Facebook and WOT – WOT??

By | May 21, 2011
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Carole asks about Facebook and WOT
Facebook is now going to use WOT … What will happen, they are already having trouble, what will happen?

Our Answer
Your guess is a good as ours. WOT is getting a lot of recognition and working their way into a lot of different areas. This is troubling. Not many people really know how WOT works, let alone how it arrives at its site ratings. It is basically a community-based rating system which is bad enough. But when you realize that out of supposedly millions of members, a handful of them (less than 100) are making the majority of the site ratings it gets worse. Not to toot our own horn too loudly be we’ve been way ahead of others in a lot of things – and this site-rating mania is no exception. Everyone is rushing to add “safe-surfing” community-based (so they can’t get sued) site ratings to their programs: Norton, Avast, McAfee, AVG, and others. More will follow for sure.

Site ratings based on average users’ input sounds like a really great, democratic idea. But WOT’s community has been overtaken be a small number of attention-hungry (apparently really bored) people who make tens of thousands of posts every month. They have no idea what they are rating but the vast majority of ratings are negative. The only thing that matters to them isn’t the accuracy but the number of ratings. WOT turns around and rewards these kinds of people with participation awards. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.

So what’s going to happen when WOT is integrated into Facebook? Our prediction: pain. People will be getting little red WOT warnings on their  “walls” when anyone posts a link that WOT doesn’t like. You can depend on the warning to be based on facts or real information, but you can imagine many will avoid these warnings and notify the profile owner of their dangerous content. It will be a mess. I can’t see WOT lasting very long on Facebook unless they use some different, more objective site-rating system. We can picture it already – they’re going to have a cadre of Facebook users running the show – and when this Facebook community gets going – a handful of attention-starve Facebook/WOT users will start running amok. And if WOT’s past behavior pattern continues – those who run amok will be welcomed and even rewarded with ridiculous “platinum” awards from WOT.

Isn’t it time we all get serious and stop welcoming censorship into our world? Censorship never works. You’d think we’d have learned that by now.

One thought on “Facebook and WOT – WOT??

  1. james

    You got it right, Censorship does NOT work! This WOT crap is just that CRAP…

    Reply

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