It's interesting that something as old fashioned as trust keeps coming up as the theme for me in a course on social networking. Or maybe it's predictable?
The way I read our ITEC656 readings is by opening a new tab for each reading, and then reading each tab, starting from the right (in effect, reading from the bottom of the list to the top). So I read the older How Many Reviewers... article about Yelp before reading Review Site Yelp Draws Some Outcries of its Own this evening. As I was reading the first article, I was remembering that I'd read of some very fundamental criticisms of Yelp somewhere, and I hoped that this would be addressed.
I was glad to see the trust issue addressed in the second article (which I think I'd read previously). It sounds like Yelp has a lot of potential, but they need to work out a policy where the readers, reviewers and reviewees are confident of the accuracy of the posts, and have a recourse when they feel something has been done unfairly.
Probably something with some transparency would do the most good. I'm thinking of the moderating and meta-moderating system using at Slashdot.org where readers moderate comments about news articles, and other readers rate (meta-moderate) the moderations, as a check that someone's not being overly subjective in their moderations. I think it works pretty well, or it did back in the day when I spent a lot of time reading comments. Perhaps something similar would work for Yelp. It works because it's fairly transparent and people understand how it works, whereas the Yelp system sounds like it's shrouded in mystery.
Trust is required for social media to work: I need to trust Facebook to not sell too much of my personal information before I will join, I need to trust my friends that I add to my profile to not spam me or abuse my declaration of our relationship, and I need to trust the reviewers I read on Amazon (I don't use Yelp) that they are real uninvolved consumers rather than vendors or manufacturers.
I've made purchasing decisions purely based on reviews posted to Amazon - that is, negative reviews have turned me off of an item, if I feel the issue reported is important to me. Funny though thinking about it: I am not as easily swayed by positive reviews. I think I may intrinsically be not trusting the good reviews as easily as I trust the negative ones.
What online service do you trust, or not?(Photo credit HG Rules)
