Rating Websites

For quite some time I considered rating websites to be a very feasible path to incentivize socially-expected behavior in a complex society. Some of my readers know that I have an arm-chair interest in gift economies, and anyone who thinks for 2 minutes about gift economies knows that the success of deferred non-explicit reciprocity depends on peer pressure - there have to be ways people can share not only their expectations of how productive and generous people should be, but also their assessment of each other regarding their productivity and generosity. In short, you typically need face-to-face interaction for gift to go well, and in a large urban or suburban community you need a way to openly and instantly praise good behavior and reproove bad behavior.

That's what I thought something like Yelp could do - until some really lame daycare moms who got pissed off at my mom for kicking them out of her daycare went ahead and made incorrect allegations about her online. One of the ladies first did it on yellowbot - which I was unable to give two shits about, given that pretty much nobody uses it. Then she did it on Yelp, and a second lady who got kicked out of my mom's daycare went and seconded everything that the first lady wrote. That's when I got really agitated. I use Yelp. And I take it very seriously. I do have my ways of telling how descriptive a rating is, but this still worries me. If I hadn't known my mom, I don't know if I would be able to tell whether the first lady's allegations could hold any water. And that's a threat to the usefullness of credit rating websites.

Part of the problem, I think, is that while there is an openly-known target of criticism, the criticizer is more or less anonymous. Were the criticizers subject to the same standards to which they are subjecting their targets, would people be as willing to post untrue statements about their targets?

There might be another issue besides that. Even if everyone were required to state their whole name and post a picture of themselves on their user profiles as a condition of use, there's still the possibility that they might not feel any negative repurcussions for making untrue statements on the rating website. This might be especially true for people who have no vested interest in the accuracy of their ratings - people who post to the website for the sole purpose of shit-talking my mom, and have next to nothing to do with it after that.

For that reason, I have three suggestions for rating websites (and especially for whoever makes a rating website for a network of gift circles):

1. No anonymous posting - everyone who wants to post should be required to complete an accurate user profile, with a picture of themselves, and any comment completed through an account that lacks a complete and accurate profile should be deleted;
2. Possession of a user profile should be conditioned by long-term contribution to an individual or group effort which is itself subject to ratings in the website;
3. Users themselves should be subject to ratings regarding the helpfullness of their reviews (Yelp already allows users to rate each other's comments, but I don't think it allows users to rate each other).

I'll probably come up with more, but I just had to get this off my chest for now.

And for the curious, here's what a Yelp user profile looks like.