aspect to it considering the pittance that people make doing it (granted it's supplemental income if they are stuck in a under-utilized desk job all day). The fact is that by boycotting content creation he is just joining the silent majority of people who don't post anything. Even on Facebook where there is pretty much nothing but UGC I suspect the majority never post anything. The question of what motivates people probably has a different answer on every site, and it's certainly worth exploring, but the answer is not to be found in what this guy thinks he deserves. It's sort of funny how in a few short years there is a growing contingent of people who have gone from fevered excitement over new free services to bitterness over how much those free services are making from their content in just a few short years. But let's examine the economics of the situation. How much profit does Facebook make from a status update? A like? A comment? How much does TripAvisor make from a review? I don't have any numbers, but by any reasonable napkin calculation the economic value of a single user's contribution is just not significant. It's probably less than you would be willing to give a bum on the street. If Facebook makes $1 billion revenue off 500 million users, that makes you worth $2 a year not even counting expenses. Of course all users are not equal, so maybe you're an extremely heavy user and you're worth $10 even after expenses. What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?
- asibehar 16y ago
  I agree. Fame and competition - especially for limited resources, whether that's featured placement on a site, elite status, or a limited pool of other rewards - tend to be much stronger motivators than simple financial rewards. Not to say that financial rewards alone can't work (unless I'm missing something, that seems to be how eHow farms most of their content), but my last company (Revver) focused primarily on rewarding users financially for creating and sharing video content. It's not the cleanest example because of some of the related implications of that decision: not including copyrighted content for fear of negating DMCA protection, having large media companies uncomfortable with the reward structure around dispersing content freely, etc. While some content creators really treated the endeavor as a business and looked to maximize profits as much as possible, most were really in it for the fame - and Youtube had the built-in audience we couldn't build (especially without stolen, copyrighted work early on). I still do think there's a happy medium between the two - with fame / competition being the primary motivators and financial rewards being included as bonuses or perks. At Revver we had that priority order reversed, thinking that financial rewards would be big enough motivators to bring traffic and content.
VladRussian 16y ago
time for web2.5 - where user generated content would really belong to users, ie. sites like Yelp would be replaced by anonymous intelligent (as in search and link/references/reviews rating) P2P style trackers who would return to the reviews searching person the reviews (actually the trackers will return references/links to the user's browsing software which will do actual "fetch" of the reviews' content) which would "belong" to the original reviewers and served from their blogs, personal computers/phones/VPS/"spaces" (and accompanied by review creator's adsense ads if they choose so). The reviewer's reviews and ratings thus wouldn't be spread among different unconnected sites. Instead all user's reviews and ratings would be kept at one place if the user choose so. Ie. the traffic will get driven to the reviewer's "place" in this reviewer centric schema. Think Diaspora (the web2.5) vs. Facebook (web2.0).
crasshopper 16y ago
Obvious. The only people who like 4sq are gadget-y people who derive so much pleasure from playing with new things that they will re-arrange their lives to do so.
Jach 16y ago
Yeah, PG, give everyone with over 100 comments free startup funds!

49 points by wheels 16y ago

On the other hand, the value of the reviews on these sites goes down the older they get. On Amazon it seems like the opposite is true. Because of their meta-review process, where users can flag reviews as helpful or not, it seems like old and classic reviews tend to float to the top, while recent ones have a significant hurdle to overcome before they make it to the front page. See for example here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530 (Admittedly, users can also be fickle and support other kinds of reviews for different reasons, cf. http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032G1S0 http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032...)

executive 16y ago
Yes, but Amazon's reviews are for products.. not hotels. Hotels get older and crappier thus newer reviews are more valuable.
- panacea 16y ago
  Two words: bed bugs
- andre3k1 16y ago
  I would necessarily say that hotels crappier as they age, but the service from hotels is elastic. The same hotel visited 2 different times could prove very different. The same book purchased twice, on the other hand, will read the same.

smalter 16y ago

It's stone soup. I benefit from participating in Yelp because I like the community (or used to) -- writing reviews and getting feedback -- and because I read Yelp for reviews (or used to). The guys/girls who sent up the infrastructure to make that happen should get some soup, too, and there's nothing wrong with that. I suppose if I were a pro user that created a disproportionate amount of content, I'd complain more. But I don't think that's the point of the above post. The article seems just to express fatigue with internet-related obligations, which I can relate to. But it's couched in this weird resentful language.

ianb 16y ago

He misses another benefit of writing reviews: rewarding good businesses. And even, in the case of a thoughtful review, enabling a diversity of services -- simple star reviews can't express the give and take of different kinds of service, and so a decrepit-but-lovable hotel can't be distinguished from a decrepit-and-neglected hotel. Reviews make it possible for people to find the right hotel (or any other service) for their wishes, and they don't have to rely on crude measures like brand loyalty. I honestly can't decide what the personal benefit is. If reviews can make a difference in a business, then one review can make a difference -- unlike "likes" or votes or stars a review is not automatically aggregated, it is specifically read by other people. So there is real potential that a review can positively impact a business you like, and provide you real benefit as a result. The negative impact of a bad review has no direct benefit that I can think of -- you will never return, and the only happiness you might derive is schadenfreude if the business's fortunes decline. Either way though there is a sense of satisfaction, which seems to be the primary reason people submit reviews.

thetrumanshow 16y ago
Repeat business is how you reward a business for being awesome. Its over-and-above to give them word-of-mouth recommendations or to post positive reviews. In general I don't think its wrong to ask for something in return for staking your reputation on a recommendation.
- ianb 16y ago
  Wait... are you proposing that you get a kickback for your positive review? I'm not sure that will work so well...
  - thetrumanshow 16y ago
    "I want direct benefits....free parking, a free night, coffee for free or dessert, discounts and so forth" If you provide illiquid perks for participating in a review process, I don't see much wrong with that. If they were handing out cash, then yes, that is a grey area.

sebg 16y ago

"If you want my reviews because your business runs on user-generated-content, you are going to need to do better. Stroking my ego no longer works." I think this is missing the point. Businesses like four-square/yelp/blogs/social media/etc exist not to stroke anybody's ego, they exist to let users have their friends or random strangers stroke their egos. Complaining that a business isn't stroking your ego should tell the business that they aren't making it easy enough for your friends to stroke your ego. Facebook does this brilliantly. My friend bakes a pie and then myself an a ton of other people pile on and tell them it looks good, tasty, when are they making me one, etc.... Facebook doesn't stroke my friend's ego, facebook makes it ridiculously easy for "friends" to stroke my friend's ego.

cwp 16y ago
He's not complaining that his ego isn't sufficiently stroked. He's saying that ego-stroking is insufficient to motivate him to keep writing reviews.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  fine distinction point which i somehow still don't get

rapind 16y ago

Rewards programs like airmiles are pretty successful. Seems to me you could apply similar logic here. Giving back to your contributors would motivate them.

panacea 16y ago
I'm not sure incentivising reviewers is the problem here. It's the respect given to 'pure' non-financially motivated advice that generates trust. The democratization of information that the internet seems to promise is in direct competition with paid-for "page-rank".

kevinskii 16y ago

His "personal benefit" comes from reading others' reviews, which he admits he does regularly.

gabrielroth 16y ago

I want direct benefits....free parking, a free night, coffee for free or dessert, discounts and so forth. I'm pretty sure that small rewards (free coffee) would make people less likely to post reviews, and large benefits (a free night's stay in a hotel) wouldn't be cost-effective.

andrew1 16y ago
If RandomHotelBookingWebsite.com announces that for every five reviews you write you'll earn a $5 credit which you can use for any booking on the site, why would that make you less likely to write a review? I can see that it might not make someone more likely to write a review (why bother for $5?), but why would it stop you if you were going to anyway?
- gabrielroth 16y ago
  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html
- mikeklaas 16y ago
  The same reason that levying a fine on late daycare parents increases the frequency that they will pick up their kids late. Monetary incentives tend to displace intangible incentives. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, IF you've designed your monetary incentives correctly...
  - frossie 16y ago
    No,it's not the same thing as the daycare example. The issue with daycare late fines is that they allow a person to "pay off" bad behavior, therefore reducing guilt and therefore increasing it's likelihood. Here the OP is discussing rewarding "good" behavior. The psychology is not necessarily the same. I am surprised at the negative comments on this thread. The feelings the OP is experiencing are real and even legitimate. The reality is that sites do profit massively from user contributed content, and an asymmetry in the perceived value of the transaction can clearly exist. Frankly it amazes me that it has taken this long for rumblings like this to appear.

espadagroup 16y ago

This is very true, honestly when you think about it you really are giving a lot of time just for "ego stroking". Implementing a nice high level tier of benefits for those who contribute the most could be great. For example if you reach a certain threshold of generating content you get entered into a premium tier where you receive a once a month voucher for things or whatever it is. Business's could give these deals to the service too since they'd be rewarding their most adamant customers who are also the ones who would be spreading the service through word of mouth. Sure it takes a bit more work for the service but user engagement would benefit tremendously.

donall 16y ago

It seems to me that providing monetary incentives (or incentives with a clear monetary value, like a cup of coffee in a specific restaurant) for submitting reviews would attract the wrong sort of crowd. An entire new class of reviewers would start using these services. One example would be people who submit a review of a place just before they arrive to get their free coffee. A more worrying case would be users who write a script to generate and submit reviews automatically. Generating text that _looks_ like a review is not difficult and, unlike spam mail, it wouldn't require plugging a product (which is what gives spam its distinct spammy flavour :)) or generating millions per day. In practice, it would be very difficult to filter that sort of thing out and there would be so much noise that the value of the site to real users would plummet.

mistermann 16y ago

I'd be happy if TripAdvisor jkust put a little effort into making theirs site useable. For the reviews, I think they are trying to minimize the content per screen (I suppose to load more pages and display more ads?) I can understand trying to maximize revenue, but the combination of increasingly poor/fake reviews with the (deliberate) bad user interface is, for me, pushing that site to the point of uselessness.

dasil003 16y ago

I empathize with the feeling here, but it seems to me like the author is detached from both the reality of user motivations and the economics of UGC sites. There are lots of reasons people use sites and create content, and I can't think of any case where they are monetary. Even something like Mechanical Turk I believe has a significant non-monetary aspect to it considering the pittance that people make doing it (granted it's supplemental income if they are stuck in a under-utilized desk job all day). The fact is that by boycotting content creation he is just joining the silent majority of people who don't post anything. Even on Facebook where there is pretty much nothing but UGC I suspect the majority never post anything. The question of what motivates people probably has a different answer on every site, and it's certainly worth exploring, but the answer is not to be found in what this guy thinks he deserves. It's sort of funny how in a few short years there is a growing contingent of people who have gone from fevered excitement over new free services to bitterness over how much those free services are making from their content in just a few short years. But let's examine the economics of the situation. How much profit does Facebook make from a status update? A like? A comment? How much does TripAvisor make from a review? I don't have any numbers, but by any reasonable napkin calculation the economic value of a single user's contribution is just not significant. It's probably less than you would be willing to give a bum on the street. If Facebook makes $1 billion revenue off 500 million users, that makes you worth $2 a year not even counting expenses. Of course all users are not equal, so maybe you're an extremely heavy user and you're worth $10 even after expenses. What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?

asibehar 16y ago
I agree. Fame and competition - especially for limited resources, whether that's featured placement on a site, elite status, or a limited pool of other rewards - tend to be much stronger motivators than simple financial rewards. Not to say that financial rewards alone can't work (unless I'm missing something, that seems to be how eHow farms most of their content), but my last company (Revver) focused primarily on rewarding users financially for creating and sharing video content. It's not the cleanest example because of some of the related implications of that decision: not including copyrighted content for fear of negating DMCA protection, having large media companies uncomfortable with the reward structure around dispersing content freely, etc. While some content creators really treated the endeavor as a business and looked to maximize profits as much as possible, most were really in it for the fame - and Youtube had the built-in audience we couldn't build (especially without stolen, copyrighted work early on). I still do think there's a happy medium between the two - with fame / competition being the primary motivators and financial rewards being included as bonuses or perks. At Revver we had that priority order reversed, thinking that financial rewards would be big enough motivators to bring traffic and content.

VladRussian 16y ago

time for web2.5 - where user generated content would really belong to users, ie. sites like Yelp would be replaced by anonymous intelligent (as in search and link/references/reviews rating) P2P style trackers who would return to the reviews searching person the reviews (actually the trackers will return references/links to the user's browsing software which will do actual "fetch" of the reviews' content) which would "belong" to the original reviewers and served from their blogs, personal computers/phones/VPS/"spaces" (and accompanied by review creator's adsense ads if they choose so). The reviewer's reviews and ratings thus wouldn't be spread among different unconnected sites. Instead all user's reviews and ratings would be kept at one place if the user choose so. Ie. the traffic will get driven to the reviewer's "place" in this reviewer centric schema. Think Diaspora (the web2.5) vs. Facebook (web2.0).

crasshopper 16y ago

Obvious. The only people who like 4sq are gadget-y people who derive so much pleasure from playing with new things that they will re-arrange their lives to do so.

Jach 16y ago

Yeah, PG, give everyone with over 100 comments free startup funds!