July 31, 2006
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Reading the Ratings
I have recently been subjected to the painful pleasure of reading through the ratings at one ApartmentRatings.com. The place is a fascinating case study on human nature, especially in how people characterize their experiences and how people react to uncertainty of the verification of information.
My first thought on these ratings were that they were completely worthless. You see, it quickly became obvious that ‘everywhere’ pretty much had bad ratings and usually more bad ratings than good. This is to be expected though as people are only likely to post a review if they have strong feelings about a place either positive or negative, and negative reactions are more common than positive with regards to most things, especially something so import to people as one’s living experience. But more importantly, it seeon became clear that a great many ratings, good and bad, were illegitimate and utrustworthy. You see, you don’t have to review the site for more than five minutes before you find at least one review acusing another review of being “written by management” or “written by a former disgruntled employee”. Upon further examination you do find posts that have the air of fakeness about them. Certainly there are those that use language that is ‘unlikely’ to be used by a normal poster. Furthermore, there are those that are posted by people who clearly have a grudge against the place about which they are posting and want to hurt it in some meaningful way. There isn’t any particularly strong moderation, in large part because
it is difficult to discern, if you are honest about it, a fake post
from a real one. On top of that, the average poster to this site is clearly not very experienced in the new ‘art’ of internet message board/flame navigation. People don’t even know the basic principal of: “ignore the troll” that is the first step in holding a meaningful conversation in boards that are not effectively moderated. Add to these facts the simple fact that anyone can post annonymously as frequently as they’d like, and you end up with total meaningless flame-filled gibberish. The noise can very often far drown out the quality posts that provide meaningful information.So it stinks, in a lot of ways. But perhaps far more interesting still, is the fact I ultimately found it to be, despite all the problems, still is very VERY useful. I would not consider buying an apartment without first looking through the ratings at apartmentratings.com. Perhaps, this is a testament to how effective the internet is as a means of transferal of information. The simple perfect accessibility of the forum creates an environment where the good and meaningful information can be transferred even if it is one amongst many less than useful comments. A similar experience occurs with a number of messageboards that allow annonymous posting like Slashdot. Slashdot perhaps is a little different because of its insanely high volume and really involved and time tested moderation system. But it is intriguing how very much useful information an average person can obtain even by reading random responses to stories, many of which are written anonymously, and many of which are written without having even read the story to which they are responding! Again, it is an example of the strength of the forum. The quality posts exist, slashdot has a means of making htem stand out further than the less high quality posts, but even if it didn’t you’d still be able to find meaningful information just because the site collects so much information from such a wide variety of people with varying experineces and opinions that good stuff just ends up being out there for you to consume.
Thing of it like Napster. Now you’d think most of the music would have been the same trite garbage everyone has heard before and would not be of much interest to many people except as a means of circumventing CD prices. And most of it WAS the same old trite garbage, but ironically napster became known for something more. It became known as a means of finding the obscure unknown songs that people wanted to hear and couldn’t find anywhere else. In the end it became a repository for the unusual and the unique, the hidden gems that were not available anywhere else. People would play games of “guess the song that isn’t on Napster” and constantly be surprised by their most obscure recollections being available to be listened to in just a few seconds. It was astounding and imho a beautiful thing.
You see on the internet, a large quantity of noise does not necessarily drown out the signal. I get tones of spam. IT in no way hurts my ability to communicate via email. I quickly delete and mark as spam all of the spam I receive. It doesn’t even bother me anymore. Sure I’d love it if the only email I ever had to worry about was legitimate, but since I can set up filters and searches and group important messages and I have a intellegent spam filter that learns as I go, I ultimately have no real problem. The threshold of the amount of noise it would take to render the email unusable is far higher than the amount that even the many corrupt spam spewing companies can achieve, provided we are vigilant in building technologies to combat it.
Slashdot is similar with its moderation system. If it didn’t exist, noise might well drown out signal to the point that only the most vigilant reader can learn anything of note. Another interesting example would be file sharing networks. They are fairly resilient even to deliberate attempts to sabotage them with fake files and deliberate malware. Why? Because these networks inherently have the napster noise problem to begin with an they inherently have mechanisms to fight it. What’s more technology improves and clever protocol designers come up with better and better ways to verify the legitimacy of a file and presever the integrity of the network. Ultimate consquence: you can still very easily use the networks to find the occasional obscure hidden gem, and if you are careful you can even avoid the fakes of the well knows stuff and get the high quality real content. End result: utility not futility. Provided of course enough people still use the network to make it worth while. Fear is the enemy of these networks as people start to fear that a bad download will damage their computing environment or fear that their identity will be revealed and their lives ruined by lawsuit, they use the network less and freeload more and ultimately that damages not just the efficiency of the network but the likelihood of good material to float its way to the surface of the piles of junk.
Now what does this all have to do with apartmentratings.com? Well, it’s basically the same kind of thing. Although you can’t easily search for the meaningful reviews and it is even possibly to fake reasonable sounding reviews that skew the ratings to all hell, even so you can still without the help of any particularly technology, still a treasure trove of information you can’t get anywhere else.
You see even one open and honest review reveals important information that can be of use to use. Multiples and by observation you can begin to tell what criticisms have more truthfulness to them and are more likely to come up more than once. You can find out whether an apartment complex has a problem with ants or rats or is whether most people are happy with the maintenance or the staff, or whether most people are satisfied with the ir apartment size or whether their are frequent electrical problems or issues with holes and general cleansiness or noise, or crime in the area. You can find out the subjective experinece of those living in these places. Do people feel safe or afraid? Do people feel cramped? Do people feel treated poorly or treated well? Do people think that there are issues with rascism or discrimination? Do people treat one another well? All that and more you can learn by reading the legitimate reviews and cross referencing the elements that appear more than once in multiple rules. One of the ironic things about apartmentraitngs is that even those who are trying to fake reviews are likely to do so based on semi-true material to try to make their post look realisitc. E.g. if an apartment building has a slight noise problem, a person out to get the complex will complain about how horrible and intolerable the noise problem is, but in truth this is just as helpful to you as another person who really does find the slight noise problem intolerable saying the same. It may be an exagerattion but no matter what anyone says you won’t know what kind of consequence the noise problem is likely to have on you until you actually, you know, hear it and live with it for yourself. You really can’t judge from the reviews alone even if they were all legitimate. The fake good reviews are less likely to have this beneficial purpose. But occassionally they do. Heck, even reading a review that is just a carbon copy of the brochure still provides you with a quick reference to the basic information in the borchure. Saving you the trouble of having to go there and pick one up. A more clever manager who really wanted their review to sound legititmate would base their comments on what good things actual tenants have said and even include a couple of bad just to not sound so fake. And of course if they do that then it isn’t really that much different than having another legitimate review. So ultimately the fake reviews can end up helping you as much as a truthful.
Part of the advantage ApartmentRatings.com has is the relatively small number of reviews. It is entirely reasonable to read through all of the reviews for the complexes you are looking for and pull out all of the meaningful posts and make note of all of the repeated complaints and repeatedly praised aspects of an area and use that as a guidelines in your search rather than taking the whole collection of posts at its word. The end result is that the noise doesn’t end up hurting you too much.
Now if there were tens of thousands of posts and say 70% of which were bogus you’d naturally find the site far less useful as it would then be infeasible to read through all of the reviews and find those that are good. You could still get good information but it’d be random chance if you did and the odds are considerably. Now of course with good organizational systems such as powerful moderation, a means to filter out/ban/disable ‘trolls’, or a means to search for the more relevant and meaningful post and you can even keep a forum like this useful even IF the post counts grows to an exhorbitant size.
Luckily apartment ratings is naturally limited in post counts simply because there really aren’t all that many people who live in these apartments and the percentage of those who actually know about this site is probably still realtively low even in this era of constant internet access. The number of those who do know and feel strongly enough about an apartment and feel they have the time to post and think that their post will have a meaningful impact is probably considerably smaller still. That means that you’re probably not gonna get a whole lot of reviews. And those you did get are likely to be padded by mostly fakes and argumentive posts accusing the other posts as being fakes and general flamewar-iness.But those that aren’t you can still see and read and learn from so the fakes although inconvient don’t prvent one from discerning important information from the process.
The only thing the fakes really do is ruin one’s ability to take the overall statistics of how sites are rated realistically. You definitely can’t say a site that has an average rating of 0.50 point higher than another is strictly better or more preferred than the other. Again though this is as much a natural consequence of the nature of the site as it is a matter of the fakes and unfounded fake accusations and bribed posts and duplicate posts. The simply reality is that you aren’t going to get a fare representative sample because the sample size available isn’t big enough and those likely to post are going to be self selected and thus likely to be those with the strongest feelings on the matter, in other worse those who had the most negative or most positive experiences in the complex. Now that would average out to a somewhat useful average at least comparatively between complexes, but alas with the fakes and duplicates, etc. etc. the overall ratings can’t even server that purpose.
IT’s a shame really, as I am a person who does not like to judge thing by anecdote and casual observation. I want statistcs, facts, data. How many poeple live here. What are their average ages/incomes. Crimes committed per year?, type nature of the crimes?, thickness of the walls?, number of noise incidents per year?, cost of electricity?, square footage?, does that include/exclude patio?, how much does it cost?, when was it built? last time it was renovated? number of pets allowed?, number of recidents?, hours various facilities are open? how many dogs are in owned by renters?, etc. etc. etc. I want to say 3>2 and 7>5 therefore apartment A is strictly better than apartment B for the cost. Now the average satisfaction rating of the customers would be a very valuable additional statistic to put into such an equation. But alas, apartmnetratings, for all the reasons I’ve stated above is a poor choice for that purpose.
Overall the statistical ratings and overall numbers really are quite useless, even though the site itself is a gem. Just how valuable a gem it’s going to be for you is going to inherently depend on your patience and ability to shift through the dirt and find the facets that shine.
Still, I did overall find it depressing nearly to the point of my being wanting to give up altogether to see how many apartments in the world are so very very screwed up according to the apartmentratings posts so maybe I am giving the site too much credit for usefulness after all.
