Epinions.com

Epinions.com is an online website that was established in 1999. At Epinions, readers can buy items, or read reviews about them before deciding to purchase. Contributors do not need to be webmasters to write at this website, although a password is required along with an online ID. It does not observe NPOV rules; quite the contrary, writers are allowed and intended to write their own personal views, satisfactions or dissatisfactions with products. This is the website's aim: To give future customers a preview of what they might expect should they decide to buy a certain product or use a certain company, or even watch certain television shows or movies. A review originally had to be at least 100 words, but later on the minimum was reduced to 20 words, with such short reviews classified as "Express Reviews". There is no maximum length.

Epinions is a place where members can write reviews, as well as other kinds of opinions. Each contributor must rate the products after their reviews are written, one star being the worst rating, five stars being the best. For several years now, each review comes with brief Pro and Con sections.

Epinions offers an Income Share, which ostensibly rewards reviewers for how much help they've given users in deciding to purchase products. Epinions claims that you are also rewarded for helping visitors not purchase an item. However, since the end of the dot-com era, any and all payment is practically non-existent for most users. The Eroyalties plan, the payment per read of your opinion, has steadily decreased and finally been unilaterally abolished and Income Share has dwindled to a trickle, despite strong profits for Epinions itself.

A major problem with the Epinions.com system is that it pays members for their 'opinions'. This has led to a rash of fake reviews with some members writing hundreds of reviews on high dollar items to earn more income share. Many of the advisors and top reviewers on Epinions.com treat this site like a business and copy product information from product websites and post this as a review. It is hard to distinguish real consumer experience from copied data.

Members can rate opinions by others as Off-Topic (OT) Not Helpful (NH), Somewhat Helpful (SH), Helpful (H), and Very Helpful (VH). ("Express Reviews" are instead rated on a "pass/fail" basis, with raters choosing to "Show" or "Not Show" them.) Members can also decided to "trust" or "block" (formerly known as "distrust") each other. The ratings and the Web of Trust combine to determine in what order opinions are shown. The order you see depends on your own trust and block choices. The order you see as a visitor is determined by default list of members you supposedly trust.

Some members are designated as "advisors" (this title has changed several times over the history of the site), which gives their ratings greater weight in determining the prominence of reviews. They also have an additional rating, "Most Helpful", which they can give to the one best review of any product. (At one point in the past, any member could rate something "Most Helpful", but this seems to be available only to advisors now.)

Advisors on Epinions.com have created a system where only reviews full of 'scads' of information will display to the public. This often leads to the TMI, or information overload factor that turns off consumers. More often than not, honest consumer opinions are buried by the Epinion's community building up their own reviews.

Abuse of the site has always been a problem. There are so-called Rating Circles whose members "trust" and "rubberstamp" each other's reviews and are often aggressive towards members who dare to give them anything but the highest rating. They play these rating games to gain more rating power and skew the Income Share payments. These so-called circle-jerkers often "block" good members who do not play along with their gaming of the system.

External link

• http://www.epinions.com/
• the epinions.com dictionary: http://www.epinions.com/content_1370660996