Rating swaps and undiscriminate fans hurting squidoo?
Michelle Willow and aj2008 were having a debate on Saturday about whether it hurts squidoo if people rate lenses only because other people have rated their lenses aka rating swaps.
Personally I think it depends. If I rate a person’s lenses what I see happen is: they look in my list of lenses to find the lenses they think are interesting and see if they like them and then rate them. I do something similar if people rate my lenses.
I also tend to become a fan of people who have rated my lenses. That way I get to see their squidcasts and if anything good comes up, I can rate it quickly. I think this is especially useful to new lensmasters. I mean, they will often not have very good lenses the first time I drop by, but if they improve I am more likely to find out about it if I befriend them.
Of course if ratings really become meaningless because people only rate lenses BECAUSE people have rated theirs, then the system no longer works. But the reality is more subtle than that, I think. People rate lenses for a mixture of motives. Factors like the following ALL play a part:
- Has this person rated my lenses? Have they linked to one of my lenses? Do they have a link plexo on the lens where a related lens of mine can be listed? If so – I am more likely to rate their lens. BUT there’s no guarantee. A sucky lens can still get only one star or simply none at all.
- Is this lens good? If so, I will likely rate it – once I found out about it. Becoming a fan of people makes me more likely to find out their great lens exists. This is precisely how the system is supposed to work. If it is useful I am likely to also favorite it. I wonder at people who favorite almost any lens. Personally I favorite only lenses I am likely to want to return to.
- Is this lens decent? If I can’t comment, and can’t add a link to a plexo, and can’t show who I am at all – I am more likely to rate 4 stars, depending on the quality. I’m not sure this is how the system is supposed to work – but it’s part of the tit for tat spirit. If there is no chance of the lensmaster finding out who I am, they can’t reciprocate. Makes me more likely to give a lower rating. But a 5 star lens will still get 5 stars. However, the bar on the content is raised. I am more likely to just give 4, 3 or even less stars on a lens that leaves out the option of feedback in other ways.
The fact is: the sucky lenses I’ve seen rarely get many people to rate them or favorite them. I’ve looked at a great number of sucky lenses to day and only a few had a decent number of people rating them. Even in those cases I don’t think they are likely to get a lot of visitors, because who would ever link to a sucky lens? Since lensrank only depends partly on ratings, and much more on traffic, putting energy into swapping ratings is really no good. It just isn’t energy efficient.
4 Comments »
CrypticFragments said :
October 20, 2008 at 10:18 am
I disagree. I don’t think this is what is meant by ratings exchange. I think ratings exchange means indiscriminately saying I’ll give you 5 stars if you give me 5 stars. Genuine exchange of ratings is (I hope) different. If you discover someone via their comment or rating of your lens and then go genuinely rate some of theirs which you may not have known about before…that’s good. However if you go automatically give 5 stars to each of the lenses of someone who has rated/commented yours…that’s BAD. I try to be genuine when I rate, but the ratings scale is highly subjective- if a lens is very good but not AWESOME do you give it 3,4,or 5 stars for effort and potential? there was a time when I never gave 5 stars..now I do, partially because I have gotten so many, and partially because effort deserves reward.
sorry- didn’t intend for this to be so long!
mulberry said :
October 20, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I don’t get too caught up in this topic because I don’t think it’s that meaningful or something we can control. As you stated traffic is at least as important in getting lensrank. Personally I feel we should spend more time on outside traffic that comes from targeted visitors if we really want to experience “financial” success. There are some very good lenses that get very few stars and some mediocre ones that get a ton of 5 stars. (I can say that about my own in fact..I have some that stink and they get rated highly and I have others that are pretty good and get almost no attention.) I like the ability to give stars and I do tend to be generous because I genuinely want people to succeed. (I have given low ratings on occasion however as we all want the really bad stuff to sink out of sight)
aj2008 said :
October 21, 2008 at 8:02 am
You need to have a look at Mimi’s blog. She has found a very “sucky” lens and my view is that it is also probably in breach of copyright.
I think by now everyone knows what I think about trading ratings so I wont go into that.
If I see a sucky lens I do not rate it at all, because the genral consensus is that 1 star is better than no stars so I quietly move on. The only lenses that I report are any that may have a G-Rating, but clearly are not.
I will generally always rate a lens that I read – but I wish the stars that we click on were at the bottom of the page. They could still leave the summary at the top.
spirituality said :
October 21, 2008 at 8:09 am
The thing is though: that lens that mimi found actually didn’t have all that many ratings. It got to where it is in lensrank by SEO tactics that in this case did not bring visitors the best user experience.