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Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

I think Amazon reviewers are people with opinions, who relish the idea of sharing their opinion with the world. I don't think these people need any more motivation than that-- no badges or flair required.

However: I think that the reviewer-to-reader ratio is tiny, and this is masked a bit by Amazon's absurd popularity.

And, to make matters worse, this absurd popularity is one of the driving motivators (cf above, "share one's opinion with the world", not "share one's opinion with the 200 people who happen to follow my micro-site.")

If anyone knows any way out of this besides increasing the number of users by several orders of magnitude, I'd love to hear it-- I, too, have a site that allows reviews, and only a tiny handful of reviewers (so far.)

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I think the main thing would be to build a community where people feel some need to belong. I don't know if Amazon really does this, and what you're seeing in terms of number of reviews on their site is probably just another reflection of their popularity. Some % of people will write a review, Amazon just has enough people that it ends up being a rather large number.

The problem then becomes how to encourage a greater % of your audience to contribute. Some people might be more willing to contribute if they could see that their contributions were valued. Can users rate a review (like Amazons X of Y people found this review helpful)? Some might be more willing if it increased their standing in the community - some people enjoy being seen as an expert - do you recognize people who take the time to leave reviews (perhaps magnified by review quality)?

Most of this will only really work if it is within a community, however. If lots of people just come and go then those tactics are fairly meaningless. If you have a niche site with a lot of repeat visitors that you can build a community around, this might be a good way to start that process.

Currently either a reviewer has 2 choices: 1. put a review on Amazon, but hand over ownership of the review. 2. put a review up on a personal blog, and maintain ownership but get no readers. Micro-formats offered a way to publish reviews and have them more easily aggregated, but haven't delivered. It is clearly a non-trivial problem.

"If anyone knows any way out of this besides increasing the number of users by several orders of magnitude, I'd love to hear it"

Disclaimer: I have never run a reviews site so this might just be a wild idea.

What if you implemented a karma system like HN/Reddit/Digg and rewarded users for their relative karma score for particular comments to other users commenting on the same thing. For those who achieve a certain relative score, you can give them prizes, discounts, etc. I mention relative score since this would curb the incentive to game the system.

Don't forget that there are also a lot of Amazon reviewers who are nothing but trolls. They are making it harder to post reviews like that, but I still see plenty of cases where people have hijacked Amazon comments or reviews for the lulz.

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