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Rate This Story: But By What Criteria?

Dec 16, 2005 3:36 PM
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Yahoo! has had a feature in their news section for a while now, called "Recommend this story". This is very similar to Amazon.com, where you assign one to five stars.

What is mysterious to me is how people use the tool. For example, this article about Google buying a share in AOL is pretty significant news in tech business (a billion dollars are changing hands and two goliaths are forming a partnership). Yet, the average of the 34 votes is a paltry 1.5 stars.

Do you think that people use the ratings to indicate:

  • How good (well-researched, well-written, balanced) the article is
  • How significant and "newsworthy" they feel the item is
  • How pleased they are about the news (i.e. it's favorable coverage about something they like or unflattering writing about something they oppose)
  • Something else?

Comments: Rate This Story: But By What Criteria?

Heh, interesting post Joe, because that's something I thought about when I first saw that feature. My guess is more of #1 and #2, less of #3. I can see it mostly being a function of how good the article is (because let's face it, in today's world you can get the news almost anywhere, pretty instantaneously, so you're going to read one story rather than another because of how well-written it is). #2 sort of applies, because someone's not going to rate highly an article about the reporter's favorite soup. #3 I think is not as important as you think it is -- think about how much people are drawn to "bad news" in today's world.

Posted by: Jay on December 16, 2005 4:32 PM | permalink

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