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July 14, 2005Should all User Ratings be Weighted Equally?We've had "Was this review helpful?" functionality for some time now. Yet, as far as I can tell, no matter how helpful or unhelpful the review, the ratings are weighted exactly the same. In other words, if there are two reviews, a 5-start review that is 100/100 helpful, and a 1-star review that is 0/100 helpful, they will everage out to 3 stars. Hmmm. I suppose an argument could be made that, unlike reviews, all ratings are equally valid, because although there is Wisdom in Crowds, not everyone in the crowd is equally gifted at written communication. Then again, maybe all the "Was this review helpful?" votes are another form of crowd-wisdom that could be given consideration, in the form of weigthed ratings? Ehhh... just thinking out loud today...
Should all User Ratings be Weighted Equally?
CommentsThe best benefit of the 'helpful' votes, is just to quickly skim through a longer list of reviews. Amazon might be better served to use an interface like slashdot does for article comments, where less helpful comments can only be viewed by clicking the review title, while older reviews 'modded' as helpful would still be available on the the first page, instead of being buried several pages back. ... more or less - I view the 'helpful' votes as an indicator of how much thought someone has put into their review. But to really know how useful a review is for my buying decision - I would always want to see the other reviews by the same person. Posted by danny at July 24, 2005 1:46 AM |
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