Self referential mumbo jumbo (Feedback and General Suggestions for dooyoo)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	Feedback and General Suggestions for dooyoo
Date:	25/08/01 (130 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, Rewarding

Disadvantages: Impenetrable, Secretive, Cliquey

I moan about Dooyoo, evidently more than I thought I did, so much so that I've finally annoyed the people I live with enough that they have all unanimously turned around and said 'Well write a flipping opinion on it then'. So here I am writing an opinion on Dooyoo. I hope that there is a section for this, I am writing this in text to upload later and had been looking for speakers corner which I couldn't get to easily at all. I guess that you reading this means there was an appropriate section for it which I hence found and placed this in. Wow future definitive, a great tense. Which brings me to my first complaint: Some things on Dooyoo are very difficult to find, my most noticed one being speakers corner which I couldn't find other than by going to an opinion in speaker's corner and then going back up the tree as it were. From Home there is no Speakers Corner link to click, there should be. Ok Ok an update I now know that you can get to this via community but I didn't know this and maybe that makes me slightly stupid but there we are.

Ok so that was fairly minor. I am aware that if I'm not careful this will just turn into a big list of gripes and complaints which would be a shame as I love Dooyoo, find it addictive (it should probably come with a health warning similar to that found on the original (amiga version, now that dates it) of lemmings: 'The management cannot be held responsible for loss of:
1. Time

2. Sleep

3. Hair'

but this isn't really a complaint) and I generally love it. There are a few things that seem unfair and annoy me, mainly because I am a selfish little blighter who wishes he knew how to get more reads.

First: Points. Ok this is probably my biggest problem, I have reviews read by twenty five people, eight of whom are members which means I get forty points instead of however many it should be, now Dooyoo isn't all about points but this is annoying,
I wouldn't mind more points, who would? and so if people read my stuff why don't I get the credit huh? huh? Sorry sliding into mock anger there. Also members who read stuff and don't rate it, this also means no recognition of a read. There are a few things that could be done about this, points for every read not every rate or an automatic rating of Useful unless the person changed it. Another suggestion, which people may not like, is that you should get more points for good ratings than bad ones, i.e. ten points for a Not Useful, thirty for a Somewhat useful, fifty for a Useful and seventy for a Very Useful. This would fit in with the automatic rating system, fifty points per read, as it is now and hopefully it would mean that people took more attention as to what they rated an opinion because presently people often rate leniently as to 'make friends' who will read their opinions and up their own reads. If you altered how many points were achieved by what a rating was it would mean that people would take more care rating. Also it would mean that when someone wrote in the comments: 'What your review needs is this ... do it and I'll re rate it' more people would pay attention and change their review. Ok controversial ideas out the way. This has just happened, nine people have read this and one, 1! has rated it so I get 50 points not 450. Thankyou so much.

Secondly the crown system. What makes a review crownable? It isn't the number of nominations for a crown it has, if I believe people's comments then there are reviews with lots of nominations and no crown and others with only a few nominations and there is the crown award. Also I have noticed that when a person earns one crown suddenly their reads double overnight (which is fine) and their other reviews, which have been sat there for months, suddenly start getting crowned. Now if these reviews are worthy of crowns, which a lot are, then crown them but crown them when
they are written not when the author earns another crown for something else written later. Some of my problem with this system is that it is all hidden, we don't know what it is that we have to do to get a crown, so how can I, or any one else, aim for it?

Thirdly, linked with the crown complaint, is the spiral problem: Those people with few reads write more and get few reads whilst those with lots of reads write more or even not, and then get lots of reads. This is a problem because it means people like me, and there must be a few of us, get a little disgruntled, slogging our guts out to write decent opinions that only get read by seven people. The other problem is that new members have to break into this circle of high reads and they either manage it or don't. I'm sure you can break into it after months or years on Dooyoo but that means sticking it out until then whilst your opinions get slowly read by ten people if you're lucky.

Fourthly features: The hall of fame and things like that get very little space advertising them. A friend of mine got into the hall of fame and that's great I didn't even notice until I read some of the comments people had written in their reviews that said 'congrats on hof'. Which brings us back to the spiral problem, those who do well get into hall of fame, get more reads and continue to do well whilst those of us who have no fame and few readers have no way to get ourselves noticed further than we already are and continue to wallow in anonymity. Not that I don't think hall of famers deserve teh notoriety but they are notorious before becoming hall of famers.

Fifthly there seems to be a secret recipe for success on Dooyoo, some of the people's profiles I look at look like mine, a few reads here and there averaging about ten reads per opinion but most of the profiles I look at now have minimum twenty five reads per opinion and some stretching up to one hundred or more. Wh
at are these people doing differently to me? Ok, firstly I can believe that most of them are writing better reviews than me, fine I don't think my reviews are the best in the whole world or even the whole of Dooyoo but they aren't that bad, and they can't be as much worse than everyone else?s to separate them by ten to twenty reads per opinion and that adds up to a lot of reads in total. This recipe for success, whatever it may be, is definitely a secret known to the chosen select, (I know tautological) and I wish it were revealed to us mere mortals.

Ok so this has turned into a list of complaints, it was fairly inevitable, there isn't that much point listing the good things about Dooyoo to Dooyoo users is there? Where as there is a point to listing the bad things as it may make people go, oh yeah that's true, or maybe even get someone to email me and tell me what it is I'm missing. Which brings me to another problem, I tried to change my details on my profile and then there were none, no details about little old me. I'll try again at some point but oh well. The main problem I have here is that I'd like to put my email address on, it's in the comments to this opinion if you want to email me. I didn't put it on when I first joined as I knew nothing about Dooyoo and didn't know if it was trustworthy and so I didn?t want to hand my email address over straight away. Now when I know it would be really valuable to have my email address up there so people could contact me about stuff I can't get it to appear on my profile, arrrggghhh! Not that I check my email religiously but it would still be nice.

See this is a long list of complaints, but don't say I didn't warn you. Hopefully you'll all take this as it was meant, a self obsessed lament about why on earth more people don't read my reviews, no no what I meant was, oh bother. What I mean is that I hope you'll all understand that despite
everything which I've written here I do like Dooyoo and respect it's structure and community. I enjoy using it and have got past the point where it's all about points but what is demoralising, to repeat myself, is writing a review I really like and then watching only ten people read it. Thanks for your effort in slogging through this fest of self pity. Matt

Update again: I've managed to get the stuff I couldn't get up on me Profile up, but the complaints still stand, just with less force. Maybe I'm just stupid, I do hope it's not just that.

Oh one other thing, what is a premier opinion award? Is it a crown or not? and it's worth 1000 miles, that?s loads so tell me what it's about please. Ta again. Matt

Update:

Right the advice people have given me is to read lots more. This works, yes it really does. I now get more like 20 reads per opinon. A lot of people out there still get more like 40 or 50 and I guess some of that is because they spend more time on Dooyoo than me. Some of it is because there are little groups of people who either know each other from a none Dooyoo orientated background and thus read a lot of each others ops or have gathered here on dooyoo itself, and some of these groups appear to be quite large thus their 'members' retain a high read rate.

I still have the sense of disgruntlement that I could be doing better than I am but I can't give too much of my life to Dooyoo. I probably would be willing to give more if I got more reads. Maybe it's simply down to the fact that I don't write opinions as well as those people who get 100 reads or more. But none of us would like to think that about ourselves would we?

Well it's a few months later and my reads per opinion is looking a lot better, averaging around twenty to twenty five which is nice. The 'secret recipe' is to read more and write less. If you can spend the time reading then
do so but if you're on limited time then get as many ratings in as possible. It'l get your name noticed around site. I had limited time on the internet at home and now I'm at uni I have a lot more opportunity, if not time, to get on dooyoo. Rating a lot quickly will get you criticised, in fact doing anything designed to gain yourself reads other than writing opinions will get you criticised but that's just the British way, someone is actually using a technique other than the obvious one to suceed, ooh that can't be good. Ignore it, suffer the comments and just rate quickly. I'm not suggesting you don't read the ops you rate, that is stupid as you'll degrade the rating system but if you read lots and rate lots more people will see your name and read your stuff.

Leave lots of comments, no really. Make sure your comments are relevant and/or amusing and people will click on your user name from comment's pages. The more your name is displayed around the site the better.

I still think there is a clique. I'm still not in it. I have got some crowns, which is nice, and once I got my first one I then a bit later got some more for things I wrote a while ago. I still don't know what gets a crown and why, if you write loads then you stand a fair chance but some of my shorter opinions have been crowned recently. Not a complaint by any means but not something I have worked out the mechanics behind yet.

On emore thing, as I'm feeling brave: If anyone who runs Dooyoo itself ever reads this then could you maybe email me and tell me the answer to some of my questions? Please? Pretty please with cherries on top? Thankyou in advance.

Sorry for the extended rant. Matt

Summary: