Sunday, November 13, 2005
I am certain I am not the first person to write about this, but here it goes anyway. It's about how websites with community feedback need to be more proactive in weeding out fake feedback. Here's the example I ran into today. On amazon.com, there's a book called Making Instruction Work: Of Skillbloomers: A Step-By-Step Guide to Designing and Developing Instruction That Works (Paperback) by Robert F. Mager. I don't remember why I added this to my wish list, because upon viewing this today I'm not sure I really want it, but it has a 4.5 (out of 5) average star rating from 3 reviewers. People who don't bother to read the reviews (which start more than halfway down the page) are led to believe that this is a great book. Let's look at the feedback. The first review was on October 11, 1999 from an anonymous reviewer who gave it 4 stars. The second review was on June 13, 2000 from Ken Myers of Naperville, Illinois who gave it 5 stars. The third review was on August 29, 2000 from an anonymous reviewer who gave it 5 stars. A link is provided for Ken Myers: "See all my reviews." When you click it, you see that Ken Myers has reviewed 5 other books, all written by the same Robert F. Mager, and all of which he gave 5 stars. Since the other reviewers were anonymous, there is no such "See all my reviews" link for them. Now Ken Myers of Naperville, Illinois might indeed be a true fan of Robert F. Mager's works, but it seems highly suspicious to me that he has 6 five-star reviews of Mager's books and no other reviews, say, of similar books in the same book category. I went back to the first page listing all the reviews. For the first review, 7 of 8 people found the review helpful. For the second, 6 of 6, and for the first, 4 of 4. Indeed, the reviews are written with some thought and are somewhat helpful to helpful. But what Amazon needs now is a way to say "Upon closer inspection, I suspect this review is not genuine" (and why) and make that information publically available alongside the review. I found this same problem while shopping for an emergency radio—many reviews are by people who have only one review within the system. When, on occasion, I encountered someone with even a handful of reviews (like 5), I trusted that review and reviewer a lot more. I wonder how people would react if Amazon decided one day to change how it displays reviews. For example, if one hasn't written at least one review per year since opening an account, Amazon could simply not display any of your reviews. Or one has to review at least 3 books by different writers within the same book category. Or it could implement different or more stringent requirements. Anything to encourage people to have better reputations. Chatted with Steve M, who told me about mturk.com where he says he made about 2.50 USD for an hour's worth of work. Still, Amazon Mechanical Turk is an interesting concept, I think. Errands in the Castro. Patrick ordered the 20-pound (!) turkey he's going to cook for Thanksgiving from Buffalo Foods. I went to Cliff's hardware to pick up parts for the last shelf in the closet shelf project as well as some hardware for hanging Mom Ryan's decorative banners from Ikea later today. Stopped at Mom Ryan's. She gave me a bag of chocolate covered cherries as a late birthday present. She also gave me and Patrick each a Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream bar. Patrick ate his at her place. I saved mine until later. We talked about earthquake and disaster preparedness. We hung up the Ikea banners. The hardest part was that our wire cutters weren't industrial strength, so it took us a while to cut the wire to the length we wanted. When I get my new digicam I'll take a photo and post it somewhere. Dinner with Mom Ryan and Patrick at Blue: Mom Ryan had decaf coffee, lentil soup, chicken breast plate (with mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans), Patrick had iced tea, lentil soup, mac and cheese with chicken, I had hot chocolate, salad in a bowl (which, oddly, came on a plate), and chicken pot pie. Dinner was great, Cathleen was our server, reliably efficient and pleasant, as usual. They have some new servers I haven't seen before. One was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and looked exactly like a Tom of Finland drawing. In fact, it's pretty common to see Tom of Finland men just walking around the Castro or, even more likely, at the intersection of 18th and Castro. At 10:08 PM Pacific time, rei.com is down!