Equipment reviews, are they credible?

Opinions are like....uhm, you know....

I have less of a problem with peoples' biases, or even their agendas, then I do with the poor quality of effort and time taken which is being displayed in 90% of these so-called "reviews". A heck of a lot of the responses are more informative and thoughtful than the "reviews"! I at this point frankly think that there is a higher percentage of worthwhile user reviews to be found on Audioreview.com, which is very disappointing to realize.

I believe the easiest way around this situation is for Audiogon to institute a "peer-review" system for the "reviews" themselves. Each review should have, right on the page with it, a box that permits the readers to vote on two catagories:

1) The quality of the review from a standpoint of thoroughness, informativeness, thoughtfulness, how well-written, and how enjoyable it was to read.

2) To what degree they either agreed or disagreed with the writer's findings and opinions.

Both catagories could be represented on a 5-point scale, and the site would automatically compute a running tabulation of the average reactions of Audiogon members to any review. The average result for both catagories could be shown by a pair of decimal numbers between 1 and 5 that would be displayed in the title line of the review, helping browsing A-Gon members to search out quality work, and avoid the dogs.

But more importantly than that last benefit, the review-grading system would have the immediate effect of greatly encouraging review writers to take their time and do good work in the first place, so that it would preemptively weed out all the worthless one-paragraph, unsupported quickie opinion-mongering jobs that are badly written and painful to read (and in my opinion, basically somewhat disrespectful by the "reviewer" of the members such a "review" seeks to be read by).

Without something along these lines being implemented, it's already clear to me that this whole feature is fast turning into mostly a waste of time, and something that will simply begin clogging up the site. To facilitate better reviewing efforts being successfully attempted and completed, however, there are also two things that Audiogon needs to do about the way reviews can be written and posted on the site (I have not yet written a "review" under the new catagory as such, so if I'm about to mention features already in place, please forgive my ignorance):

1) The site needs to be constructed so that a review writer can draft their article over more than one session if need be. The writer must be able to save the current draft of their article on the site, and be able to return to it later to continue writing and editing, submitting the finished work for posting on the forum only when they are satisfied that it is ready. This feature should not be limited in number of sessions or days that it can be used.

2) The writer must further be able to add footnotes or corrections to the body of the original article once it has been completed and already posted as the thread-head, for the life of the review in the archives. These additions should be automatically dated just like a member response below would be, but will have the 'privilege of place' of being located with the original article, for the reviewer to add any pertinent addendums, references, links, corrections, or follow-ups to the review. Reviewer replies to member responses should still be located below with the all the responses, however.

P.S. - Alternatively, we could just send all of our equipment to Clueless for him to review and be done with it. ;-)

Cluesless: That would imply a having a working knowledge of how to use a computer. ;-)

Turnaround, your point is very well taken, and I was thinking about some things along those lines after I posted above. I think the pertinent difference in this case between Audioreview.com and Audiogon is the way the reviews are set up to browse. At Audioreview.com, you click on a particular brand and model of component, not an individual review, as with Audiogon. This means that at Audioreview.com, you don't in effect wind up wasting your time opening worthless reviews; as you scan the possibly long page of reviews of any one piece of gear, you can pretty quickly tell the wheat from the chaff as you go, and don't have to wait to open and close separate pages, which takes considerable time all together if you want to peruse many reviews. Here at Audiogon, you must open each review individually, so without some external indicator of the review's quality, you often feel gypped for having wasted the time.

But again, I want to stress that the main thrust of my review-ratings idea was to force an improvement in the quality of the articles themselves (it would probably also have the effect of reducing somewhat the total number of reviews posted - not necessarily a bad thing, IMHO). As for this idea's merely being 'opinion on top of opinion', I think it's much easier to have many people agree on the worthwhileness of an article, than on their assessments of audio gear (also not a bad thing).

Audiogon - thanks for pointing out that the feature allowing multiple writing sessions is in place (has anybody used it so far?). I actually suggested this in an older thread from several months ago that touched on these topics. Whether you read that then, and whether it was a novel idea at the time if you did, I don't know. But I'm glad it's here, and I for one will try to take advantage of it sometime soon.

Yeah, I think we're on the same page about this stuff, Turnaround. What you pointed out concerning a ratings system's being potentially biased towards favorable reviews of gear anyone rating the review personally happens to like, is why I proposed a two-pronged ratings approach as detailed above. One rating for the quality of the article, one for agreement or disagreement with the take of the reviewer. My idea is that this would tend to keep the raters more objective about article quality. I think your idea of some 'leading questions', as we say in sales, to guide the review writers is also not a bad idea.

P.S. - Nrchy, I'll raise a hand for Bishopwill based on my exchanges with him. You listening, BW? Get in here and defend yourself! :-)