Ask HN: What would it take to rate the web?
Ended up starting a simple project over the week with that in mind [1], but wanted to discuss with others here too.
Spam reviews: With moderation and anti-spamming tools, it seems to have “worked” for rating products (Amazon), offline businesses (Yelp), and others so why not online services (websites)? The 5 star rating system measures “satisfaction” somewhat well, but the “popularity” part (number of stars) is easier to spam. I really liked the format used in [2], so I used a modified version of that in my project. I feel the “never heard of it” option could suppress spams.
Apathy: What would motivate folks to start contributing? It should probably be dead simple so I thought a browser extension could work well, both for the people leaving and consuming reviews. This obviously has its limitations on mobile. The real motivation probably comes from the fact that the review was helpful to somebody. People seem to go nuts on reddit gold, so I guess that’s validation if any, so I tried to add something like that.
Privacy: Related, but some people don’t like leaving traces behind on the web. I feel the best way is to be transparent as to what is happening and give them as much control as possible. For example, make it easy to view and remove everything they know about the user. Still probably won’t satisfy everyone.
There are other smaller issues that I can think of (e.g. not all websites fall into a "rate-able service" category), but probably missing some big ones too. Please feel free to share what you think.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lome/necafokehnnolgnjmapmlmhigjmlelpl
[2] https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/overview/
2 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 19.6 ms ] threadFirst, you'll never get users to do it at huge scale, which is what you need. Those days ended - to the limited extent they existed at all - with sites like StumbleUpon declining and with the arrival of the smartphone with apps dominating most average usage. Unlike food (Yelp), the average person has zero passion for the Web and zero interest in taking the time to provide feedback in such a manner (they have as much passion for the Web broadly as they do any other utility; they use it, yes, they get upset when it doesn't work, yes, but they have zero passion for it). To get people to dedicate time consistently, you need passion. The young Web had that because of who the early users were (early adopters have passion), and it was a shiny new toy even to the average person (at least for a few years).
Second, the interface point (for initial rating and discovery sorting) has to be tied into an already existing epic scale discovery point. That's because you aren't going to be able to get people to first browse to the rating site for discovery purposes, the audience for that would be relatively small (which is why StumbleUpon is dead). There are only a few sites/services that could even be considered on the short list for that: Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (and other services in places like China or Russia). You're inherently competing with the huge platforms for discovery. The next huge platform will arrive with an inflection point occurance.
I'm not suggesting you can't build a small service that would be popular with a group of passionate users. I think that's possible. You won't be able to "rate the Web" though, at the scale that would be desirable. You need millions and millions of quality active users for that.
At that point, it seemed more difficult to filter out websites that wouldn't fit into this category, hence the question: why not everything?
Your points on passion is valid though. Maybe folks just don't care enough about the web. I do think they do care about the services provided on the web though.