The Idea Dude

CONNECTING THE DOTS ONE AT A TIME

Friday, October 08, 2010

Hell has no fury like a user scorned

I was watching a YouTube video given by Randy Farmer. He explained why the rating system on YouTube was broken. When you looked at many video ratings, they either had 5 stars or none. It seems logical now that he explains it. If you watched an entire YouTube video, chances are you liked it and would rate it highly. You would never waste time watching the entire thing and give it a single star. At least not many people do. Ergo, the proxy for the 1 star was implicit, i.e. anyone who didn't finish watching was essentially giving it a single star or a thumbs down.

There's as much to learn about what was not said or not done when analyzing user interactions. We get excited about the pages where we get million clicks, but we never ask ourselves (rarely) what happened to the pages that got 1 click. Surely there is as much to learn from that, because that actually makes us better. But we don't because it points to our failures and we hate those.

Women have already figured this out. If two men are unhappy, they go outside, have a yelling match, maybe throw a couple of punches and then make up and go have a beer. A woman scorned will slowly kill you with her stare and her silence. It's a slow dagger that gets twisted with every second, driving you nuts because you don't know what she's thinking and how long the pain is going to last. Of course, this is said tongue-in-cheek, but you get the idea.

Ronan Keating has a song with lyrics I'm going to repurpose. It goes like this.

You say it best, when you say nothing at all

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home