I'm Tired of Creating Your Content
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On Amazon it seems like the opposite is true. Because of their meta-review process, where users can flag reviews as helpful or not, it seems like old and classic reviews tend to float to the top, while recent ones have a significant hurdle to overcome before they make it to the front page. See for example here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530
(Admittedly, users can also be fickle and support other kinds of reviews for different reasons, cf. http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032...)
The same hotel visited 2 different times could prove very different. The same book purchased twice, on the other hand, will read the same.
I honestly can't decide what the personal benefit is. If reviews can make a difference in a business, then one review can make a difference -- unlike "likes" or votes or stars a review is not automatically aggregated, it is specifically read by other people. So there is real potential that a review can positively impact a business you like, and provide you real benefit as a result. The negative impact of a bad review has no direct benefit that I can think of -- you will never return, and the only happiness you might derive is schadenfreude if the business's fortunes decline. Either way though there is a sense of satisfaction, which seems to be the primary reason people submit reviews.
In general I don't think its wrong to ask for something in return for staking your reputation on a recommendation.
If you provide illiquid perks for participating in a review process, I don't see much wrong with that. If they were handing out cash, then yes, that is a grey area.
Paying for reviews is paying for reviews integrity compromised, trust lost.
An entire new class of reviewers would start using these services. One example would be people who submit a review of a place just before they arrive to get their free coffee. A more worrying case would be users who write a script to generate and submit reviews automatically. Generating text that _looks_ like a review is not difficult and, unlike spam mail, it wouldn't require plugging a product (which is what gives spam its distinct spammy flavour :)) or generating millions per day.
In practice, it would be very difficult to filter that sort of thing out and there would be so much noise that the value of the site to real users would plummet.
There are lots of reasons people use sites and create content, and I can't think of any case where they are monetary. Even something like Mechanical Turk I believe has a significant non-monetary aspect to it considering the pittance that people make doing it (granted it's supplemental income if they are stuck in a under-utilized desk job all day). The fact is that by boycotting content creation he is just joining the silent majority of people who don't post anything. Even on Facebook where there is pretty much nothing but UGC I suspect the majority never post anything. The question of what motivates people probably has a different answer on every site, and it's certainly worth exploring, but the answer is not to be found in what this guy thinks he deserves.
It's sort of funny how in a few short years there is a growing contingent of people who have gone from fevered excitement over new free services to bitterness over how much those free services are making from their content in just a few short years. But let's examine the economics of the situation. How much profit does Facebook make from a status update? A like? A comment? How much does TripAvisor make from a review? I don't have any numbers, but by any reasonable napkin calculation the economic value of a single user's contribution is just not significant. It's probably less than you would be willing to give a bum on the street. If Facebook makes $1 billion revenue off 500 million users, that makes you worth $2 a year not even counting expenses. Of course all users are not equal, so maybe you're an extremely heavy user and you're worth $10 even after expenses. What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?
Not to say that financial rewards alone can't work (unless I'm missing something, that seems to be how eHow farms most of their content), but my last company (Revver) focused primarily on rewarding users financially for creating and sharing video content.
It's not the cleanest example because of some of the related implications of that decision: not including copyrighted content for fear of negating DMCA protection, having large media companies uncomfortable with the reward structure around dispersing content freely, etc. While some content creators really treated the endeavor as a business and looked to maximize profits as much as possible, most were really in it for the fame - and Youtube had the built-in audience we couldn't build (especially without stolen, copyrighted work early on).
I still do think there's a happy medium between the two - with fame / competition being the primary motivators and financial rewards being included as bonuses or perks. At Revver we had that priority order reversed, thinking that financial rewards would be big enough motivators to bring traffic and content.
> What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?
Must the incentive be economic? Facebook provides value to its users through a social incentive. Likewise, the incentive to share an article on HN or Reddit is your Karma score and to engage in a lively discussion on the topic. Neither of the two is economic.
An interesting point that you failed to make when discussing the economics of the situation is the following, regardless of whether or not a user contributes to TripAdvisor or Qype he can still peruse the site. So my question is the following, what incentive does a user have to contribute reviews to TripAdvisor or Qype versus simply reading others' reviews?
As far as the incentive to write a review on TripAdvisor, from personal experience I'd say the overwhelming incentive is to either benefit or stick it to an establishment you visited.
I think this is missing the point. Businesses like four-square/yelp/blogs/social media/etc exist not to stroke anybody's ego, they exist to let users have their friends or random strangers stroke their egos.
Complaining that a business isn't stroking your ego should tell the business that they aren't making it easy enough for your friends to stroke your ego.
Facebook does this brilliantly. My friend bakes a pie and then myself an a ton of other people pile on and tell them it looks good, tasty, when are they making me one, etc.... Facebook doesn't stroke my friend's ego, facebook makes it ridiculously easy for "friends" to stroke my friend's ego.
I'm pretty sure that small rewards (free coffee) would make people less likely to post reviews, and large benefits (a free night's stay in a hotel) wouldn't be cost-effective.
Monetary incentives tend to displace intangible incentives. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, IF you've designed your monetary incentives correctly...
Here the OP is discussing rewarding "good" behavior. The psychology is not necessarily the same.
I am surprised at the negative comments on this thread. The feelings the OP is experiencing are real and even legitimate. The reality is that sites do profit massively from user contributed content, and an asymmetry in the perceived value of the transaction can clearly exist.
Frankly it amazes me that it has taken this long for rumblings like this to appear.
For example if you reach a certain threshold of generating content you get entered into a premium tier where you receive a once a month voucher for things or whatever it is. Business's could give these deals to the service too since they'd be rewarding their most adamant customers who are also the ones who would be spreading the service through word of mouth.
Sure it takes a bit more work for the service but user engagement would benefit tremendously.
I suppose if I were a pro user that created a disproportionate amount of content, I'd complain more. But I don't think that's the point of the above post. The article seems just to express fatigue with internet-related obligations, which I can relate to. But it's couched in this weird resentful language.
The democratization of information that the internet seems to promise is in direct competition with paid-for "page-rank".