It's slow . Navigation is pre - Columbus . Enough bugs to keep an entomologist happy .
Recommend to potential buyers:
no
Full review
This is the opinion that I never thought I would write.
I joined dooyoo back in May 2001. It was an offer from MyPoints – so many points if you registered with dooyoo. No, I didn’t join up from altruistic motives of spreading consumer knowledge; I didn’t join up to earn some money. I joined up for a few MyPoints. It wasn’t even that many as I recollect, but I figured it would help me on my way towards that first voucher. I only intended to register and then forget about it, but I looked and I was intrigued.
Back in those days it was 10p for writing an opinion and 5p for every read you collected. Some people were complaining even then that the rates weren’t what they had been, but they looked good to me so I thought it wouldn’t harm just to write one opinion, now would it, just to see my name up there on the internet?
There was little to choose between dooyoo and Ciao in the early days. Both had a similar range of categories under which you could write an opinion and your peers could read it (or not) and rate as they thought appropriate. Ratings were, and still are, Very Useful, Useful, Somewhat Useful and Not Useful which are the equivalent of Ciao’s VH, H, FH and UH. I’ve often wondered how the conversation went when it was pointed out that “Fairly Useful” wasn’t a good idea.
You got to comment on the opinions too and I often spent more time reading the comments than I did the opinions. Wonderful arguments would develop and it took me back to my days in a University debating chamber. Occasionally the comments were abused; the lack of Guest Books meant that you quite regularly saw comments which read “I’m going to email you” despite the fact that the person reading it probably got the email before they read the comment. There were churners too and debates about whether or not there should be a limit on the number of opinions which could be posted in a day or a week. We worried about such things then.
It was two months after I joined that I became a Guide and for me this was the beginning of the golden age on dooyoo. We wrote, we read and rated, laughed, played and argued. It was fun and addictive. I found that it wasn’t hard to collect 70 or 80 reads at 5p a time for each review and there was always the possibility of another £1 on top of that for a crown. It didn’t pay the bills, but for the fun I was having I’d have paid them!
There were rumours floating round of a new platform – Aurora it was called. Apparently it would revolutionize dooyoo and make its fortune. It would be a wondrous thing to behold. Unfortunately, this did mean that one or two minor irritations, such as the site’s ability to mangle the punctuation in submitted reviews, could not, for the moment be addressed. Could we be patient? After all, Aurora was to be launched in November. Of course we could, only too pleased to help.
Staff were so profuse that even I had heard of their fabled expertise at table football, but there was always someone to turn to, even if one or two of them had developed the art of masterly inactivity to genius level. It was inevitable though that there would be some cut-backs and the ravening hoards returned to their own countries or the dole queue and we were left with, well, the three.
The cuts weren’t going to be restricted to staff either. Ciao had just savaged its own payment rates and it was inevitable that dooyoo would follow. The 10p for writing an opinion went and the read rate was cut to 3p. It was still a great deal more than Ciao (and still is) but the timing was bad. People were just starting to think about Christmas and there was a disincentive to visit dooyoo. After Christmas a lot of people just never came back, many completely put off by the fact that you had to earn £100 before you could get a cheque without paying a service charge. High Street vouchers went and even online vouchers required a service charge at their lowest cash-in level of £20. Dooyoo miles had been devalued for all but the very highest earners. Now there's even a time-limit of twelve months for cashing in your miles - or losing them. It's yet another thing that puts people off.
We were also by then playing a game of “hunt the staff”. Most of the UK operation was disbanded. The servers went to Berlin and the content staff moved to Madrid, but we were still paid from the UK. Dooyoo Spain was on its last legs though and after a few weeks of suffering the unreliable technical backup in Madrid (at one point the Guides’ only contact with the content staff was via an Internet Café somewhere in downtown Madrid) it folded and the two remaining UK content staff flew home.
The bright spot on the horizon – Aurora – had suffered one or two technical glitches too. Launch of this wondrous beast was put back to February, er, no, scrap that, and make it April, yes, definitely April.
In the beginning Guiding had been more akin to mentoring. There was time to help people – to advise them as to how they could make the most of dooyoo. We helped writers to develop their own style, advised them on placing opinions in the best categories – even got them moved to solve problems. We encouraged new writers, soothed ruffled feathers wherever possible. It was fun and there was a sense of playing a real part in developing something good. With the reduction in staff though, more work fell onto the shoulders of the Guides. We were more prominent on the site and members had no one to turn to but the Guides when they needed help. More and more of the emails that arrived complained of abuse or cheques and vouchers which hadn’t arrived, asked about the policy on crowns or complained about new items not being added. Virtually the only “official” reading of opinions was done by the Guides, who were responsible not only for bringing crown-worthy opinions to dooyoo’s attention but also for telling them about some of the rubbish that was posted that could really give the site problems. Suddenly I had a revelation.
I was an unpaid content checker.
I wasn’t alone in coming to this conclusion. Some of the big names gave up guiding and I couldn’t blame them, but I still believed that something good could come of the site. April passed and Aurora, rare as the deathbed of a virtuous virgin, remained elusive. The UK content team went on its travels yet again, one left and the remaining, er, one moved to Berlin. Suddenly we were dealing with “the dooyoo team”. I’ve now come to realise that when this happens it means that I have more dogs than they have staff.
I wasn’t the only Guide who began to make improvements on the site a condition of continuing to guide. Dooyoo did publish its policy on the awarding of crowns as a result of this after months of having one published policy and operating an entirely different one.
Then, at the end of August Aurora was launched; well, not exactly “launched” as with a fanfare – it was “soft-launched”, an effective admission that it was a bit of a failure. How much of a failure we soon realised. Dooyoo had taken a reasonably useable site and made it completely unworkable. Even such basic problems as the splattering of opinions with unwanted question marks had not been addressed. Four months later not all the bugs have yet been cleared.
After months of trying to work behind the scenes to make improvements Jill Murphy and I resigned as Guides at the same time, primarily over the issue of the site’s failure to do anything for the dooyoo community. The site had become a farce. When I checked yesterday morning 50 opinions had been posted in the previous 24 hours, 15 of them from one person. In a reasonably comparable twenty-four hour period 88 opinions had been posted on Ciao with no obvious churners.
You might be smiling now, thinking that Ciao’s ahead of the game, but I’d like to give you something to think about. The latest thinking is that Community is a bit of a millstone around a website’s neck. A community needs support and nurturing. It needs rewards. A community means that people will stick around – and want paying. Community costs money. The ideal for an opinion site is a constantly changing group of people who will post a few reviews, realise that it’s going to take too long to earn enough to cash in and move on without costing the site anything. Dooyoo’s either got it right or it’s struggling to keep its head above water and frankly I’m not certain which it is.
My conclusions? Well there’s two really. Firstly I don’t think I’d advise anyone to start on dooyoo now; whatever happens I don’t think it’ll ever be as good as it was. Secondly I think we all ought to realise what a precious thing this community is and I think we should be doing everything that we can to nurture it and make certain we keep it.
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