Inside the Web's free-advice revolution.
There's no pornography at Epinions.com. No gambling, no daytrading accounts, no instant sports scores. Yet online discussions among hardcore members read like transcripts from a 12-step meeting: "I am addicted to a drug called Epinions. I have to keep going back for more," and "Luckily, I am already divorced, or Epinions would probably be the cause of my breakup."
In fact, you'll find nothing but user-written reviews on Epinions, 100- to 1,000-word critiques of thousands of products and services: restaurants, books, recipes, ISPs, videos, casinos, charge cards, colleges, sports stadiums, single malt scotches, ankle braces, credit unions, vegetable peelers. So if Consumer Reports doesn't elicit this kind of response - no one hoards copies to pore over guiltily in darkened basements - why is it that people are banging away obsessively on Epinions?
One of the top-ranking Epinionators, Bonies7, explains it on a message board: Using the site is "as addictive as the most powerful stimulant known to man," he writes. "Why does it work? Because it plays so well to the egos we all possess."
That's it. The neurochemical rush of pure ego boost on Epinions is as fine as anything you'll find in a paper bindle or a plastic vial. Epinions is a concentrated, pharmaceutical-free source of ego gratification, delivered via quantified feedback. And Epinions.com understands this. The site is like a Skinner box codesigned by Rube Goldberg and the creator of Sim games, in which rats take turns pressing levers in order to deliver jolts of pleasure to their fellow rodents' brains. "The cool part of Epinions," posts one user, "is waiting and seeing how people rate your reviews."
Users can rate the reviews posted on Epinions as Highly Recommended, Recommended, Somewhat Recommended, or Not Recommended. Ratings are made public for all to see (imagine wearing a number on your chest that indicates your prestige among coworkers), and reviewers can sign up to receive an email alert whenever a new rating is posted: "Your review of 'Private Benjamin' has been rated!" Some Epinionators admit to staying up all night just to see if anyone rates their newest contribution. Casey Stewart, a registered nurse in Stockton, California, says that when she started writing for Epinions, she'd check the site five times a day for "ego strokes."
Science fiction fanzines have a word for the rush you get when you see your name in print: egoboo (short for ego boost). A distant predecessor of Usenet, the fanzine got its start in the late 1920s, when the sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories began running a letters column in which readers discussed the scientific principles behind the pulp mag's tales. The column included the street addresses of the fans. This led to the formation of fan clubs, many of which began publishing their own newsletters, and these newsletters eventually became known as fanzines. A 1949 issue of The New Republic ran an article about the hundreds of fanzines in existence at the time, explaining that sci-fi fans "seem to be infected with a virus. ... They correspond with other sufferers, sometimes in letters running to 12 pages."
Letters columns could take any number of twists and turns: What might start out as a discussion of Charlemagne's campaign to Christianize Europe could, in the course of subsequent issues, spin off along three separate trajectories - one on how to solve Fermat's theorem, another on the proper way to construct a funeral pyre, and a third on the evils of adding fluoride to the water supply. (A common saying among science fiction fans: "All knowledge is contained in fanzines.") Getting a letter published in someone else's fanzine was one of fandom's great ways to score egoboo; getting praised for your letter in the next issue was even better. Richard Eney wrote in his 1959 Fancyclopedia II that fandom itself "may be defined as an infinitely complex system for the production of pure egoboo."
You might say that the Internet is an infinitely complex system for the commercial exploitation of egoboo, where - on dozens of new "knowledge exchange" Web sites like Epinions - people are offering up their opinions and answering questions on everything from setting up a Web server to comparison shopping for inflatable sex dolls.
And they are doing so prolifically. On Askme.com, stay-at-home mom Charlene Wood answered 1,085 questions about taxes, parenting, beading, and paranormal psychology (among other subjects) in a single month. Marty Stratton, who won the title of top expert in ExpertCentral.com's automotive category in February and who always ends his posts with "God bless," has answered a total of 588 questions. Like Bill McCann (aka Dagda on ExpertCentral) - an Irish geophysicist, chemist, archaeologist, and playwright with a special interest in ethics and metaphysics, who answers questions on everything from Celtic mythology to first dates - thousands of ordinary people are churning out reams of valuable prose on the Web and getting practically nothing in return.
Tommy Hui has 426,054 points on the Experts-Exchange, making him the sixth-highest-ranking member in Experts-Exchange's Hall of Fame. He has answered more than 1,200 questions, many from professional programmers, including the guy who complained that a maddening C++ problem was "keeping me from getting a job done for my employer." Hui's answer, typical of the others he doles out at an average rate of three a day, included a page of meticulously formatted program code, ready for cutting and pasting into the questioner's application.
Unlike the format at Epinions, where members post reviews at their whim, here the drill is Q&A. For each question, a member offers the number of points they think the answer is worth, and answerers like Hui pick and choose their challenges. These are the kinds of questions that crop up on Experts-Exchange: "I need a dial-up con-nection via null-modem to connect w95 machine to NT Server RAS over TCP/IP," and "My iMac won't boot from 2nd partition." If you've got a question on OS/2, MVS, NT4, AIX JavaScript, HTML, Java, or CGI, at least one of the 57,000 registered "experts" at Experts-Exchange can supply an answer - provided you offer enough points. Web surfers looking for answers get 75 points to spend when they sign up, plus an additional 5 points each day thereafter. Most questions go for between 50 and 100 points.
But points on Experts-Exchange and most of the other expert sites are nothing more than a quick way to advertise your egoboo score. (Other expert sites reward users with "infodollars," "prestige ratings," or "knowledgeability scores.") Those thousands of points get you nothing tangible. On Experts-Exchange, the 100 highest point-earners make it into the Hall of Fame and get their choice of low-end tech gadgets, such as scanners or PDAs.
A lanky 29-year-old who radiates easy confidence, Hui develops Windows NT applications for Tibco Finance Technology in Palo Alto. He telecommutes from his Los Angeles apartment, which he shares with his wife, Soyeun Choi, and a Jindo dog named Mango - the subject of many of Hui's digital photographs. Hui's got three gigantic PC towers on the floor of the spare bedroom, each crammed with noisy cooling fans ("I don't notice the noise anymore," he shrugs), and he logs on to Experts-Exchange after waking up, during lunch, during breaks, and at night while his wife studies for her law degree.
Why would Hui want to tackle other people's programming problems when he already has a full-time job doing the same thing? "It's not as if he's the Mother Teresa of computers," says Soyeun Choi admiringly, "but if someone happens to ask, he's willing to help."
And what if hundreds ask, perfect strangers who've got no ties to Hui other than through a Web site? He's still willing to help - with clipped, unadorned answers, devoid of salutation, chatter, or sign-off but perfectly to the point. When asked, for instance, how to find the name of a hard drive in OWL programming language, Hui proffered this single, typical sentence: "Use GetVolumeInformation()."
Hui is hard-pressed to explain his devotion to Experts-Exchange save with vague references to "helping out." "I worked for Borland tech support for about three years after graduating from UC Santa Cruz in '92," he reminisces. "I have a lot of good memories of Borland, and Experts-Exchange is a natural progression from there. It's very soothing, because you know that what you are doing is helping others."
But there's more to it than that. The site gives Hui an opportunity to prove himself. Hui says that when he joined the compiler group at Borland, he was awestruck at the talent of a few programmers known internally as the Barbarians. "I was always amazed at how much they knew and how they were able to figure things out. And I've always strived to be like them." At Experts-Exchange, Hui faces a slew of real-world challenges that he can use to test his skills. Even though he says his work on the site is "not an ego thing," if he's coaxed he'll admit, "I do feel competitive." And to his wife he'll own up completely: "Look - I'm number six!"
The minds behind Experts-Exchange are happy to go along with the egoboo model - what Web site would want to turn down thousands of pages of free content? The site's CEO, Keith McCurdy, who came from a job as VP of technology for Electronic Arts, says that Experts-Exchange's non-negotiable point system - experts can't even use the points to "buy" answers to their own questions - plays right into the psychology of egoboo, preventing users from feeling like they're performing labor. Instead, the "heroes and celebrities" on the site earn only "the satisfaction of being right" before an audience of their peers. Says McCurdy, "They like the exposure they get. They like to be known."
The challenge for guys like McCurdy is to facilitate the flow of satisfaction. Reputation managers - rating systems that allow members of an online community to vote on the quality of other members' contributions - are a powerful incentive to participate and be interesting. Offline, it takes time to figure out who the liars and idiots are and cross them off your list. Online, there's no place for them to hide. Tools like reputation managers make it instantly evident how valuable other people are to you and how valuable you are to other people. It's easy to become obsessed with your score: It's one of the few ways to find out what other people really think of you.
"I can't wait until morning to see what my new rating is," says Len Titone, a 38-year-old CPA from Zionsville, Indiana. Earnest and unfailingly humble, with an occasional stammer and a quiet tone, Titone says he's hooked on the Q&A site Askme.com. "I want to get straight 5s the way a student wants straight As." The sixth-highest-ranked expert at Askme, Titone has answered more than 1,000 income tax and accounting questions on the site. He has a listed average response time of five hours, and an average quality-of-advice rating of 4.5 out of 5. "I go over my ratings, especially the low and high ones, to see what people liked or didn't like," he says. "It's a scorecard mentality."
Does he ever feel cheated out of a good score? "Now you've hit the sore spot," he moans. "Sometimes I have to research an answer for someone, and it can take a while. I will spell out all that I know in detail, with options and plans, et cetera, and I get a low rating. I take it personally." As is often the case on expert sites, people will give Titone a low rating if they don't like his answer, regardless of its accuracy or quality. When he told a divorced father that he wouldn't be able to claim his children as dependents, the dad gave Titone's answer a 1. It comes with the territory, he says: "With taxes, the messenger gets shot." But it hurts. One day someone slapped each of six of Titone's answers with a 1 rating. "I reread the answers and was very upset. It bothered me all day."
But with four adopted children (one from Paraguay, one from Honduras, and two from Chile; a fifth, from Bolivia, died soon after the Titones brought her home), shouldn't he be too busy for this crazy sideline? "How do I explain?" he asks. "You get a question regarding the earned-income tax credit and you know that it's from a single mom and she's got three kids and is making $30,000 a year and by the time I'm done I may have saved her $1,500. There's something about that that drives me." And if the question is from a young white guy making $100K? "Oh, it's the same thing for me; I still have to help."
Although he says he doesn't feel pressure to be in the top 10, Titone is driven to answer some 25 questions daily - a symptom, he explains, of his type A personality. He's compelled to answer new questions, as well as follow-up questions, the same day he sees them. When he can't, he says, "I feel like I'm behind and need to catch up." Titone laughs self-effacingly. "You see those ratings and you have to be number one."
The only money anyone on Askme.com ever makes is the $25 to $500 awarded each month to the top expert in each category.
Askme, Experts-Exchange, and Epinions are just three of the dozens of egoboo engines now on the Web. With names like Allexperts.com, ExpertCentral.com, and Abuzz.com, these startups are attempting to exploit the human proclivity for generosity and the need for ego-stroking by building ad-sponsored environments in which micro-mavens obsessively volunteer their time reviewing products and media or answering questions on a variety of topics.
These business models presume generosity - or at least some basic drive to share. Why not? Some anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists argue that humans are hardwired for generosity, that our propensity for sharing was inherited from our primitive ancestors. The economist Mancur Olson came to the same conclusion in his consideration of the rich man who provides a coastal community with a lighthouse: Even though it isn't in the interest of an individual to pay for a public work, the benefactor is indirectly compensated through a boost in status.
On Epinions, Casey Stewart has provided her community with more than 70 "quick meal recipes" - including one for "fancy little pots au crème" and another for sausage cheese balls. And like the rich man, she's been indirectly compensated.
Stewart, aka KCFoxy, has the kind of temperament Epinions was built for. With nearly 300 well-written reviews to her credit, covering everything from a magazine about log cabins to a Rolling Stones documentary, she claims she has only "scratched the surface" of a deep mine of material.
On a single day in February, Stewart wrote about suicide ("The doubt, guilt, sorrow, and anger are pervasive. Loved ones search their memories for clues, signs, messages") and about Redmond's Aussie hair-care products ("My everyday conditioner is the aptly named Instant Daily Conditioner. It is a light conditioner that detangles and provides added moisture"). During the six months of her Epinions membership, her reviews have been read by other members more than 10,000 times.
Dressed in colorful post-hippie purple, and possessed of a melodic voice and conspiratorial smile, the 49-year-old Stewart comes across as free-spirited, kindly, and self-assured. In high school she edited the class newsletter; in college she contributed fiction to the literary journal. And like Len Titone, she's earnest and unpretentious. "I just sort of challenged myself," she confides, describing her growing participation on Epinions, "to spread my wings. I'm so amazed that anybody would want to read what I write."
After a stint as a singer-songwriter in the San Francisco Bay Area, Stewart returned to Stockton to care for her ailing grandmother and ended up studying nursing. But writing is her first love. "My ultimate fantasy would be to win Lotto, build a wonderful log cabin in a beautiful wooded area, raise husky puppies, and do some volunteer work in nursing - and live the rest of the time online," she muses. "It would be so mellow - just self-actualization." Stewart works 35 hours a week as a registered nurse, but devotes even more time to writing and researching for Epinions. "If I review a cooking tool," Stewart explains, "I might spend the whole day cooking with it, to put myself in the place of someone who'll try it when they read my review."
Epinions, however, isn't the only site that's reaping the benefits of Stewart's careful, lucid prose. Before arriving at Epinions, she was contributing to Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. In one recent month, in fact, on top of her Epinions work, she contributed 2 reviews to Frommers.com and 15 to Dine.com. Leaning back in a cushiony highback chair, Stewart explains how, on a recent vacation cruise off the coast of Mexico, she realized Epinions had begun to affect the way she thinks: She found herself making mental notes for future reviews. "It was funny, because I was experiencing it on one level, and on another level, I was storing away ideas for future Epinions." Her new life as a critic, she says, is always "there in the background."
At Epinions, status is measured (and made public) in a variety of ways. Not only are members' reviews rated one at a time, but Epinionators also make declarations about whom they trust and whom they don't. Member data, prominently displayed, includes how much they've written, the number of times they've been read, and the number of members who trust them. You can make it onto the site's "most popular" lists or "most trusted," overall or by category, and you can visit community spaces where members scold and applaud one another.
Perhaps for this reason, Epinions is one of the most active and varied ecosystems on the Web. Launched in September 1999, it has evolved into a diverse community populated by cliques, clowns, parasites, symbiotes, self-appointed cops, cheaters, flamers, and feuders. It's swarming with people who were English or journalism majors but ended up stuck in other careers. And it has produced member-generated site refinements, such as the Web of Distrust.
Jeff Schwartz is a celebrity on Epinions. The 32-year-old insurance adjuster from Littleton, Colorado, who goes by the handle Poseidon, hovers at around number four on the site's overall most trusted members list. (One fan recently posted this on a discussion board: "Note to Epinions.com: You need another rating choice above Highly Recommended. Label it: Poseidon.") An outspoken right-winger hardened by the barbs of liberalism when a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Schwartz says he would run for office in a second, if there were money in it. Instead, he became VP of his condo board association and created the Web of Distrust. This is how he explains it in one of his Epinions posts: "It is a list of people for whom I will not read any of their opinions, because they have demonstrated extreme immaturity and do not take the purpose of Epinions.com seriously." In other words, they're making a mockery of the hunger for egoboo. Many people are now building their own distrust lists, and Epinions has even officially sanctioned the idea by putting "distrust this reviewer" buttons on every page, which, as Epinions explains, "makes abusive and unreliable members disappear from view" - a fate worse than infamy in an egoboo economy.
There are of course other factors that might account for Epinions' bubbling culture. For one thing, members can actually earn decent money for their efforts there.
Reviewers at Epinions are paid anything from a penny to 3 cents every time another member reads and rates their work. Laurie Edwards (username: Endora60) and her husband, Dave (Zobovor), say they actually make their living (and support two toddlers) writing reviews for Epinions. A former blackjack and craps dealer, Laurie Edwards writes at least three thoughtful, well-crafted reviews a day, mostly about books; her husband writes chiefly about Beanie Babies, Pokémon, and Star Wars figurines. The couple claims to spend between eight and nine hours a day writing and researching out of their home in Ogden, Utah.
Most Epinionators, however, will tell you flat out that they're not in it for the money. As Epinions cofounder Mike Speiser puts it, "Fortune is not the motivation here. Fame is infinitely more valuable."
Twenty-nine-year-old Chris Bickel came to Epinions with every intention of becoming a celebrity. "I'm on the list of most trusted members, and on the music list I'm ranked first," he tallies. "I just made the most popular education reviewer's list, which I don't really understand, but I think it's because I wrote about how I was a male stripper to pay my way through college."
Bickel's reviews have attention-grabbing titles, like "Mandatory abortion for retarded mothers!!" and "I keep a gun under my seat." Each day a new photograph graces his profile page. (Bickel posed in a Warholesque wig one day and mugged in dramatically sinister lighting the next.)
But Bickel stands out from the other gimmicky Epinionators (such as the guy who reviews everything in pirate dialect or the Mexican-wrestler reviewer) because he's a great writer and wit. He's not fooling around. Like the name of his rock band, Confederate Fagg (which performs in clubs near his South Carolina home), Bickel's reviews deliberately provoke the homeyness that seems to have settled in across much of Epinions. He suspects that his review of the Bible ("A most elegant, eloquent work of drug-induced fiction") and one about his penis (to protest the scores of opinions on circumcision) have prevented Epinions management from designating him an expert. But Peter Merholz, creative director at Epinions, has described Bickel as a "fucking genius." Bickel often reminds readers in his own reviews that a site called DamnDirtyApe.com has crowned him King of Epinions.
Then why hasn't he made it to the commercials?!
In perhaps the most brazen attempt at egoboo exploitation yet, Epinions has elevated a few of its members to the status of national spokespeople. Cofounder Mike Speiser produced the series of TV commercials, featuring real Epinionators in action, that began airing this March. In one, the author of a November 1999 Epinion called "Screw Alta" tries to barge his way onto a lift at the Utah ski resort, Michael Moore-style, on his snowboard. (Snowboards are banned at Alta.) In another, a woman whose original online review was titled "Love the Medela!" demonstrates the battery-powered Medela breast pump, while her cat laps up the spillover.
These ads, Speiser says, are the ultimate way to reward the site's celebrities with the thing they're really after: attention.
Attention, yes. Or infodollars. Or author ratings. Or knowledgeability scores. Top 10 lists. Gold stars. The knowledge that you helped.
In northern Tanzania, where researchers from the West like to journey, looking for clues about human behavior, a group called the Hadza hunt large antelope and giraffes. Kristen Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, has studied the men of the Hadza culture. They prefer to hunt large game, instead of easily snaring the plentiful guinea fowl. By going after the more difficult prey, Hadza men are less likely to put meat on the table at the end of the day. And since the meat of a giraffe, for instance, is too much for a single family, the hunter ends up sharing most of his spoils with the community.
So why does the hunter make that extra effort, when most of his profits go to others? Why not just focus on bringing home his own bacon?
Hawkes has concluded that the prestige the Hadza hunter racks up for his success in bagging the big game pays off in the form of public admiration. It's the glamour of a feat big and good enough for sharing that matters.
But of course we could have guessed that. If you've ever been on an expert site, you know: Eating is only half the fun. The rest is egoboo.
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