Online reputation online is a fascinating area, partially because eBay, through their feedback score, is the only company to have reached scale. Startups like Rapleaf and iKarma are still young and struggling.
Perhaps their flaw has been in taking the high road, and going out of their way to ensure that reputational feedback is being left by verified identities.
New startup Gorb, which I first read about on David Berlind’s blog, takes no such high road. Gorb allows, even insists on, anonymous comments and ratings about an individual. Like someone? Hate them? Tell Gorb all about it, using their handy Ajax slider to rate them from 1 - 10 in their professional and personal lives, and leave written comments as well.
Arguing that a “non-anonymous system also contains “noise,” as reciprocity creates a fake positive response,” Gorb founder Leonard Boord (trash or glorify him here) thinks that anonymous feedback is the only way to go.
They do have some checks on the wholesale slaughter of people’s reputations. Each written comment can be voted, Digg style, up or down by other users. If lots of people agree with you, your reputation is enhanced. If they disagree, your reputation suffers. The person being discussed may also respond to each comment.
I agree with Boord that services like LinkedIn are often a farce - people leave good feedback on others in the hope that the gesture will be returned. And since the user must approve feedback before it is published to the site, only gushing testaments to perfection ever see the light of day.
Rapleaf does a much better job than LinkedIn at getting balanced feedback from users. But there is still a cost to posting something negative - Rapleaf isn’t an anonymous service, and comments are at least tied to a user name.
With Gorb, there’s absolutely nothing to lose by telling someone how bad they smell, or how much you dislike the tone of their voice. Libel away.
I think Gorb goes too far, and will appeal mostly to people who have highly negative things to say about others. Without fear of being held accountable for their words, people may go a little overboard in their quest to “help” people know the truth about themselves.
But Gorb also has the smell of success about it. People will be drawn to this in the same way they slow down when they pass a highway accident. They are tapping into basic human psychology, and may make a buck or two on the back of what is sure to be the misery of others.
Seth,
I don’t think they will lose any cases, I think they will get tired of spending all their time and money defending against lawsuits.
Ebay has ways to remove stuff for this very reason, why put your legal position at risk case after case when you can just build a reasonable removal system?
Over time these sites will fold under the legal pressure, it is just to hard to run a business on adwords while you are getting sued.
Arrington - You’re exactly right, not being able to opt out is going to cause problems for someone at some point. Whether it really matters is something else - I imagine that even if this takes off, anyone reading it will take the results with a grain of salt, considering what the site is. If checking this becomes a standard hiring practice, along the lines of companies Googling potential hires, that might be a problem.
Personally, I’m not inclined to take the Gorb too seriously. Then again, you attract a lot more trolls than most people, so a rating on a site that seems like an interesting diversion to us might be a bigger deal for you.
Still, I think there’s some value in people being able to say things about you that you have no control over, and the fact that users can rate feedback should at least mitigate the effects of trolling.
But you might be right. At the very least, I’m interested in seeing how things shake out, and whether it becomes another bilious cesspool, or if worrying about your Gorb rating becomes a sort of community conscience for the Internet.
When FuckedCompany was a really big deal in 2002-2003, there was a ton of gossip and really hurtful stuff about just about everyone in companies that were in trouble. Who was a slut, who was a womanizer, who stole what, etc. Some of it had a factual basis, some didn’t. All comments were anonymous. It was incredibly hurtful to people who got caught up in it.
I wasn’t around for the heyday of FC, or at least wasn’t aware it got that bad, so I’ll have to take your word on that. I think you have a good point, and I certainly don’t want to marginalize the effect that sort of talk can have, but there are a couple of reasons I think, or at least hope, that Gorb won’t wind up like that.
First, you’re talking about FuckedCompany. I’m guessing their user base were mostly either pissed about losing their jobs recently, bubble gawkers trying to stir up gossip, or just jerks looking for a place to troll. Either way, a bit narrower and less savory slice of the Internet than Gorb might (I want to stress the “might”) get.
Secondly, Gorb has mechanisms to downplay the horrible trolling - voting down bad comments, for example. And hopefully your ranking is more than just a straight arithmetic mean of people’s replies, which would end up minimizing the outlying trolls.
Look, obviously you’ve dealt with a lot more of this crap then I have, and a lot of what I’m using to defend Gorb is conjecture or hypothesis at the moment, but I don’t want to write this service off as doomed to failure just yet, or start going Chicken Little about my reputation immediately landing in the gutter. Not to call anyone out, but comment 45 is a good example of what, at this point, I’d call over-reacting, and 50 is actually a little scary, if he’s implying what I think he is.
“In real life”, every defamer has an identity. Even the concept of whispering your opinion to a friend carries the fear of “what if that ‘friend’ lets someone know what I said.” Providing complete anonymity does not mimick anything in real life.
What a complete sham. Leveraging the negative to make a buck. This site will seriously hurt people, no doubt. I am actually pretty disgusted.
http://www.waxy.org/archive/20.....bait.shtml
What ever happened to privacy?
Correction… id does mimick this blog.
@ Rational Beaver (#24)
You win the award for comment of the day.
I agree with others who’ve posted that this is a solution searching for a problem. This seems pretty valueless to me and not very entertaining either.
I think that the safeguards in place at techcrunch for anonymous comments are non-existent. Nobody knows who speaks here, and yet they want everybody else held at a higher standard.
And the overall purpose of this service is what exactly?
If you ain’t got something nice to say, say nothing. The people I have given recommendations to in Linked deserve it. The people who don’t have no recommendation from me.
I do not see it as a great startup in Online reputation arena. It lacks the foundation i.e. feedback based on facts and free from biases.
Also, another area of challenge for online reputation system is multiple identities created by people. Probably a mashup of OpenID and a good reputation system can help solve the problem.
I don’t know what country they’re trying to hit with this ill-conceived service, but it is a clear violation of EU human rights legislation. They are going to get sued to hell if EU state citizens start seeing their details posted up on there with no agreed Transactional Relationship.
Particularly where employment email addressees and details are used to rate people.
I thought of this service a long time ago, for good reason. I wanted people to know what an asshat I had for a neighbor. I know for a fact that my other neighbors agree. Anyway, its counterproductive. While neighbors are a significant element of whether you enjoy your home, you don’t want to start slashing them, since it would drive down property values to say the least. I had great name for it though: neighborater.com
ps: Why would I want anyone to know my neighbor’s an asshat? Because they might change their asshat behavior. In addition, if I was a buyer, I would want this valuable information as a factor when weighing the decision to purchase a home.
Oh please don’t add me to your little internet Burn Book! (a la Mean Girls) Imagine the cat fights which will ensue in high school halls across America. I say go for it!
I don’t know about your experience, but most comments I get on eBay as a buyer are seller ads!
I had once to post a negative comment on a seller and I immediately got a negative comment in return. I was right, the seller was wrong. Nice “rewarding” tactic! I hope that Feedback 2.0 addresses these!
I think it’s terrible that Gorb mixes personal and professional! Those two have to be kept separate!
RapLeaf is a better solution and its growing adoption is the a clear indication. Gorb looks a lot better though. I hate RapLeaf’s poor design. If their badge looked nicer, it would have a much wider adoption. It’s plain ugly!
Check out a different perspective on this site http://www.funanymore.com/2007.....rb-wuffie/
What happens if the system can’t compute because the dynamic nature of the world give it something it
doesn’t have a variable for?
http://www.datconverter.net
Do they really think reputation is just about conduct? What people think about you can depend on lots of other things too, not just on what you actually do.
For example, one of my friends in 7th grade had a very slutty reputation. She was not promiscuous - in fact, she didn’t even date. She did suffer from a severe acne problem, so the local bullies decided she was too ugly to treat like a human being and made up perverse rumors about her as well as harassing her in other ways. Sadly, at our school the jerks like that outnumbered the kids like me who did accept her.
Now I wonder how many people with low ratings on TheGorb will actually be badly behaved and how many will just be lonely kids who can’t be sexy enough for their classmates to respect them…