SezWho (SezWho? SezMe) -- commenting reputation systems

Read/WriteWeb's New Comments Feature: SezWho:

At the beginning of this week we introduced a new comments feature on Read/WriteWeb, called SezWho. Basically it introduces comment rating, reputation and filtering to this blog.

This is truly cool. Folks who've been stuck listening to me rant about karma/reputation systems know I've found most of them pretty wanting; far too often, they become a game unto themselves, which biases the data they generate away from any real usability -- and ultimately don't help you know whether or not you can trust the information being presented to you. Isn't the idea of these kind of rating/karma/reputation systems just that?

But most of them fail the transparency test, and some of them (slashdot, for instance), have turned karma into a game where some users see the purpose of the site is to win the "karma game".

I'm really happy to see a system like SezWho under development. First, they seem to be heading down very similar paths to the ones I've been investigating, which makes me feel comfortable that (for once) I'm not a blooming idiot, and second, it means I can adopt this in and not have to write it. I'm all for it. Here's hoping we see this (or something like it) on Typepad as soon as possible; it's an interesting enough system to cause me to consider moving platforms to get my hands on it down the road....

Jitendra said they have over 50K users with profiles currently. They are growing rapidly, via individual sites like Read/WriteWeb - but they are also "doing deals with big social media hosting companies". SezWho supports Wordpress and MovableType platforms at this point, but they are working on phpBB and vBulletin. Plus they will eventually make their APIs public.

And hopefully Drupal and Ning and Typepad...

I mentioned recently that improving community on Read/WriteWeb is my number 1 priority for the site; and SezWho has certainly given our comments some 'wisdom of the crowds' functionality. Rating, reputations, filters - these are all features we regularly see in the web products we report on and analyze at R/WW. So SezWho allows us to experiment with the same technologies in our own community. Plus of course, SezWho is a very 'read/write' technology - as it highlights the comments of our readers and hopefully encourages more community as a result.

To some degree, success or failure of a community comes from the 1% of the community most committed to and involved with the community. The struggle for community owners/leaders is to identify and nurture them. This system is one way to help automate that challenge. But there's a second challenge, which is how to identify "bad data".

For the most part, I don't think you can -- but what you can do is use reputation engines like this to help users understand how much to trust data. Consider a restaurant or hotel review. How often have you gone to a site like, say Citysearch or Yelp or Orbitz and looked at a restaurant or a hotel, and it has four reviews -- three five stars, one one star, nothing in the middle. Makes you wonder which of those reviews came from the owner or the night manager, and whether that bad review is because the waitress turned down someone who made a pass at her, or is from the chef's ex-wife?

the problem is, all of that may be true -- or none of it. And you, looking at it, have absolutely no way to tell. So those reviews are useless to you, because there's no context. The reviewers have zero transparency, so you have no way to rate the raters. Might as well not bother having them.

This is a step in that direction. The reviewer now has an identity and a history (remember, the identity doesn't have to identify who you are; just that you are you; the internet has bought in way too hard on the need for anonymity, when in reality, we should be adopting in the use of the pseudonym instead -- because you can build a reputation and identity around a pseudonym without having to reveal your REAL identity, and with pseudonyms, you can build and manage multiple identities for multiple environments if you want, a useful real-world construct we haven't really thought about much online). It creates a context for looking at the reviewer and judging whether to trust them -- you can now see whether or not that review came from someone who ONLY reviewed that hotel or restaurant, say. It's not perfect by any means (what is?) but it makes it a lot harder to game.

Frankly, if I were Six Apart, I'd have these folks on the phone to talk about buying them. It's a nice adjunct to TypeKey, and it lends itself to both an open model and a premium model nicely -- you could open up a general service to all, put advanced features into Movable Type and Typepad, and then sell site-specific services to sites that want this kind of reputation system but using only data from their site and users, not tying into the net in general. there are any number of situations where I'd want that, personally.

This kind of reputation system has been growing in influence in the email side for a while, and looks to be doing pretty well. This is taking that concept and rolling it into the user-generated content space.

It's about time, and I hope this puppy succeeds wildly.

Comments

[Sramana Mitra]

i wrote about them here:
http://sramanamitra.com/2007/07/19/a-service-for-active-netizens/

[Jitendra]

Hey Great piece and great job framing the problem...Seems like you have been thinking about this for a while.

-Jitendra
SezWho