Building Web Reputation Systems- P11

Building Web Reputation Systems- P11:Today’s Web is the product of over a billion hands and minds. Around the clock andaround the globe, people are pumping out contributions small and large: full-lengthfeatures on Vimeo, video shorts on YouTube, comments on Blogger, discussions onYahoo! Groups, and tagged-and-titled Del.icio.us bookmarks. User-generated contentand robust crowd participation have become the hallmarks of Web 2.0.
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Building Web Reputation Systems- P11incentive model depends on the goals you set for your application. One possible ruleof thumb: if users are going to pass money directly to other people they don’t know,consider adding karma to help establish trust.There are two main subcategories of commercial incentives:Direct revenue incentives Extracting commercial value (better yet, cash) directly from the user as soon as possibleBranding incentives Creating indirect value by promotion—revenue will follow laterDirect revenue incentives. A direct revenue incentive is at work whenever someone forksover money for access to a content contributor’s work and the payment ends up, some-times via an intermediary or two, in the contributor’s hands. The mechanism forpayment can be a subscription, a short-term contract, a transaction for goods or serv-ices, on-content advertising like Google’s AdSense, or even a PayPal-based tip jar.When real money is involved, people take trust seriously, and reputation systems playa critical role in establishing trust. By far the most well-known and studied reputationsystem for online direct revenue business is eBay’s buyer and seller feedback (karma)reputation model. Without a way for strangers to gauge the trustworthiness of the otherparty in a transaction, no online auction market could exist.When you’re considering reputation systems for an application with a direct revenueincentive, step back and make sure that you might not be better off with either analtruistic or an egocentric incentive. Despite what you may have learned in school,money is not always the best motivator, and for consumers it’s a pretty big barrier toentry. The ill-fated Google Answers failed because it was based on a user-to-user directrevenue incentive model in which competing sites, such as WikiAnswers, providedsimilar results for free (financed, ironically, by using Google AdSense to monetize an-swer pages indexed by, you guessed it, Google). The Zero Price Effect: Free Is Disproportionately Better Than Cheap In Predictably Irrational, Ariely details a series of experiments to show that people have an irrational urge to choose a free item over an unusually low-priced but higher-quality item. First he offered people a single choice between buying a 1-cent Hershey’s Kiss and a 15-cent Lindt truffle, and most people bought the higher-quality truffle. But when he dropped the price of both items by one penny, making the Kiss free, a dramatic majority of a new group of buyers instead selected the Kiss. He calls this the zero price effect. For designing incentive systems, it provokes two thoughts: • Don’t delude yourself that you will overcome the zero price effect by pricing items low enough in a user-to-user direct revenue incentive design. • Even if you give away user contributions for free, you can still have direct revenue: charge advertisers or sponsors instead of charging consumers.116 | Chapter 5: Planning Your System’s DesignIncentives through branding: Professional promotion. Various forms of indirect commercial in-centives can together be referred to as branding, the process of professionally promotingpeople, goods, or organizations. The advertiser’s half of the direct revenue incentivemodel lives here, too. The goal is to expose the audience to your message and eventuallycapture value in the form of a sale, a subscriber, or a job.Typically, the desired effects of branding are preceded by numerous branding activities:writing blog posts, running ads, creating widgets to be embedded on other sites, par-ticipating in online discussions, attending conferences, and so on. Reputation systemsoffer one way to close that loop by capturing direct feedback from consumers. Theyalso help measure the success of branding activities.Take the simple act of sharing a URL on a social site such as Twitter. Without a repu-tation system, you have no idea how many people followed your link or how manyother people shared it. The URL-shortening service Awe.sm, shown in Figure 5-5, pro-vides both features: it tracks how many people click your link and how many differentpeople shared the URL with others.Figure 5-5. Awe.sm turns URL shortening into a reputation system, measuring how many people clickyour URL and how many share it with others.For contributors who are building a brand, public karma systems are a double-edgedsword. If a contributor is at the top of his market, his karma can be a big indicator oftrustworthiness, but most karma scores can’t distinguish inexperience from a newlyregistered account from complete incompetence—this fact handicaps new entrants.An application can address this experience-inequity by including time-limited scoresin the karma mix. For example, B.F. Skinner was a world-renowned and respectedbehavioral scientist, but his high reputation has a weak ...