The reference system should include an anonymous element

Community Culture
69

Thanks for sharing the article, @kellyt!

Indeed, an anonymous option for feedback doesn’t give power to cowards. It gives power to voices that don’t want to end up in a shouting match whenever they rise an issue. A lot of people are just too accustomed to being able to shout down accusations without constraints.

Also can’t see the danger here being anonymous vendettas. We’re talking about a medium value from unrelated encounters. No need to mull over the effects of one wrong feedback. And the people that will be worried about the overall picture are exactly the people that should be worried.

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70

While, I still don’t see the positive point in allowing anonymous negative references, maybe I am misunderstanding the proposal and I didn’t understand @nolo sentence about “medium”, I strongly believe that named sources are much better than anonymous ones: https://asbury.libguides.com/c.php?g=65794&p=4540878

71

Thanks for pointing that out. I meant mean, though that probably doesn’t catch the working of the score so good either. I think it’s well phrased on Couchers.org:

We destigmatize negative reviews by moving the goalposts from expecting everyone to be 100% as it is in Couchsurfing™ to putting people around 60-80% on average. People won’t feel so bad about moving someone down from a 78% to a 76% if they’ve done something wrong. If a person frequently makes others feel unsafe or uncomfortable, you can expect that they’ll have very low scores.

72

This is basically a well established in social sciences Likert scale, I think this is a good lead to go. Definitely better than numbers, especially out of 10. There’s also a 7 point version we can consider.

There could be statements instead of questions, for example: “I felt safe with XXX”; strongy disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongy agree

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2 Likes
73

I love the idea of the 7 point! The color gradient is good too.

Would it make sense to split up the community rating into 4 things:

  • Overall community rating
  • Hosting rating
  • Surfing rating
  • Safety rating

The overall rating obviously would be the main rating shown, but you could click to see a breakdown of their rating. This would provide a better picture of what to expect. Some people are much better hosts than guests and vice-versa!

1 Like
74

Hopefully you will be able to create a rating system that will deter both inappropriate behavior and retaliatory references. Wtihin CS i was surprised to see poor behavior from people id met that could have easily resulted in negative references despite their lack of concern, probably because they could have just returned the favor to the opposing party.

75

hey guys, saw this come up on the bottom of the page, hope it’s not too old to reply.

I think there are 2 things that haven’t been considered in this conversation:

First is the fact that you’re kinda rating 2 things: the person and the hosting situation… how is that gonna be addressed? (maybe in another forum).

Second: “Anonymous Reviews” I think the main reason why on these platforms people don’t “report” negatively, especially with people, is that it is basically ineffectual and forces them to reveal a lot for no real reason. A review online is not some exposé. It is also kinda mean for someone if they have had a terrible experience… I don’t want to share it online, even anonymously! And with a reference, one bad one, no matter how bad, can easily be disregarded. What if someone has 100 good refs and 1 bad one? People will go “hah, the internet is full of crazies, they must have mis-interpreted something”. I understand of course, some people will intepret it differently and avoid, but I don’t think relying on that is really going to solve the issue people have brought up here. I would say having an anonymous review won’t really fix the issue regarding creeps.

The main tool to remove creeps is basically reporting them. Leaving a bad reference? It’s inconsequential. If someone has had a bad experience, an anonymous review is pointless, they should be reported instantly and removed if it was that bad in the first place. It also removes profiles that will just have loads of negative references, which makes hte community look bad. It’s the internet, we’re gonna get creeps, whatever happens. Get them out!

Now there is still a place for anonymous feedback… For example is someone needs some points to improve on, but ultimately so they can improve their contribution to the community. If you wanted to say “they were lovely, but by god, they needed to have a shower” :- ok, that’s probably fine as an anonymous review, it’s something to improve. They aren’t a bad person, but perhaps in the future they can improve their situation (better couch or something) so future guests can enjoy them.

Also I saw in the later things a definition developing between “let’s hang out all day” vs “i’m working”… has anyone mentioned how they do it on BlaBlaCar? If I remember correctly they have it on the profile of drivers like “I never talk” “I’m a chatterbox” as well as a few gradations between. I think a similar thing could work in this context, and it can be changeable, or maybe even a response to the requests to stay. “I’d love to host, but i’ll be really busy, is that ok?” Then you can go into it with realistic expectations.

2 Likes
76

Hi Benjamin, thanks for sharing your thoughts and welcome to the forum!

I understand the intention and scope of the anonymous aspect a bit differently. The intention, I believe, is not about having written references posted anonymously. Anonymity would be quite impossible to achieve like that, at least to the people involved. And that’s the kind of anonymity we are aiming at: enabling users to call on negative experiences, even when they wouldn’t want to write about it (and reveal themselves, just as you point out as well). So the anonymous aspect is mostly about making the written reference independent from leaving a quantified feedback (by selecting values on a scale or ticking choices). And then processing this feedback in a way so that it’s not directly traceable to a particular user either.

From it’s scope, it’s not directly related to reporting, as it would only visualize collective opinions. There could be consequences, if a certain aggregated threshold is reached, but reporting a serious single incident should be an entirely distinct matter to leaving a reference. I’m not aware that there’s already concrete ideas sketched out, who exactly would act on reports and which guidelines they would follow. But there is a topic on reporting already, so if you have more ideas on it, please share them in Reporting and Moderation!

77

It’s never too late to reply, unless we locked the topic for some reason! Thanks for chiming in.

I’ve noticed that when this happens it’s often the case that other people who wrote positive reviews felt something was off, but they weren’t confident/direct enough to write a bad reference. We’re hoping that by allowing anonymous ratings, people can still write something positive (like thanking their host or mentioning their good qualities), but also being able to discreetly indicate that they weren’t always comfortable. It’s complicated, especially for women, to publicly admit that something felt wrong - and it’s even harder when that person has all positive reviews or just a few negative/neutral ones.