April 12, 2008
Pollution as revenge
One of my students alerted me to a recent dramatic episode. Author and psychologist Cooper Lawrence appeared on a Fox News segment and made some apparently false statements about the Xbox game "Mass Effect", which she admitted she had never seen or played. Irate gamers shortly thereafter started posting (to Amazon) one-star (lowest possible score) reviews of her recent book that she was plugging on Fox News. Within a day or so, there were about 400 one-star reviews, and only a handful any better.
Some of the reviewers acknowledged they had not read or even looked at the book (arguing they shouldn't have to since she reviewed a game without looking at it). Many explicitly criticized her for what she said about the game, without actually saying anything about her book.
When alerted, Amazon apparently deleted most of the reviews. Its strategy apparently was to delete reviews that mentioned the name of the game, or video games at all (the book has nothing to do with video games). With this somewhat conservative strategy, the reviews remaining (68 at the moment) are still lopsidedly negative (57 one-star, 8 two-star, 3 five-star), more than I've ever noticed for any somewhat serious book, though there's no obvious way to rule these out as legitimate reviews. (I read several and they do seem to address the content of the book, at least superficially.)
Aside from being a striking, and different example of book review pollution (past examples I've noted have been about favorable reviews written by friends and authors themselves), I think this story highlights troubling issues. The gamers have, quite possibly, intentionally damaged Lawrence's business prospects: her sales likely will be lower (I know that I pay attention to review scores when I'm choosing books to buy). Of course, she arguably damaged the sales of "Mass Effect", too. Arguably, her harm was unintentional and careless (negligent rather than malicious). But she presumably is earning money by promoting herself and her writing by appearing on TV shows: is a reasonable social response to discipline her in her for negligence? (And the reviewers who have more or less written "she speaks about things she doesn't know; don't trust her as an author" may have a reasonable point: so-called "public intellectuals" probably should be guarding their credibility in every public venue if they want people to pay them for their ideas.)
I also find it disturbing, as a consumer of book reviews, but not video games, that reviews might be revenge-polluted. Though this may discipline authors in a way that benefits gamers, is it right for them to disadvantage book readers?
I wonder how long it will be (if it hasn't already happened) before an author or publisher sues Amazon for providing a nearly-open access platform for detractors to attack a book (or CD, etc.). I don't know the law in this area well enough to judge whether Amazon is liable (after all, arguably she could sue the individual reviewers for some sort of tortious interference with her business prospects), but given the frequency of contributory negligence or similar malfeasances in other domains (such as Napster and Grokster facilitating the downloading of copyrighted materials), it seems like some lawyer will try to make the case one of these days. After all, Amazon provides the opportunity for readers to post reviews in order to advance its own business interests.
Some significant risk of contributory liability could be hugely important for the problem of screening pollution in user-contributed content. If you read some of the reviews still on Amazon's site in this example, you'll see that it would not be easy to decide which of them were "illegitimate" and delete all of those. And what kind of credibility would the review service have if publishers made a habit of deciding (behind closed doors) which too-negative reviews to delete, particularly en masse. I think Amazon has done a great job of making it clear that they permit both positive and negative reviews and don't over-select the positive ones to display, which was certainly a concern I had when they first started posting reviews. But it authors and publishers can hold it liable if they let "revenge" reviews appear, I suspect it (and similar sites) will have to shut down reviewing altogether.
(Thanks to Sarvagya Kochak.)
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March 29, 2008
Presentation at Yahoo! Research on user-contributed content
Yahoo! Research invited me to speak in their "Big Thinkers" series at the Santa Clara campus on 12 March 2008. My talk was "Incentive-centered design for user-contributed content: Getting the good stuff in, Keeping the bad stuff out."
My hosts wrote a summary of the talk (that is a bit incorrect in places and skips some of the main points, but is reasonably good), and posted a video they took of the talk. The video, unfortunately, focuses mostly on me without my visual presentation, panning only occasionally to show a handful of the 140 or so illustrations I used. The talk is, I think, much more effective with the visual component. (In particular, it reduces the impact of the amount of time I spend glancing down to check my speaker notes!)
In the talk I present a three-part story: UCC problems are unavoidably ICD problems; ICD offers a principled approach to design; and ICD works in practical settings. I described three main incentives challenges for UCC design: getting people to contribute; motivating quality and variety of contributions; and discouraging "polluters" from using the UCC platform as an opportunity to publish off-topic content (such as commercial ads, or spam). I illustrated with a number of examples in the wild, and a number of emerging research projects on which my students and I are working.
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February 12, 2008
Followup: Second GiveWell founder admits deception
Earlier I noted that the founder of nonprofit GiveWell had been demoted and financially penalized when it was learned that he used a pseudonym online to recommend his own organization. The New York Times reports today that a second founder has admitted he also used a false name in an online posting recommending GiveWell.
These are provocative examples of the manipulation problem --- one species of managing the quality of user-contributed content --- because GiveWell's business is evaluating the reliability and quality of other nonprofits in order to provide advice on where to give one's charitable donations.
Posted by jmm at 03:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Permalink »
January 08, 2008
MetaFilter manipulated by nonprofit that reports on honesty and reliability of nonprofits
The
This is particularly piquant because the manipulator founded his organization (GiveWell) as a nonprofit to help people evaluate the quality (presumably, including reliability!) of nonprofit charitable organizations, and GiveWell itself is supported by charitable donations.
The manipulation was simple, and reminiscent of the well-publicized book reviews by authors and their friends on Amazon: the executive pseudonymously posted a question asking where he could go to get good information about charities, and then under his own name (but without identifying his affiliation) answered his own question by pointing to his own organization.
When discovered, the GiveWell board invoked old-fashioned incentives: they demoted the Executive Director (and founder), docked his salary, and required him to attend a professional development training program. Of course, the expected cost of being caught and punished was not, apparently, a sufficient incentive ex ante, but the organization apparently hopes by imposing the ex post punishment he will be motivated to behave in the future, and by publicizing it other employees will be similarly motivated. The publicity provides an additional incentive: the ED's reputation has been severely devalued, presumably reducing his expected future income and sense of well-being as well.
Posted by jmm at 08:23 AM | Permalink »
January 07, 2008
UCC search arrives...manipulation and pollution to follow soon
Jimmy Wales announced the release of the public "alpha" of his new, for-profit search service, Wikia Search. The service is built on a standard search engine, but its primary feature is that users can evaluate and comment on search results, building a user-contributed content database that Wikia hopes will improve search quality, making Wikia a viable but open (and hopefully profitable) alternative to Google.
Miguel Helft, writer for the
Like other search engines and sites that rely on the so-called “wisdom of crowds,” the Wikia search engine is likely to be susceptible to people who try to game the system, by, for example, seeking to advance the ranking of their own site. Mr. Wales said Wikia would attempt to “block them, ban them, delete their stuff,” just as other wiki projects do.
The tension is interesting: Wikia promotes itself as a valuable alternative to Google largely because its search and ranking algorithms are open, so that users know more about why some sites are being selected or ranked more highly than others.
“I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors,” [Wales] said. “We really have no ability to understand and influence that process.”
But, although the search and ranking algorithms may be public, whether or not searches are being manipulated by user contributed content will not be so obvious. It is far from obvious which approach is more dependable and "open". Wikia's success apparently will depend on its ad hoc and technical methods for "blocking, banning and deleting" manipulation.
Posted by jmm at 09:23 AM | Permalink »
April 08, 2006
Polluting user-contributed reviews
A recent First Monday article by David and Pinch (2006) documents an interesting case of book review pollution on Amazon. A user review of one book critically compared it to another. Immediately following a "user" entered another review blatantly plagiarizing a favorable review of the first book, and further user reviews did additional plagiarizing.
When the author of the first book discovered the plagiarism, he notified Amazon which at the time had a completely hands-off policy on user reviews, so it refused to intervene even for blatant plagiarism. (The policy since has changed.) Another example of the problem of keeping bad quality contributions out.
David and Pinch remind us that when an Amazon Canada programming glitch revealed reviewer identities,
a large number of authors had "gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues or paid professionals." A few had even 'reviewed' their own books, and, unsurprisingly, some had unfairly slurred the competition.
David and Pinch address the issue of review pollution at some length. First, the catalogue six discrete layers of reputation in the Amazon system, including user ratings of reviews by others, and a mechanism to report abuse. Then they conducted an analysis of 50,000 reviews of 10,000 books and CDs. Categories of review pollution they identified automatically (using software algorithms):
- Reviews copied from one item to another in order to promote the sales of a specific item.
- Reviews posted by the same author on multiple items (or multiple editions of the same item) trying to promote a specific product, agenda, or opinion.
- Reviews posted by the same author using multiple reviewer identities to bolster support for an item.
- Reviews (or parts thereof) posted by the same reviewer to increase their own credibility and/or to build their identity.
They also make an interesting point about the arms-race limitations of technical pollution screens:
The sorts of practices we have documented in this paper could have been documented by Amazon.com themselves (and for all we know may have indeed been documented). Furthermore if we can write an algorithm to detect copying then it is possible for Amazon.com to go further and use such algorithms to alert users to copying and if necessary remove material. If Amazon.com were to write such an algorithm and, say, remove copied material, this will not be the end of the story. Users will adapt to the new feature and will no doubt try and find new ways to game the system.
Posted by jmm at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink »