Reputations For Sale

Your Money Or Your Stars

Ratings are an increasingly important aspect of the way people use the Web, not just for products, but also for people. From Peeple's horrible model and PR disaster to Uber's get ratings or don't get work, not to mention AirBnB's approach, traditional management of project employees is getting outsourced to the wisdom of the crowds. This isn't even all that new, given the relative maturity of eBay in the marketplace, and the presence of power buyers and sellers on that site. But it is becoming more pronounced, and noticeable on a greater amount of buying decisions.

At first blush, this just seems inevitable, because it's just something that's under the hood of a disruptive technology. But just because something is inevitable does not mean that it's desirable, especially for the people without leverage, which would be the contractors. Rankings don't just put the power in the hands of the customer, they also create the potential for abuse that would be illegal in a traditional workplace, without the potential for counter-measures like unions or collective bargaining. And it's not as if you, as the provider, get more work or a better rate from glowing reviews. All you get is to stay in consideration.

As a consumer, the power of prior ratings is undeniable, to the point where low marks will more or less eliminate a product or provider from consideration for the vast majority of us. But as a provider, on a personal level, the change is very worrisome. I've spent decades going the extra mile for clients and co-workers, all to make sure that my network -- the only aspect of an individual career that can give you any degree of real job security, especially in careers in start-ups and other high turnover fields -- is large and eager to work with me again. But no advertising and marketing pro hits all the time. I'm sure that I've been on the wrong side of enough people to ensure that if my profession was rankings dependent, I could be a risk to not get future gigs, just from the actions of a handful of people. And sure, we're just at 1.0 in terms of this technology, let alone how people use it, but sometimes, v1 is all you get. I could easily see de facto blackmail from buyers who become aware of the power of a one star review.

So what happens next in a situation like this? Well, in other aspects of too much power being in a single metric, to put it bluntly, fraud. Advertising contracts that are purely cost per click inevitably led to black hat coding that produced fraudulent clicks. Five-star ratings and glowing reviews for products are already something you can buy from compromised people, with Amazon even going so far as to sue to try to maintain the integrity of their system. It's going to be even harder to police that sort of thing when it comes to a services provider, but just as fraud is inevitable, so are policing measures.

As consumers, what's going to happen is that ratings aren't going to be enough to make an informed decision. We're also going to have to become detectives and skeptical hiring managers, reading reviews with an eye for veracity, questioning a ranking if it has a suspicious amount of positive rankings for the amount of probable business, and maybe even doing a second pass through a more rigorous approach, like maybe checking references on LinkedIn, or looking at someone's Facebook or Twitter before giving power to their review. This will also be a time management problem, since some purchases are more important than others. Just taking the shortcut of lots of stars equal automatic purchase won't cut it.

That's the thing about disruptive technology. It disrupts more than just a single market. We haven't seen all of the ripples and impact from this wave yet.

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