We're Working on a Couple of Things

Here are the projects that we are currently working on:

Helfpul Vote Changes

Based on a lot of excellent feedback, we are making some important, structural changes to how we manage helpful votes.

One of the issues that I currently see with the helpful vote system is that there is only one tool to acknowledge a review. A review is posted by your friend, and your only option to indicate that you appreciate the review is to mark it "helpful."

In the world of RateItAll, "helpful" has come to mean all sorts of things. It has come to mean "I agree," it has come to mean "lol," it has come to mean "I love you man," and it has come to be a simple acknowledgement of "I read your review."

In other words, "helpful" has lost its meaning.

So, one of the things that are we are working on is to make it so there are three acknowledgement options for any review:

Helpful
Funny
Agree

This will give vote givers a way to be more precise in what their review acknowledgement means, and will give vote receivers a way to get more specific feedback. It should also start to put meaning back in the word "helpful."

Of course, the lack of tools has not been the only issue involved in the abuse of the helpful button. Some folks have flat out abused it - giving helpfuls to their friends, regardless of the content of the review, and not giving helpfuls to folks that aren't their friends, regardless of the content of the review.

So, unfortunately, we are also working on adding a tool that will let us remove vote giving priviliges for those that abuse the tool. This tool will be used sparingly, and only with the goal of ensuring that folks act in good faith in awarding helpful votes.

Finally, we are getting rid of the not helpful votes. I have long resisted getting rid of the not helpful button, as I felt that it was necessary to retain a why to indicate disapproval of a review. I know that there are some of you that still feel this way now.

However, there IS a tool to express disapproval - the commenting tool. If a review rubs you the wrong way enough to make you want to take action, you are more than welcome to comment on the review and indicate exactly why. No longer will there be anonymous "trolls" dropping unhelfpuls with no explanation or reason given. We're going to try it this way and see how it goes.

Home Page

The second major project that we're working on is a revamping of the home page. I don't know about you guys, but the big yellow block of real estate on the home page sort of bugs me. We're making too much of an effort to explain what the site is about, as opposed to SHOW what the site is about.

In the coming weeks, you're going to see some changes to the home page with an emphasis on providing all sorts of fresh content that shows what's hot on the site at any given time - most active raters, hottest lists by category, hottest items, etc. I think it's going to be pretty cool.

Stay tuned.