Churn Baby Churn - The Selfish World Of Opinion Writing (Frustration with dooyoo)

Name: plipplop

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Product:	Frustration with dooyoo
Date:	29/10/07 (236 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Everyone hates churners

Disadvantages: I don't really understand why

Regular users of opinionating sites will almost certainly be familiar with the term 'churning'. The debate around churning has been going on for as long as I've been using opinion sites. Many opinion site members classify churning as a form of abuse; others just find it irritating but most members waste little opportunity in berating any member who dares churn their way onto a web site like this one.

But what is churning? Well, in principle, it's a member who posts too many opinions in a prescribed period, but what that number is and over what period remains in the eye of the beholder. To many members, posting one review a week would be churning, but generally the criticism applies to members who post several opinions back to back in one session.

Churning is NOT a breach of site terms and conditions. Dooyoo imposes no limit on the number of opinions that you post or over what period of time. In fact, it is almost certainly within the commercial interests of the site to encourage this behaviour as any increase in activity on the site could benefit the financial performance of the site. The reality is that churning is a self-imposed sanction from a community of selfish, lazy individuals who simply cannot tolerate the unwillingness of some members to adopt the "you have to earn your reads" protocol that prevails across the opinionating world.

You see, the frustration for me is not really that people churn out opinions. It's more the mob mentality that attempts to have them removed from the site, banned from ever contributing again and damns the support team for ever letting it happen in the first place. Whatever your views about an acceptable level of contribution to this site might be, it seems obvious that tolerance to a different approach is low on the agenda for some of us. Fundamentally, it's all entirely unnecessary too, given only that nobody has to read anything on the site; it's all a matter of personal choice. Nonetheless, churning remains one of the most hated opinionating crimes of all- but why is this?

The reality is that I should refer you back to those selfish, lazy individuals mentioned in paragraph three.

Churners interfere with the Newest Reviews list, you see. For every opinion that they post, the one before drops one place down the list. So if they post ten opinions, the one before drops ten places down the list. You wouldn't imagine that this is such a big deal at face value, but then once you understand the politics of opinionating you suddenly realise that the Newest Reviews list is generally the largest source of income for individuals on the site and (incredibly) that drop in ten places on the list might be the difference between earning 45p and 60p in a day. Gosh. Bizarrely, you see, everyone goes to the Newest Reviews list all day, every day, ingesting the site's newest content like a frenzied pack of animals at a watering hole. Scientific studies would almost certainly be able to reveal a prescribed measurement of how far down the list most people are prepared to go, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be very far. Top 20? Top 30? Top 40? Maybe. Who knows? The only fact is that once your opinion gets past this point, the number of people looking at it will decrease rapidly. Hence, the impact from a "churner" on perceived earnings is considered to be significant. 15p, it seems, is the difference between welcome and unwelcome on Dooyoo.

Why can't members look past that golden Top 40 you may ask? It's a good question. It doesn't take a lot of effort. Given that you can clearly see who the author of all those reviews is, you can just as easily skip past any names that keep cropping up. Just because the review is in the list, it doesn't mean you have to read it. Alas, this is an observation wasted on many whose wrists clearly have a limit to the amount of scrolling and clicking that they can complete per day. For me, the wildest, most inexplicable behaviour is from those members who log in, see the churners in the top 20 and just log out again on the basis that they can't be bothered. Whuh?

In principle, anyone who enjoys opinion sites should welcome increased activity on the site. More active users should mean more people reading and rating, which in turn should be of benefit to everyone. Strangely, this isn't the case. Nobody reads the churners, meaning that the churners believe that this is a site where little or no money can be made, which means that they don't see the point of reading and rating others. Overall, activity on the site therefore shows little increase or actually shows a decrease, given that the lazy ones can't scroll down lower than the first 40 opinions in the list. Realistically, rating new members' opinions can be a tiresome thing. They generally aren't terribly polished and seem thrown together in five minutes, but then I guess everybody's new at some time and has to start somewhere?

Personally, I spend the same time reading everyone's opinions; I pick and choose from the list based on the topic, the member, and sometimes even the title. I doubt I'd read every opinion a churner would write, but I might read one or two according to the subject matter. They cause me zero offence, simply because I can avoid them if I wish. But then that 15p never did make that much difference to me. Psychologically, I must admit that if you keep seeing the same name in the new review list, you do think "gah!" But if you stop and ask yourself why, you probably won't come up with an answer.

Churning is often labelled as a quality issue. It's the "they're flooding the site with rubbish opinions" argument that many go for. No, what they're doing is flooding the site with opinions that don't conform to the community's prescribed idea of what makes a good opinion. Established opinion writers like to write 400 words when 40 will do. It's part and parcel of review writing (I'm just as bad). But that doesn't make it "right". Remember that genuine consumers (as opposed to 15p-grabbing Internet entrepreneurs) might actually appreciate a short, simple précis of what you think rather than a never ending list of ingredients, company history, descriptions of packaging and stories about what you did last Thursday. Most of what opinion site users perceive as "quality" is actually a self-imposed standard, driven by rewards such as crowns or diamonds. The reality is that not everyone wants to write like this. Again, it's all about choice.

Nonetheless, the churning phenomenon remains a priority issue for nearly every member of the site, which is another source of personal frustration, given only that I'm sure the site's technical team could easily resolve this.

How about a filter on the Newest Reviews list that only shows reviews written by your circle of trust? The lazy ones wouldn't need to avoid the people they don't want to read, because they wouldn't trust them, hence they wouldn't appear in the list. It would almost certainly do away with the need for alert emails too, given only that it would be like a personal reading list, waiting for you every time you log in. Sympathies would have to go to new members, who wouldn't appear in anyone's lists, but then if they put their name about on the site that would change over time – and might not be a bad way of getting them used to the politics of the site. The fact would always remain, of course, that not everyone would filter the list in this way, meaning that new members would still get attention from some. Realistically, the COT filter is only a technical extension of how many members behave anyway.

More controversially, would be a system limitation on the number of reviews you could post per day. I wouldn’t support this form of censorship, and it seems contrary to the commercial aims of the site. More useful, perhaps, would be a filter on the Newest Reviews list meaning that only two of your opinions could appear in the top 100 at any one time. Essentially, churners would churn themselves out of the list, with limited impact on the rest of the site. This would almost certainly be a popular move with the established members and probably fairly easy to implement from a technical perspective.

But rather than just focus on limiting the visual impact that churners have on the site, perhaps we should also see a change in behaviour from the "establishment". What about if the author's name was deleted from the Newest Reviews list, forcing members to read based on subject matter or title rather than writer? In a system dominated by "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" this would challenge some members' willingness to read and rate where none was likely to be returned but it might also increase overall activity. After all, any such individuals are likely to read and rate more if they can't see who they're reading and rating, desperate to increase those chances of getting that additional 15p. The reality is that site activity would plummet, of course. You have to bear in mind those two key words from before when deciding what motivates people on opinion sites and neither of them would be comforted by a move such as this.

Personally, given that the site probably has limited technical resource, I'd rather see everyone adopt a common sense approach and just pick and choose what they do. Who cares if someone posts 20 opinions in one day? Ignore them, and continue to read the people around them who do adhere to your own personal terms and conditions of opinionating. Or, perish the thought, read 1 or 2 of the churners' opinions, rate appropriately and comment that you find their behaviour irritating, selfish or inappropriate. I'll bet that 99% of the time, you'll get nowhere, but at least you'll have tried – and maybe the other 1% will be worth the effort?

In either case, at the very least, before you moan about churners next time, please consider what exactly it is that you're opposed to. If you genuinely believe it can't be defined as laziness or selfishness, then please come back and leave an appropriate advisory comment. I await your input with interest……

Summary: The life and times of a churner