If I were going to identify grand themes about the impact of the Internet of the last fifteen years, one of them would be the death of authority. The fact that we no longer automatically assign credibility to big enterprises of any sort has been a factor in:
- the inability of the record labels to get us to keep buying crap, once we had a medium to help us find other artists they weren't promoting or signing;
- the inability of newspapers, already reeling from the instant-gratification of cable news, to show us why they were relevant;
- the lack of usefulness of the Encyclopedia Britannica, once we realized that if we did a tiny bit of search engine work, we'd get a better, more current answer.
- The list goes on and on...
Into this vacuum goes the optimists who cite the wisdom of crowds as a replacement for authority. They would tell you that you don't need a Zagat's, because Yelp's crowd-sourced reviews would give you a good idea of where the really good restaurants are. The reviews on Amazon would guide you in considering the right product. You could depend on tripadvisor.com to tell you what the real deal was with hotels and resorts before you booked your vacation. And digg.com would provide a better filter for the news that you should be paying attention to than the editors of any major daily newspaper.
The problem, of course, is that all of these have had incidents that really show that the crowds do have wisdom, but they also have all the negative aspects that come with crowds: hucksters, thieves, and charlatans. Where's there's money and people, there are incentives to pervert the marketplace. For example:
- Yelp's ad sales staff have been caught (and not denied) selling advertising in exchange for hiding negative reviews of businesses.
- Earlier this year, Belkin, a home electronics maker, was called out for paying people to write positive reviews on Amazon.com.
- Vendors are selling votes on digg.com from armies of "phantom" users.
And the story that inspired me to write this:
- Hotel reviews on TripAdvisor.com have been manipulated by the properties to artificially raise their popularity index. The site admits it.
The relevant thing to understand here isn't such behavior exists, its human nature. When the first three homosapiens gathered in a group, I can guarantee that at least one of them was trying to figure out how to get the other two to feed him for free.
Even on my tiny personal blog, because I am ranked well for various poker terms, I have people stopping by to leave a comment that seems to make no sense and then links back to their blog. I unpublish it, of course, but even at the low end, you have to watch out for these sorts of things.
The important thing to notice is how each of the sites in questions deals with it. Fair marketplaces are possible, ignoring both the optimists and the pessimists at each end of the scale, its how you handle the troublesome ones that determines your long term viability, and the wisdom of your crowd. For example:
- Amazon responded to the paid review crisis and suspended third party sellers who engaged in the practice.
- TripAdvisor started marking entire destination properties as tainted, because they suspected manipulation.
Longevity in this medium will be defined by the effectiveness with which each of these properties deals with hucksters. If they fail to, users will notice (probably before management does) and go to another property.
Photo credit: Creative Commons-licnesed photo of street con man in France by Flickr user Nelson Minar
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