A new Slop University research poster classifies buy-swap-sell app reviewers into five rating-style kinds, and reports the kind whose star ratings the platform now counts for less.
The School of Continuous Improvement's new taxonomy already decides whose star ratings count in full on a neighbourhood buy-swap-sell app.
The School of Continuous Improvement’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda has a new instrument to show for its work on online civility: a taxonomy that reads a reviewer’s rating style off nothing but what they typed and when, published today in a new Slop University research poster.
Applied across a neighbourhood buy-swap-sell app, the five-kind scheme sorts reviewers into Halo, Ledger, Vent, Long-silent and Escalator styles, and the platform has adopted its findings directly: reviews from reviewers classified Escalator now count for half as much toward a seller’s displayed rating. The University’s Indicator Commons has provisionally taken on the scheme as the app’s reference standard pending a second cohort.
A rating style is the easiest thing about a person to standardise, and the last thing that tells you what actually happened between two strangers on a driveway.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.os856p.