Top 5 Ciao Sins > Reviews (40)

I suppose it is human nature that many of us (if not most of us) feel that we are more sinned against than sinning -- this is true not only on Ciao, but life in general. From biblical injunctions calling upon us to 'judge not, lest ye be judged' and to look to the logs in our own eyes before dealing with the splinters in others, we can clearly see that the tendency toward sinning (and the complementary tendency toward judging sinners) is long-standing in the history of human activity.

I must confess that I am rather surprised that this category was permitted on the site by Ciao - a more ready box of kindling for firestorms I don't think I've ever seen. Even so, it doesn't seem to have happened yet that the writings in the category (only seven others in number at the moment as I write this) have caused a great deal of consternation. Perhaps that is because the writings have often concentrated on the non-controversial sins? Almost all of us can agree, at least in broad principle, on some sins -- plagiarism is wrong, revenge rating is wrong, multiple accounts for the purposes of anonymous abuse is wrong, etc.

I've been the victim of some sins -- one person, with multiple, self-congratulatory accounts plagiarised one of my film reviews, slapped a Not-Helpful rating on my review (one wonders why he did this, given that that was a certain way to make sure I'd notice what was going on), and then began to revenge-rate people who noticed the situation and rated accordingly. Almost all the major Ciao sins rolled up into one, neat package!

Given my theological interests, I'm always interested in terms of sin of looking beyond the simple actions and proscriptions, and looking at the more subtle aspects. As I was thinking about this topic, there were various sins beyond the Top 5 or Top 10 that often get mentioned that I thought might be worthy of discussion. Some, if not all, of them are not absolute sins -- they can be methods or modes of Ciao-acting that have some justification (as, indeed, many do them). So, I do not offer up condemnations, anathemas or excommunications, but rather some openings for possible discussion.

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Possible Ciao Sin 1
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Rating the person and not the review.

I can hear you now. 'That's one of our regular Ciao sins!' But I suggest a difference. We all know that many people rate reviews by people not only in accordance with the review, but also within the context of the person. There is no absolute objectivity possible, but even so, we still adapt our ratings and opinions in certain ways. Some are subtle about it, others are blatant about it. But, this is not what I'm talking about. I refer here to the corollary of this sin, which can be described thusly:

Deciding not to read, rate or comment on certain reviews because they are written by certain people.

This is, in its own way, every bit as much a 'rating the person, not the review' -- there are people on Ciao who will not read my reviews or rate them because they are written by me; they won't read my film reviews, my Scotch or wine reviews, my travel reviews, my music reviews or my non-religious-themed book reviews because they see me as the religious book reviewer, nothing more.

I'm not the only one who gets dinged for having a reputation in one direction that is off-putting to others.

I call this a possible sin because it largely rests on intention. None of us have the time to read everyone or every review. But there are some on this service (just as there were on Epinions, Themestream, Pearlsoup, AuthorsDen, and the various other services where I've written) who will not read certain people, not because of what they've written in their latest reviews, but because of who they are.

As I stated earlier, sometimes there is valid justification for this kind of action, making it not quite the sin it might be. Lack of time is one; lack of certain interests are another. As it is impossible to judge the interior aspects of people in venues such as Ciao, we have to let self-determination as to the sinfulness of this rest with each individual user.

This can relate somewhat to the next possible sin...

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Possible Ciao Sin 2
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Stopping reading and rating someone because she or he is bumping up against your position in one of the ranking tables.

I've had this happen to me a number of times. It is rather sad to realise that someone who had been a regular and faithful reader suddenly stops, or even those who had been an occasional reader never darkens the doorstep of one of one's reviews any more. One becomes a victim of success here. There can be elements of jealousy, or irritation, or any of several of the classical deadly sins at play here. It is unfortunate, as the ranking tables often represent the more active and long-term members of the site, and it is sad when they decide for this reason to abandon reading, as if their relatively read and point additions being with-held will make sure that their own rank is preserved.

The complementary possible sin here is, suddenly deciding to get active again to keep someone from passing you in the ranking table. There is a problem in doing this, in that you have to gauge the pace of reviewing and read-accumulation of the person coming up behind you and determine if you can keep up the pace to stay ahead. In the end, none of us are guaranteed to remain at our current ranks; eventually, we will all fall. If nothing else (and this has happened to me twice in the past five years) the site might just go belly-up over a weekend and all the work done is for naught. As the Romans were famous for letting their Triumph celebrants know, all glory is fleeting.

I know when I stop I writing and reading, I'll sink in the charts. I have to confess to having stopped reading a few people because I became aware that they had stopped reading my things, too. Is that also a sin? Probably.

This leads to the next possible sin...

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Possible Ciao Sin 3
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Taking dots, Ciao points, and ranking tables too seriously.

'Surely, this one has been mentioned before,' I hear you saying. But again, I add the opposite side.

There are some who like to make it clear that they don't care about dots, points, ranking tables, etc. to such a high degree that one wonders why they in fact take it so seriously. If one doesn't care, one doesn't care. Sometimes the people who proclaim that they don't care about such things are the same ones who carefully avoiding giving points or reads to selected others.

I don't know that I've made public statements one way or the other about how I feel about ranking tables generally, or dots, or Ciao points -- I have been variously highly ranked and lowly ranked in different tables on different systems. I remember once on Pearlsoup where I was, for about 15 seconds (I'm not making this up) the number one person in terms of some kind of point system they had. The former number one person then almost miraculously added something like 10,000 points within a minute to his total (for a brief moment there, you got points for spamming all your friends with 'join us' emails). Remembering, of course, that all glory is fleeting, that person got passed himself within a few days, and by the time I left Pearlsoup a few months later, had dropped out entirely. I knew this person on another reviewing site, and he spent much of his time proclaiming how much he disliked point systems and ranking tables. I couldn't help but wonder if he only disliked them when he wasn't ranked number one.

Again, in all of this, context and intention are important. There are genuine abuses of the systems, and it is right to point those out. It does become a sin, however, when it turns into sour grapes.

For the record, I don't care much for the Ciao points, but don't mind getting them, either. Dots don't bother me, but I'd be reluctant to say I don't like them even if I didn't, because I think it is unfair to those with lower-coloured dots to be 'posh-dot' person who belittles them. I've been ranked in several different ways across many websites and platforms, and have yet to find a perfect system, a fair system, an abuse-free system, or one that I'd like to see universally applied.

But the dot, rank, and Ciao point question leads somewhat to the next possible sin...

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Possible Ciao Sin 4
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Giving lower ratings, ostensibly in the name of fairness, adherence to guidelines, or to combat 'grade inflation'.

Let us first be honest -- there is no such thing as a completely objective ranking system, and could never be across such a diverse platform of users such as Ciao. Even if we all meticulously adhered to the guidelines, there are many different ways of interpreting those guidelines, and often multiple interpretations of the guidelines will be simultaneously appropriate for any given review. Even if we were given guidelines for interpretation, a preferred hermeneutic, we would still vary. So, claims of simply adhering to guidelines may not be a sin, but is no guarantee of consistency across multiple users, or perhaps not even for the same user across multiple reviews on different days.

With regard to grade or rating inflation, I invite anyone to trek through the first several weeks of Ciao's existence in the archives. I have gone through over the past several years literally a thousand of them, and found one thing fairly common -- lots of poorly worded, mis-spelled, uninformative reviews rated Helpful or Very Helpful. I gave up my trek through the archives shortly after Ciao started requiring comments to be placed when a rating was at significant variance from the 'normal' rating. I had to put a generic comment in so often (because I had no constructive criticism that would matter, and most of the time the person was long gone anyway) that it became a bore, and might have looked like a point-grab. Unfortunately, there are lots and lots of one-paragraph-wonders out there from the early days with high ratings -- rating inflation has always been part of this site. It is nothing new. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be combatted, but with an historical eye, it does bother me when I see some things today being given Helpful votes when I know they will stand next to a much older one-paragraph-wonder that has a few VH's stamped on it, and it will thus stand out higher.

With regard to fairness, well, this is again an issue of context and intention. One of the reasons I gave up my diamond pursuit over a year ago was because whenever I would turn out a review that I knew was special, and had that little extra that might get attention, it was almost invariably stamped with a 'Helpful' by a diamond-studded person who didn't need the competition. I had one such person (someone I knew from Epinions who has since left Ciao) who admitted as much to me that that is what he was doing.

I had one person stamp a Somewhat Helpful on one of my reviews once because he thought the book title was too esoteric for Ciao. Excuse me? He admitted to me that there was nothing wrong with the review at all, he just didn't think the product was all that helpful being on Ciao. Uh, okay...

This relates to the last of my possible sins:

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Possible Ciao Sin 5
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Presuming to impose one's own view of what the community or website should be on everyone else as if it were the only normative standard.

We all have our own ideas about what we use Ciao for, and what we hope to get out of Ciao. This is true for other websites, product-related and reviewing, creative writing, or otherwise. This is not a debate unique to Ciao -- I've heard it on every website on which I've participated, and there have been varying response from participants and leadership/owners. Some owner/administrators take a hard-line authoritarian management style to keep their vision of their website going; others take a more laissez-faire attitude, preferring to see what grows out of the relative freedom afforded participants.

Ciao is a mixture, in that we have contributors/community members who help shape directions, in addition to some input at varying levels from the Ciao administration.

There are those who insist that this is just a product review site, and community aspects are (or should be) irrelevant. Others see it primarily as a community, with the product and creative writing aspects more of an enticement, or even an excuse, to join in with the other people.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- context and intention are important here, determining whether or not what one says about how the site or community should be used falls into the sinful category.

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As I said earlier, I won't make condemnations, anathemas or excommunications. Sometimes things work out for the best -- the person who down-rated my book review because of the product later revised his rating after some discussion, and we are now regular readers of each others' work. The cartel (it may have been all one person) who plagiarised and downrated my review and set up a circle of clickers was all deleted before long.

Negative events need not stay negative. It is what we do with them that makes them remain negative or become more positive.

I like Ciao. I've been here for a little over two years now, and will continue to contribute for the foreseeable future. I know that I fall into the occasional sin just as others do, and will strive to do better in the future, as I have no doubt most others on Ciao will also do.

Ciao for now!