Why You Should RATE Reviews, and do so FAIRLY
Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
You get community points, people earn money, get feedback, improve site |
| Disadvantages: |
you don't get community points, people don't earn money or get feedback |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
The reason I'm writing this, is because Ciao.com (US) is a very new opinion site, but I'm an old hand at this thing. I'm hoping that some of the members here will read this and better understand the dynamic of these sites and begin to act accordingly.I've been writing for opinion web sites for over eight years now. In all these years, I've found that writing for such sites can be not only lucrative, but personally rewarding. On the personal side there are two aspects of why we join and write for such sites. The first one is the writing aspect. Here, we get a chance to express our thoughts about things and get feedback on how well we do this. The other personal aspect is that by connecting with other people, we make friends - albeit only virtual ones, but friends all the same. (As an aside, I have to say that an American site has a huge disadvantage to the British ones because America is so large. Because of this, the 'friends' you make here you may never meet face-to-face, while people on the British sites often set up "meets".) That said, only this site has two different levels of friends - your friends list and your circle of trust - while all the other sites only have either one or the other. The idea behind these lists is to build a type of community, where you can find people with similar interests and learn from others about writing reviews. Eventually, as this site grows and matures, you'll feel this more, and hopefully, people will begin to connect with each other on a more personal, as well as professional level. Unfortunately, I have noticed certain things going on here that are, I believe, major stumbling blocks to achieving any level of community feeling on this site. The first is churners - that's people who post lots and lots of reviews (usually all sub-standard) day after day, but don't bother to read or rate others. On the Ciao sites in Europe that's not allowed and I'm sure that this site will follow in due time. In the meanwhile, when you see people who publish review after review but don't rate, why bother clicking on their reviews, right?Which brings me to people clicking on reviews but not rating them. I see this as a huge problem. First of all, by not rating, you are depriving your fellow Ciao-ers of potential income. Since many of us come to these sites mostly for the opportunity to earn money, this is a cardinal sin on sites that depend on ratings to determine earnings. Eventually, this could keep potentially exceptional reviews from getting the greatest reward this site offers - that being the coveted diamonds in the Premium Fund. This site depends on you, the members of this site, to let them know which reviews are really good, so they can distribute the diamonds to the worthy reviews. If you do not rate a review, they have no way of knowing which reviews are good and which reviews are not. More importantly, by not rating, you are also depriving your fellow members the opportunity to get feedback on their writing skills. Without such feedback we cannot grow as writers, and therefore, we cannot improve our writing skills. If you don't rate a poorly written review as being just helpful or even somewhat helpful, the writer will never know that they should be trying harder. And if they don't try harder, they'll never achieve the quality of review writing that could earn them diamonds. Which, of course, once again comes back to potential pennies in their pockets. So, not only is rating reviews important, but rating them appropriately is even more important. To rate a poor review as very helpful will not indicate to the writer that they should be trying harder. Of course, not everyone will find every review equally as helpful as the next person, so we can (and should) expect that any review will have a mixture of ratings. But if there is only one rating, or no ratings at all, neither this site nor the writer get any indication regarding how good or bad their review really is.Getting back to the community bit here, it seems to me that it would be only common courtesy that when someone goes to the trouble of reading and rating your reviews, that you should click on that person's user name and do the same. No, you don't have to read all of them, but a smattering will let you know if a fellow writer here is a good writer or not, and you will at least be giving back what you've gotten. Only fair, isn't it? And you never know, that person might just become a friend of yours, or better yet, might add you to their circle of trust. And through that, when people see you rating someone else's reviews, they might say "hey, this person is reading and rating a whole lot" and they too might click on your name to see some of your reviews. And when you find people who are consistently good writers, you can subscribe to their reviews.
WARNING This doesn't mean we should be sending out mass mailings of messages to people's inboxes or putting notes on peoples' walls to tell them that we just posted a new review and they should read it. That type of messaging is spamming. What's worse, when more than two people start notifying each other that they've posted a new review so that the others will come by and rate them, that is called making a clicking cartel, and that is totally against the rules here. What's even worse, these groups of people sending messages and posting on each others' walls are giving out unfairly high ratings to all the other people in the group.This is how the circle grows: each of the pebbles of your rating reviews can grow into a larger and larger ripples across the site - generating feedback and return ratings and improved writing and financial rewards. And with time, these ripples can grow into mighty waves of larger numbers of friends, more people in your circle of trust, leaps and bounds in your community points, and best of all, the Tsunami of rewards that gives you the big bucks - diamonds on your reviews.So, let's take the time to read peoples' reviews carefully and rate each and every one that we read as fairly and honestly as we can. It is for the good of this site, and the good of us all - personally, professionally and financially. Thanks for reading!Davida Chazan © May/October, 2008
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