spaceponies

I'm a fan of reviews and thought­ful crit­i­cism. I also like to write reviews, but I've had a hard time fig­ur­ing out what to do with them.

Var­i­ous web­sites offer a home to ran­dom reviews. Yelp has decent local cov­er­age. Of course, it turns out that Yelp has a strange busi­ness model which calls its reviews into ques­tion. (Allegedly, they extort local own­ers: "pay us $300 a year to sup­press this neg­a­tive review" that a real per­son may or may not have writ­ten) Friends have pointed me at Angie's List as an alter­na­tive for con­tracted ser­vices, but it turns out that they have sim­i­lar prob­lems.

So what's the big deal? Review web­sites are just a col­lec­tion of reviews. Well, my par­tic­i­pa­tion becomes a fea­ture of that web­site. The util­ity of a review web­site is deter­mined by how much infor­ma­tion it can give you. Unique user opin­ion is use­ful, and there­fore no reviews is not use­ful, one review is some­thing, and ten reviews is pretty good con­tent. There­fore, why would I want to drive traf­fic, via my tiny par­tic­i­pa­tion, to a sketchy ser­vice that shakes down the peo­ple, man­u­fac­tur­ers, and ser­vices I'm try­ing to review?

It's just a drop in the bucket, I know, but it's my drop.

I'm going to post my reviews here. I know, on my own blog! What a thought. In the case of book reviews, I'll keep up with GoodReads. If I find other places where the reviews fit well, I'll put them there as well. The internet's a big place with a ton of con­tent, and lit­tle web­sites get washed away. How­ever, the stronger voices do even­tu­ally get through… whether I'm one of them or not.