Plipplop's Right Royal Guide To Collecting Coronary Kudos (dooyoo Crowns)

Member Name: plipplop

Product:	dooyoo Crowns
Date:	31/07/09 (201 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Everyone can win one, there are lots of them, they're awarded promptly

Disadvantages: Reviews can get overlooked, guides are arguably too influential in the nomination process

It would seem to be customary that when one reaches a Dooyoo milestone that said occasion should be celebrated with a review about something related to Dooyoo. For my 600th review, I was going to be totally unconventional and review something like a foot cream or a castle in Wales, but then I got a headache and decided instead to revert to type. So here you go - a thoroughly conventional Dooyoo opinion for my 600th Dooyoo anniversary.

I like the crown system here on Dooyoo, if for no other reason than to bear witness to the endless rantings across the site about how biased and unfair it is. It's amazing how, when given half the chance, so many writers will happily and very publicly announce that they've written a review that they say should win a crown and that's that. Such modesty notwithstanding, it's an inevitable by-product of one of the few financial parts of the Dooyoo bonus scheme that rewards quality and, as such, there's clearly some kudos to be had from winning one of the little yella fellas.

For anyone new to the site, I should give you a very simple overview of the system. Crowns are awarded to reviews on a weekly basis (currently a Tuesday) and are intended to reward the highest quality writing on the site. If you win a crown, a little yellow crown .gif appears next to your review title and you get 1500 bonus miles (currently valued at £1.50.) Members are asked/invited to nominate reviews that they believe should win a crown and the team of guides here on Dooyoo also nominate reviews. The Dooyoo site support team reviews the nominations weekly and it is they who decide which ones should receive the awards. Once a month, a 'review of the month' is selected from all the crowned reviews and receives a further 3500 bonus miles. A category-specific competition also runs monthly, with three prize-winning reviews selected from all the reviews submitted in that category that were awarded a crown. If you do the maths, a crowned review could therefore be worth £5.50 without a single read (50p for posting, £1.50 for the crown, £3.50 for winning review of the month.) Suddenly, everyone's interested.

The main reason that the system is considered unfair is that it is based almost entirely on nominations. Given that nominations come from individuals, and that individuals have their own bias, it's possible that crownworthy reviews are overlooked or missed. It's difficult to find a manageable way round this. Clearly, the site needs to run with minimal costs and it's not possible to pay Dooyoo staff to read every review. As such, they are reliant on the community to do the nominating and 'alert' them to the reviews that should win the prize.

The theory is that quality reviews always stand an equal chance of winning a crown. The reality is that your behaviour and that of others on the site can and will influence your ability to win a crown.

* Members who post lots of reviews are less likely to have their crownworthy reviews spotted. With only a certain number of hours in the day, guides and members alike can only read a certain number of reviews and are unlikely to read (or nominate) multiple postings by the same member.

* The site can/will not award crowns to an unlimited number of reviews. The site doesn't publish any criteria for awarding crowns but it seems sensible that, in budgetary terms, they need to manage the number of crowns awarded. As such, if you're unlikely enough to post a review of a certain product in the same week that another, better review is posted in that category, you might not get a crown, even though in another week, you would.

* The system is heavily reliant on guide nominations. It is *possible* to win a crown without a guide nomination but, in my opinion and experience, it's extremely unlikely. As a guide, I can tell you that my 'strike rate' on crowns is very high. Pretty much everything that I nominate wins a crown. When I was not a guide, my 'strike rate' was not as high. The guide system, as it stands, means that all guides tends to focus on one or two categories, meaning that if you don't get read by the guide for your chosen category, you stand a much lower chance of winning a crown. Some guides (I would include myself here) actively nominate outside their own categories, which increases your chances a bit.

Understanding and accepting these facts is the first step to increasing your likelihood of winning a crown. But there are other things to consider too.

* Seldom have I seen a review that won a crown that didn't demonstrate an extremely important quality - the writer clearly knew a lot about the product. This wasn't evidenced in detailed user guides and exhaustive descriptions of packaging, barcodes and ingredients lists. This was demonstrated in the way that he/she articulated his/her usage and experience of the product. So, a review written on a shampoo that somebody has used for a week might be very useful, but it probably won't win a crown. A review of a toy or game that is written to the writer's 'cookie-cutting' formula might tick enough boxes to be very useful, but it won't win a crown if the writer hasn't actually played with it, at length. Such reviews don't show any depth, sound experience or knowledge. I feel as though I *know* a crownworthy review when I read one because it is evident that the writer really knows the product in question and really has something to say about it.

* It's likely that the system is biased towards certain products and categories. Clearly, this makes commercial sense. Reviews written in popular, revenue-generating categories are more likely to be highlighted by Dooyoo, as that's the sort of thing that they want people to find useful here on Dooyoo. So electrical goods, mobile phones, MP3 players and televisions, for example, will stand a much better chance (if other criteria are achieved) than other categories. Sorry, but it's only review writers who (generally) read and write reviews about food. A crown in the food category is extremely unlikely.

* There's no ideal way to present a review, but having some kind of format is quite a nice idea, you know, things like sentences and paragraphs. Something that's easy to read, grammatically-sound and well-structured is going to stand a better chance. User guides are out. Don't confuse information with experience and don't be fooled into thinking that the system rewards effort. You can write 4000 words on a topic, having spent hours putting it all together and you may not be rewarded. Indeed, the Dooyoo crown system is unlike other review sites, such as Ciao, where arduous detail seems to win the day. It's easy to predict the disappointment from hardened Ciao members, who probably win countless diamonds over there only to get nothing here. And learn to spell definitely, for God's sake.

So could the system be improved? Well, arguably, the system is too dependant on guide nominations, but the community only has itself to blame for that. Up-rating and over-rating here on Dooyoo is rife and if crowns were awarded purely on the basis of member nominations, the system would crash and burn. Dooyoo needs to maintain a sense of objectivity about things. The community, for example, kicks off when a review with only a handful of ratings wins a crown, on the basis that the crown should reward community-related behaviour. Wrong! The crown is there to acknowledge the quality of the review, not the writer. Review-writing communities thrive on popularity and mutual back-slapping and a system that rewards quality has to try and ignore these things. So, until the community grows some integrity and stops slapping a VU rating and a nomination on every other review, the guides will continue to dominate the nomination process.

The £1.50 payment per crown seems appropriate to me; it's about the right amount of money to hand out. The Ciao premium fund is ridiculously lop-sided. When I was a member, my record was to win £109 in one month on six reviews, whilst other members were claiming to have won £1 or nothing at all. On Ciao, there are only 10 diamonds a month, on Dooyoo there are easily five or six times that number of crowns in a month, which is a better reflection on the general level of quality overall. I could see a system where crown payments differed according to category, so that computing, for example, attracted a higher payment, but that might be better managed via the payment for writing rather than the crown. I like the simplicity of the current system. Suggestions for different-coloured crowns rewarding at different levels seem vaguely over-complicated to me.

The efficiency with which the crowns are awarded is excellent; pretty much every week without fail. Crowns are occasionally awarded outside this as part of the Crown of the Day idea but this seems dependant on site support resource more than anything else. I'd slightly stall the system so that crowns were awarded weekly for anything written at least seven days ago, such that a review had to be on the site for at least a week before it could win a prize. This would maximise its chances of being noticed and nominated. On that subject, members often complain that they have been nominated for a crown without winning one, driven by comments stating 'Nominated!'. Generally, this is something that's considered a bit icky on the site, and fewer and fewer members are doing this in their comments but I'd formally outlaw this once and for all. It's not a helpful thing to do as it sets unfair expectations and the support team tell us that many members who say they have nominated don't actually nominate, as they are simply saying it to attract a return rate. My advice would be not to trust any such comments and to be extremely wary of the intentions of anyone who leaves you one of those messages.

As a reward system, Dooyoo Crowns are not perfect, not by any means. Reviews *do* get missed and sometimes the wrong reviews win crowns. But generally, I think the system is the best it could be. I'd like to see a community that has the integrity and intelligence to start to be able to honestly recognise when something genuinely deserves a crown and act accordingly, such that the system was far less reliant on guides. But, whichever way you look at it, the system works pretty efficiently and, generally, engenders a good feeling of pride, so it seems to do the trick.

Summary: Musings on Dooyoo's reward scheme