12 years ago
Apicius, I agree with you that both the award feature and the comment feature hold a lot of potential for bringing the community together. These are huge improvements from the other sites. At one of them, there is no interaction about the reviews whatsoever. At the other, it is possible to make reviews disappear by voting them down. The ultimate effect, at the end of the line, will be to suppress criticism because many people dislike negative reviews of perfumes which they love. In addition, I would be very surprised if shills were not at this very moment availing themselves of that feature to promote the products which they wish to sell and demote competitors.
The "comment on review" feature here is fantastic because it makes it possible to give some specific feedback but also to strike up a little conversation with the author of the review. I am definitely going to start using this feature more, as I have seen it is frequently used on the German site.
I also noticed that on the German site people are very liberal with the awards, and it might be that on this side people are thinking that it's supposed be like an academy award.
But you are right: the more we bestow awards upon writers, the more interaction there will be, it seems to me.
I also wanted to point out how nice it is that we get to title our reviews here. This also tends to make people take review writing a bit more seriously. So we don't see any shout-outs for Britney here and probably never will.
Thanks for everything, Apicius and Don!!!!!