Ron Evans

The Scale of Trust

Posted by Ron Evans, Oct 12, 2010 5 comments


Ron Evans

Ron Evans

I'm really enjoying the blog salon discussion by so many smart folks here on ARTSBlog. Technology in the Arts' David Dombrosky and I both decided to pick up the banner of discussing citizen reviewers and trusting online commentary. In his recent post, he talks about the need to educate citizen reviewers so they know how to write an intelligent review. And in my recent post, I talk about training people to trust what people are reviewing right now.

I thought this was a cool way to attack the problem, and people seemed to dig the perspectives via the comments they left. So I emailed David and asked is he wanted to join my on Skype and talk about these two ways of attacking the problem on a deeper level. You can listen in on the recorded convo below:

Ian David Moss (fellow ARTSBlog writer) also chimed in with some thoughts on how he and his friend Daniel Reid had considered some of these issues when it comes to some of the big “vote for your arts group to get a grant” challenges that are happening all over the place. Based on these conversations, I decided to take a crack at a simple rating system, let's call the “scale of trustiness” (or SOT -- let's bring the great word SOT back from its original meaning!) that you can store in your head when you're reading an online review for an arts event. You won't need to remember any number of points or anything -- it's enough that you just consider a particular review on the SOT scale, and if you're weighing two shows to go to, perhaps each review's SOT score can help you decide what to attend.

The Scale of Trustiness (SOT) Score System for Online Reviews


Or, in short, red is bad, green is good. The more “real” you are, and the more of this type of behavior you “publicly” do, the higher the score.

While I definitely am displaying some tongue-in-cheek with a SOT scoring system, the idea of learning to rate the content you encounter out there is going to help people to figure out what they should go and see. It may even help people to write better reviews -- if you know people will trust your review more if you include certain factors, you might improve your writing. And David's idea of arts service organization's training the public to become more polished arts writers is a great idea (listen to the discussion to get filled in).

Got comments or suggestions for improving the SOT scale? Let's discuss and crowdsource it!

5 responses for The Scale of Trust

Comments

October 28, 2010 at 3:58 pm

Great information! The Greater Austin Creative Alliance has developed another good model for encouraging citizen (community) reviewers with their A-Team. Basically, it's a special category of individual membership where those individuals get free tickets for events in exchange for posting a review on NowPlayingAustin.com. I'm not sure if training is provided, but I'm sure those reviewers gain credibility over time.

Hopefully we *can* implement such a program here at the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council in time!

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October 28, 2010 at 1:44 pm

Finally catching up with this wonderful blog series before I meet everyone at NAMP...

Yeah, thanks for "outting" us over here at GPAC, David! But seriously, really enjoyed listening to the conversation and I agree with the idea that instead of bemoaning citizen critique, we should embrace it and provide tools for enhancements. There's room for everyone, in theory. I think that I, too, lean towards Ian's perspective on the trustworthiness scale, but let me also reveal my bias that most of the online reviews I'm seeing are for retail (Netflix, Amazon, clothing) not arts. When this becomes even more ubiquitous, perhaps my mind will change on that.

And here in Pittsburgh, the Art's Council's ArtsPittsburgh events listing MAY be the perfect platform for such a citizens' review corp. As I am adding that to our strategic visioning for building marketing capacity in Pittsburgh over the next 3 years, watch for your personal invitation to the planning sessions, David. It'll be in the shape of a pie...haha!

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October 13, 2010 at 12:45 am

Thank you for the insightful comments guys, and your perspectives -- I can see your point. But I feel more in the other direction -- reviews from people I don't know who don't reveal themselves are much less meaningful to me. It could be someone's Mom writing the review for all I know, and if I can't trace it back to a real person I discount it a lot. Anonymous criticism doesn't do it for me at all, even when others are given the opportunity to agree or disagree with certain reviews (like Amazon does with "how many people found this review helpful). The best case for me is one of my friends on Facebook sees something, and tells everybody what they thought. I know it's a real person, I have a pretty good idea about how they are involved with things, and I know if they leave comments about other shows they've attended. So maybe the idea is not "one review to rule them all" but hundreds of small reviews in trusted friend circles of 100-200 friends on Facebook that would be successful. Good stuff.

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October 12, 2010 at 6:13 pm

Thanks, for the Skype convo, Ron!

I have to agree with Ian on the weight of "thoughtful comments" when compared against anonymity/user identity.

Perhaps, it that we need the transparency for the hyperbolic or overly laudatory/desultory critique.

I know that I may be desensitized due to the amount of time I have spent on Netflix and other site that foster citizen critics, but I am perfectly fine with anonymous criticism when it is well articulated and provides insight for its perspective.

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October 12, 2010 at 4:52 pm

I would basically agree with this classification. The only thing I'd say is that the "thoughtful comments" is worth more to me than some of these other factors. So, for example, if someone had a declaration of bias, link to a public profile, etc., but their (re)views weren't very enlightening or meaningful, I'd probably trust them less than an anonymous commentator who was clearly making me a smarter person.

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