She likes me, she 5-star rates me not
About 9 years ago, Time Magazine chose ‘you’ as its person of the year. Yes, you, and everyone who is not just a mere consumer of online content, but a contributor now. That was when user-generated content was taking off, and the rise of what was called web 2.0 back then. Cultural theorist Henry Jenkins, wrote about the very same paradigm shift in how content is being consumed online in the same year. Audio, video and text are all types of content, but also there are other kinds of content that we may overlook, though it is part of our web usage routine, that is liking, rating, voting and recommending stuff.
One contributor to Quora, explained rating systems as “avenue for dialogue” between users and the services they use. They invest part of their time in it, expecting some sort of return of that investment. They might do so to acknowledge good content, so that their peers on the system benefit from their input, they might also do so in the hope that the service they use will learn more about their likes and dislikes and recommend better content to them in the future. Actually, one of the oldest uses of rating systems dates back to the mid 90’s, when some researches tried to make personalized music recommendations to people based on their interests.
Ratings come in all sizes and shapes, Amazon uses 5-star rating, Youtube prefers up and down votes, while Facebook sticks to its likes, but not dislikes. Granular rating systems give the users the ability to express their opinions better, yet less granular systems, such as Youtube up/down votes, gives people less room to misinterpretations. For a conservative person, 4 stars might have the same meaning as the less-conservative persons 5-stars, yet both of them will be more confused how to rate a mediocre video on YouTube. The use of vocabulary is also important here, I might “like” the Facebook page of the rival football team to the one I support, just to stay updated to their latests news, but do I really like them? Maybe, a “follow” is more suitable here.
Personality traits also play role here. Researchers found that curious people with high imagination who are always looking for new experiences and ideas tend to like more content on Facebook, while less spontaneous individuals with higher degree of organization and conscientiousness are more conservative with their likes.
As entrepreneurs, mentors and investors using the bidx platform, you too collaborate with each other. Entrepreneurs submit their business plans, mentors and investors give their feedback and they all engage into discussing business ideas using messages and other forms of communications on the platforms. Thus, we decided to augment the existing forms of recommendations with rating as well.
When viewing a business summary on our platform, feel free to rate it and share your opinion about a business idea!
Have a look at our active portals and join them for free if one ore more suit your interest. Having your own portal specialised for a location or industry is also a possibility. For any feedback or comments, feel free to contact us here.