Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?

Sorry, I think that crowds are not wise and what we call Wisdom of Crowds is nothing else and not more than the Power of Diversity. This paper shows
that it can be the Weakness of Diversity too.

Any complexity built into a review system is purely to prevent the system from being spammed. The best method to encourage people to review is to show them past purchases once logged in and give them a option to review that product at that time.

The article is assuming the personalities of people who are actively providing feedback are extreme in there views. If a person has a bad experience with a product they will likely write about it. If a product is far better than expected and they are quite happy they feel like telling other people. Many of these people are simply knowledgeable about the product and I find the advise they provide to be very useful. If 20 people review a TV and 5 say the remote is poor quality or broke soon after purchasing it then it is likely my remote will break as well. The reason I expect the remote to break is that 20% of the people experienced this in a short time frame.

In other words I find the reviews to be very accurate as long as they have enough reviews of the product. It is important to only let people review products they have purchased so the system won't be skewed by a agenda.

Isn't this minority called "art critic", "expert reviewer", "journalist", etc. in other contexts? ;-)

I strongly recommend greater participation to enhance sharing and learning, and wisdom.

New technologies like http://urtak.com/about are revolutionizing public opinion research and providing new tools that will promote and advance democracy.

There is another very common reason why ratings are so often in the extremes.

your opinion on a comment or product that you read and think neutrally of can easily be swayed if it has a high number of other people saying it is good or bad.  It will prompt you to re-read it with a new slanted opinion on it, after which you input your vote along with the crowd, making it even more of an extreme for the next reader.

In addition, it generally takes time to sign up for a site to leave reviews.  Often times a person will only sign up once they have something very extreme they need to say about a product.  Before that point they don't feel the need to spend the time to sign up to leave their say.  This coupled with the information from the article stating that most people only leave 1-2 reviews, means the majority of those reviews will be extreme.

It will be interesting to see how many more people comment/rate comments on this article versus the others.

The term "Crowd Wisdom" is too often an oxymoron. Take a gander at Jonathan Livingston Seagull if you disagree. The problem of a minority having too much power is older than the printing press. Deal with it!

I question everything, especially opinions... do you guys think maybe I have trust issues or is this degree of skepticism healthy?  The irony is hilarious, is it not?

This is an interesting article that highlights that people submitting reviews or ratings of products on sites like Amazon do not provide acurate respresentation of the populations view. This as mentioned is due to the extreme lows and high reviews prevalence, super satisfied and horrible dis-satisfied people tend to comment and rate, while netural people do not.
  The thing missing in this article is how the consumers interpretative these rating an rankings. I can speak for myself, where I look mainly at the negative review and determine if their is any product defects that are common, opinion usually mean little to me. Hence, I ignore the opinions and look for evidence of product failure.
I would love to see a follow up article explain how on average people interpret these ratings and rankings.
  Dr. Brian Glassman
Ph.D in Innovation Management from Purdue University 

Maybe I'm dense, but if you have enough access to the data provide voting transparency, couldn't you build in a mechanism that allows one person one vote?  If you verified by IP address I'd think you could get a long way toward the one person one vote.  That would solve that aspect of the problem.  The other, the fact that some people express extreem views... so what?  If that's their opinion then that's their opinion.  What's the problem with that?  Excluding their voices is a form of censorship.  I'm against it.

The picture very well depicts how the crowd opinion and hence the crowd behavior can be wrongly skewed by a very few.Solution is that the voting engines need to mention the results as a percentage of the total users and need not give weightage/publish till at least 60% vote.

Comsumer’s Ratings of Products on the Internet

Several years ago, MIT Technology published an excellent article in its magazine about the internet and "group think", and how the more people involved in the process, it is more likely that the right political decisions will be made as opposed to a small number of "experts".

For this to be valid, one's information must contain a true cross section of society for its opinions... And the conclusion was that the internet provides that service with the above requirement.

Of course, the problem is that one has to separate the garbage from quality. And the conclusion was that bloggers that write crap, get lost in never-never land in time due to credibility.

Two examples. One, the ten or so advisors to LBJ and Nixon, during the Vietnam War, and the same with the Iraqi War with Bush illustrate the folly of “experts”.

The group think was way ahead of the "experts" in making the decision .

Hence, the internet, if used wisely, represents the third communication revolution.

The first, was controlled by the church and kings, they control of the knowledge, the second, moveable type which gave knowledge to the serfs.  But still the second was under the control of the publishing houses and main stream newspapers, which propagated its own self interest... ie Time magazine, etc.

After Vietnam, the press was blamed for losing the war; however, when I wrote my book, about the sixties, covenantbetrayed.com, I read all the Newsweeks from 1958 to 1975. My conclusion was that the MSM was a strong proponent of the war, up until Tet. Throughout all of 1967, we got reports that we were winning, and than Tet. After Tet, no body believed anything regardless of whether or not the government was for once actually telling the truth... that Tet was a severe blow to the Viet Cong.(By their own admission.)

Regardless, the information was available if one searched for it, from where the antiwar movement gathered its information. Bernard Fall’s books and many others told us that the Domino Theory did not apply to Vietnam, since Vietnams history for the past 2000 years was to fight back against Chinese expansionism into Southeast Asia.

Now, we have the internet, the third, but we are seeing more and more control of the internet. ie, China. Even the United States want authority to close the Internet during a “national emergency”.

OK, I am digressing from the topic, but the point I want to make is that although user’s recommendations have serious flaws, a careful search, for other sources of information a consumer can still make correct decisions.

I am far more likely to reject a product based on just one or two poor ratings despite a ton of five star ratings. So, in some way, the ratings still have some value. The big bugaboo, is that often return policies are so short that one doesn’t have sufficient time to fully evaluate a product. Here again, I stay away from these internet sites.
So, make sure what the return policy is, and if there is a restocking fee. (something I also avoid.).

Hey, anyone wanta buy a Sangean HD radio? I got one I will sell at half price, never used, ‘cuz the software to run it is just too complicated and always crashes. Burned once, but not again. Actually, I would be ashamed to sell this to anyone. So, I am stuck with it.  I don’t even want to donate it, because it will get sold to some other sucker.

ps, I didn't mean to plug  my book, but just used the experience I had writing it to illustrate a point and felt I should give the reference for some validity as opposed to just pulling my comments without out documentation.


ron hansing 9.17.9

The conversation needs to be different when we are talking about social networks within an organization’s firewall. In that instance, it’s not about trusting the crowd’s wisdom. Rather, it's about managing the community by knowing whose input should be trusted, along with managing and moderating the community. This must all be done in the context of how the community relates to business initiatives and the information assets of the organization.

At our company, Inmagic, we call this the "social volume knob." As organizations roll out social technologies, they might want to start with the volume knob set "low" for certain classes of users. For example, some users might be allowed to tag one type of content, or other certain users can blog or comment.

In other instances a "high" setting on the social volume knob may be more appropriate because the wisdom of the crowd is more crucial to have. In these instances, users and members of the network may be given more freedom. In corporate settings, this is usually provided to domain experts, who can be authorized to write blog posts and have access to full social capabilities.

And then you have everything in between. Each contributor's access capabilities can be adjusted, so perhaps one user can blog, rate, and comment, while another can just comment -- and only on certain content. This lets vetted information retain its veracity, and provides control over what content gets socialized, and how.

Unmanaged social knowledge networking risks culture shock, or worse, information chaos that can undermine or overwhelm the knowledge management initiative.

Mike Cassettari
VP Marketing and Business Development, Inmagic
http://blog.inmagic.com

This article is quite interesting to me - as a consumer, as a technology industry professional, and as a market researcher).
As new media continues to proliferate, it causes us as consumers (of news, services, products, etc.) to change the way we take in and process information. For most people, I think the feedback on a user-input site is but one piece of information that they process. If I am shopping for a TV, for instance, I would read the comments from users/purchasers, look at input from respected, independent sources, ask friends, and look at it myself - before making my own judgments.
The so-called Wisdom of Crowds (like practically any other market feedback system) can be influenced by a small group. I believe as time goes on, however, these systems will continue to be fine-tuned to improve the information provided.
However, opinions are opinions - whether they are from an individual that has written 5 of them or 500 of them. We just need to refine our system of making our own judgments to accommodate this type of feedback.
So, yes, the system can be influenced by a small group. But, if you wisely use it as just one source of input then you should be okay.

I believe that the wisdom of the crowd only works in cases where one has to predict some thing that can be easily quantified (eg. number of jellybeans in a box). Using this principle for any thing that involves intangibles may be stretching it a bit too far.
I have started an experiment at( http://socialexperiment.heroku.com ) where people are asked to guess the weight of three objects, one is very light object, one is a very heavy object and the third is a person. The data collected so far shows that people are good at guessing the weight of a man but are really bad (way off) when guessing the weight of very heavy and light object. Which clearly shows that wisdom of crowd only works in cases when we can trust the intuition of the crowd even if the population is diverse.