Many of these systems are designed for easy entry in order to collect as much input as possible so the site (business) appears successful and supported by an engaged community. Adding the functionality necessary to garner better ratings would have an impact on the volume of ratings.

But I do see this changing, businesses are starting understand the real value of good UGC.

Thanks for the article, it articulates a lot of what I’ve been trying to talk with my clients about, I’ll get a lot of use out of it!

I think the behaviors we see today indicate how well, or how poorly, these systems are working in their current social context and within existing constraints on implementation. Some contexts (eg autos custom) may have turned into gestural and signalling systems (as you note, maureen). Some could become richer (Scott) with better filtering and pre-qualification. I don’t know if Goog will open up its data, or FB, but i do think that in the distributed conversation space (activity streams) attempts are being made to capture and share more meta data. Analytics engines and metrics providers will jump on this as it becomes available. It’ll take time, it seems only inevitable. And I think it’s worth the social design community thinking about, for there are certainly design issues involved, both of the UI and social interaction models.

In the article the authors write about the one community that *did* have a healthy mix of ratings, Autos Custom.

“Looking more closely at how Autos Custom ratings worked and the content was being evaluated showed why 1-stars were given out so often: users were providing feedback to other users in order to get them to change their behavior. Specifically, you would get one star if you 1) Didn’t upload a picture of your ride, or 2) uploaded a dealer stock photo of your ride. The site is Autos Custom, after all! The 5-star ratings were reserved for the best-of-the-best. Two through Four stars were actually used to evaluate quality and completeness of the car’s profile. Unlike all the sites graphed here, the 5-star scale truly represented a broad sentiment and people worked to improve their scores.”

The idea behind the post is to identify nonprofit leadership through social media reputation scoring.

http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/Blog/Controller/viewEntry?permalink-title=identifying-nonprofit-leaders-using-social-media

If you have a moment, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Regards,
Scott Stadum
Idealist.org