3. Manipulated: ˝Which Ice Cube Is the Best?"
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Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 3. Manipulated: “Which Ice Cube Is the Best?" Joseph Reagle Published on: Apr 08, 2019 Updated on: May 14, 2019 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 3. Manipulated: “Which Ice Cube Is the Best?" So I’ve got all these apps on my phone to let me rate restaurants, hotels, food. But why have all these apps when I can have just one that lets me rate everything? Take for example this glass of water, which ice cube is the best? According to Jotly: that one, it’s melting the slowest. Helpful! … It just makes sense. With the Jotly you can rate anything. You don’t need all of those other apps. I mean they all got pretty low ratings anyway. So just delete them. —Promo Video for Jotly In a 2011 video for the fictional Jotly app, an enthusiastic user descends a playground slide, and the app informs him that “5 others have slid here. 10% go faster than you. Share on Twitter!” With a frown, he comments that “this slide is not very exciting” and gives it a “D.”1 This video parodied a proliferation of rating services and applications. In fact, Jotly appeared at roughly the same time as the genuine rate- everything apps Oink and Stamped. Yet, while these were soon discontinued, an actual Jotly app was released with its sardonic edge intact: “Your life is exciting and worth sharing: everything with everyone! Everyone cares about everything you do. Now you can rate your entire life and share the experience.”2 These apps hint at the immense value of users’ online comments, including reviews and ratings. In 2013, Amazon purchased Goodreads, the book review and discussion site, for $150 million. Within four years of its founding, TripAdvisor, a travel review site, was acquired by Expedia for $200 million. This 2004 success paled in comparison to TripAdvisor’s 2011 initial public offering as a separate company valued at over $3 billion. Google purchased the restaurant rating guide Zagat in 2011 for $150 million. However, Zagat may have been Google’s second choice. It is rumored Google offered Yelp $500 million but Yelp walked away, perhaps embittered by instances of Yelp reviews appearing without attribution in Google Places. In 2012, Google continued to feed its appetite for reviews by purchasing Frommer’s Travel for $22 million. In 2013, Google sold the Frommer’s publishing brand back to its octogenarian founder Arthur Frommer: it had the data that it wanted and few plans to do anything further with the brand.3 User comments, ratings, and reviews are valuable because, in economic terms, they address the marketplace problem of information asymmetry. The classic example is a potential buyer’s fear that a car might be a “lemon.” The seller can signal quality by offering a warranty, noting resale value, or (if it is available) providing the car’s maintenance history and mileage. Because some of these things can be manipulated, such as turning back a used car’s odometer, additional sources of opinion are sought, including informal word of mouth (does your friend like the one she bought?), traditional reviews (what did Consumer Reports conclude?), or online reviews (what do users on Yelp say?). 2 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 3. Manipulated: “Which Ice Cube Is the Best?" The information asymmetry is especially problematic when we buy things sight unseen. In the late 1990s, the main concern that people had with online retail was the trustworthiness of the merchant: was the retailer just a scammer with a Webpage? In response, online merchants decorated their pages with assurance seals that vouched for their legitimacy. But this told consumers little about the quality of a particular product. One way to deal with concerns about quality is to have a friendly return policy. Because online shoe stores deal with the fact that buyers never know how well the shoe fits until worn (researchers call this an “experience product”), Zappos (and others) provide convenient and free returns. Some Zappos devotees think nothing of buying three different sizes of a shoe and returning the two that do not fit. It would be ideal if people could avoid making poor purchases in the first place. One approach is for the merchant to select the best products, such as the stylist who curates Shoe Dazzle’s collection. The opposite approach is to sell everything, and let consumers sort it out. Zappos customers review and rate its ninety thousand styles of shoes. Amazon, which acquired Zappos in 2009, sells billions of products to its over 200 million customers. In 2000, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said, “We want to make every book available—the good, the bad, and the ugly. When you’re doing that, you actually have an obligation—for going to make the shopping environment one that’s actually conducive to shopping— to let truth loose. That’s what we try to do with the customer reviews.”4 Today Amazon sells more than books (in 2010, media sales were surpassed by sales of other products), but the philosophy of letting “truth loose” remains the same. Amazon and others have “let truth loose” with user comment, but that truth is being overtaken by fakery and manipulation. TripAdvisor’s extraordinary growth in value has been accompanied by increasing stories of abuse: of proprietors who write their own positive reviews, slam competitors, or pay others to do so. In 2013, a hotel chain executive was writing reviews under a pseudonym, but when he did so using TripAdvisor’s Facebook app, his real name, photo, and location were exposed publicly. Was this fakery the exception or the norm? Who is writing false reviews and why? And what is being done to counteract it? In this chapter, I address these questions and argue that replacing strangers’ recommendations with friends’ endorsements will not solve the problem. Sites that take advantage of our social networks for commercial interests hasten a world in which we are all increasingly tempted to take advantage of each other. Research on Reviews Marketing consultants have issued dozens of reports that document consumers’ reliance on online user reviews—and these firms have a marketing service they want to sell you. Fortunately, the nonpartisan and nonprofit Pew Research Center offers some compelling findings. In a 2010 telephone 3 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 3. Manipulated: “Which Ice Cube Is the Best?" survey of 3,001 adults, 58% reported that they have gone online to research products and services, and 24% said that they have posted comments or reviews about their purchases. (Among Internet users, this is 78% and 32%, respectively.) In fact, 21% of respondents report they had researched a product the day before. In a 2011 Pew survey, 55% of adults said that they seek news and information about local restaurants, bars, and clubs, and 51% of those turn to the Internet for information.5 This use of reviews by consumers affects a merchant’s bottom line. In one early study of eBay, researchers offered identical vintage postcards as a reputable merchant and as a newcomer, and the established merchant’s postcards sold for 7.6% more than the newcomer’s. More recently, a study of digital cameras listed on the price-comparison site NexTag found that a camera’s poor rating was associated with a greater discount from the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Another early study compared how book reviews at Amazon and Barnes & Noble affected sales rankings. Because it can be unclear whether better reviews lead to better sales or if both are simply the result of a better product, using the same product on two different sites helps researchers to focus on the effects of the reviews. In this study, the conclusion was that better reviews were associated with better sales.6 When it comes to dining, clever researchers noted that Yelp rounds off the overall star rating to the nearest half star. So a restaurant with an average of 3.24 is rounded to 3.0 stars, and one with an average of 3.26 is rounded to 3.5 stars. One researcher used discontinuities around these thresholds to estimate that a one-star increase leads to 5% to 9% more revenue. Other researchers looked at how often a restaurant’s tables sold out during the busiest dining hours (using a restaurant reservation site’s database) and found that crossing the 3.5-star threshold increased a restaurant’s chance of filling all of its tables by another nineteen percentage points. Good ratings and reviews have also been shown to increase the sales of hotel rooms and video games. And even when the valence of a review (that is, whether it is positive or negative) does not drive sales, such as in one study of movie ticket sales, the number of comments does: increased awareness seemingly drives greater ticket sales.7 There are hundreds of similar research reports on user ratings and reviews. Scholars study the effects of reviews relative to their valence, variance, volume, and helpfulness. They also analyze reviewer characteristics (familiarity and expertise), reader demographics, and the categories and features of the products. From all of this, some high-level conclusions can be drawn. First, ratings and reviews tend to be more significant for niche or relatively unknown products. Second, reviews tend to follow a “J-shape” distribution because people are most likely to participate when they have a strong positive or negative experience. Imagine a very wide J with some negative ratings on the left, a dip in moderate ratings in the middle, followed by a peak of positive ratings on the right.