# Slop University sorts online reviewers into five rating styles

> 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 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.
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> --- 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.