Though both the articles we chose were about trust, the things I found interesting were related more to the issue of motivation. Why Review? What is the motivation of putting in effort and time online?
“users who write product reviews are engaged in a variety of activities: promoting agendas, carrying out personal attacks, boosting their own and others’ reputations, building their own identities as reviewers, experiencing for the first time the empowerment of publication and so on.” (David & Pinch, 2006)
The most interesting of the motivations the authors reported were related to Identity and empowerment. I could relate to these two and thought I would share my experience of Yahoo Answers. answers.yahoo.com is Yahoo’s social networking website where you can ask and answer questions. I joined it just to see how it works and what exactly is happening. The status/structure of most active answerers is similar to that of best review writers so I thought it would be interesting to share my experience.
Since I joined, I have posted answers for various reasons. Initially, I used to find questions that really interested me, something about which I had information or an issue I was passionate about. I wrote lengthy answers for some of the questions, often rechecking the information I had by referring to books, online info etc. It was a good feeling of camaraderie, and a feeling that somebody reads/cares about my answers. One of my answers got selected as best answer. Some also got a good rating from multiple users. I got hooked at this point because it was more of ‘recognition’ that I was a useful person and my views were accepted by people around me.
Later, I discovered the point structure. Each level has various rights. I was falling short of 100 points to reach level two which allowed me to rate answers. I desperately wanted to rate answers, especially so that I could give ‘thumbs down’ to a nasty answer to one of my questions. At this point, I started to participate in a calculative manner - Give one liner answers to random questions to get 2 points for each answer and put in effort for answers that have a chance to be chosen as best answers giving me 10 points. It was fascinating to watch how my attitude, objective and level/quality of participation changed over time.
So I pretty much went through these transitions - curiosity, need to share information/views, recognition, calculated effort to get more points to get more power to participate in all forms of communication.
“users who write product reviews are engaged in a variety of activities: promoting agendas, carrying out personal attacks, boosting their own and others’ reputations, building their own identities as reviewers, experiencing for the first time the empowerment of publication and so on.” (David & Pinch, 2006)
The most interesting of the motivations the authors reported were related to Identity and empowerment. I could relate to these two and thought I would share my experience of Yahoo Answers. answers.yahoo.com is Yahoo’s social networking website where you can ask and answer questions. I joined it just to see how it works and what exactly is happening. The status/structure of most active answerers is similar to that of best review writers so I thought it would be interesting to share my experience.
Since I joined, I have posted answers for various reasons. Initially, I used to find questions that really interested me, something about which I had information or an issue I was passionate about. I wrote lengthy answers for some of the questions, often rechecking the information I had by referring to books, online info etc. It was a good feeling of camaraderie, and a feeling that somebody reads/cares about my answers. One of my answers got selected as best answer. Some also got a good rating from multiple users. I got hooked at this point because it was more of ‘recognition’ that I was a useful person and my views were accepted by people around me.
Later, I discovered the point structure. Each level has various rights. I was falling short of 100 points to reach level two which allowed me to rate answers. I desperately wanted to rate answers, especially so that I could give ‘thumbs down’ to a nasty answer to one of my questions. At this point, I started to participate in a calculative manner - Give one liner answers to random questions to get 2 points for each answer and put in effort for answers that have a chance to be chosen as best answers giving me 10 points. It was fascinating to watch how my attitude, objective and level/quality of participation changed over time.
So I pretty much went through these transitions - curiosity, need to share information/views, recognition, calculated effort to get more points to get more power to participate in all forms of communication.
4 comments:
You bring a very interesting point. It makes the online community more similar to the offline, isn't it?
People's initiative thoughts and actions will be changed when receiving some unexpected feedbacks or regulations.
One of my friends told me her exprience of leaving comments on some website. She saw a picture with a very poor little boy finding food on the street. She left a comment of this picture because of her strong feelings. The boy in the picture seems at the same age of her son. She was very excited as this was the first time she published her thought online. But unfortunately, someone else gave a very negative review of her comments. She was so frustrated the she said she would never post online in the future.
So that's how the Q&As on the yahoo works! I always wondered why those people were willingly putting so much effort into giving answers. And like some of the cases mentioned in 'six degrees of reputation', many of the answers are copy pasted or they take the chance to advertise or damage the rival's reputation. Also, as mentioned in the article, if this system is used in a medical information website, the impact could even be lethal.
The feeling of control and that your opinion is more valuable than others and thus have bigger impact is enough motivation to collect those points. In case of answers.yahoo, it motivates the users to post agreeable answers; In amazon.com, agreeable book reviews; for ebay.com for more security and profits.
The motivation factor for answering these questions always kind of fascinated me - I always wondered about it too! One of my friends actually does a lot of "wiki-gardening," and spends hours a day on it! I asked him why he does this, and he just said that he it annoys him when things are inaccurate and he likes to prove people wrong!
My other friend is obsessed with her eBay reputation - she said that if she doesn't ship things out fast enough, no one will want to do business with her - so she is very conscious about the risk of a bad reputation on eBay, and the role that reviews play on your business.
Thank you for the Brickfish info!
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