August 7, 2009
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Do Recommendations Work?
Well do they?
Please keep in mind. I’m not asking if you like recommendations or if you’re glad recommendations exist. I like them and I am glad they exist too. That’s not the point of this post.
I’m asking a different question. Do they work? Do they accomplish the ends they were initially set out to achieve?
The way I see it recommendations were supposed to serve three distinct purposes:
1. Promotion: allow a way to promote a site
2. Rating: establish which posts are “better” or at least more of interest to the community as a whole
3. Cost: create a “cost” to rating a post beneficial that discourages frivolous use or overuseHave recommendations succeeded in these goals?
I’d say no.
1. Promotion: Initially recs were very good for drumming up interest in a site. You could get a lot more views and comments based on recs. Now it seems unless you have a very large number of recs you don’t get substantially more views or comments than you otherwise would. Over time recs have had diminishing effects because people have become de-sensitized to them. Originally they were new and cool and there weren’t a whole lot of them. Eyes start to glaze over when they see a rec now.
2. Rating: Although there is a most recommended sorting option, it’s the Top Blogs ordering that determines who gets on the front page and seems to be what people use to judge what are the most popular entries.
3. Cost: Do you even notice when someone is recommending too often?? I get so many recs day in and day out that I wouldn’t even notice even if it were happening unless someone just spammed recs all at once. A vast majority or recs I don’t view so it doesn’t matter if someone recs bad posts to me, I’ll probably not notice. Have any of you ever de-friended anyone over recs? It seems to me that today people rec with impunity. There is no appreciable cost to doing so.
In their current form,, I think we can only say recs have achieved somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 of these stated goals. I think with a few minor tweaks they can do better!
That’s not to say that recs are bad and should be scrapped. They shouldn’t. They accomplish lots of things. In particular they provide a nice filtering effect, enabling you to read only those entries written by a blogger that are most likely to be of interest to the largest variety of users and hence to you. Recs make it easier to keep your subscription list down to your very favorite blogs without missing things going on in the broader Xanga community.
But I think they can be even MORE useful than that.
With all those thoughts in mind I submitted a series of ideas that I think would help make Recommendations an even BETTER feature:
Quick Links to Other Recommended Entries
This is the one I think is most important. Basically it makes it easy to see what other posts a user is recommending. So if you can find out if you like the kinds of posts someone recommends. Likewise I through in the ability to see what other posts a user has had recommended of theirs. That’s just a nice way to draw up attention and drive traffic to some of your older more popular blog entries.
Subscribe to Rec Feeds
Really this goes hand in hand with the first idea. Once you discovered a blogger who recs things you like it’d be nice if you can make that blogger’s recs STAND OUT in some meaningful way so you can go back and look at them. Either you can tether this to the subscription system that already exists, so that anyone you subscribe to has a separate RECS feed visible in the subscription browser, or you can make it an entirely separate feature.
Suppress or Block Recs
Obviously once you’ve identified reccers you like, it’d be nice to do something about those reccers you DON’T like too.
Rec a Blogger or Blog
Pretty self explanatory. This won’t get cluttered cuz you can only rec a blog or blogger ONCE. However you can and should be able to display all the bloggers you recommended.
Rec Button on Subscription Browser and Universal Inbox
Just to make things easier and more importantly to make the feature of recommendations more VISIBLE especially to new users.
RE-Pulse Feature
An effective alternative to recommendations for pulses. This combined with a Twitter Sync (and maybe an automatic url shortening service) I think would skyrocket the amount of pulse use as a means of disseminating information.
REC Statistics
It’d be nice to know how often your posts are recced so you can compare how you are doing to other popular bloggers. It’d be nice to be able to proudly display to potential subscribers how often your posts are recced too.
Show Rec Counts on Posts in Universal Inbox, Subscription Browser, Front Page, and Top Blogs
Fairly self-explanatory. If one of your posts is receiving a lot of Recs it should be very easy for anyone who happens upon your site to see that.
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After I came up with these ideas I decided to take a look through all of the Xanga ideas posted for other interesting Recommendation related ideas (I know I probably should have done this first to avoid duplication). I ended up finding a bunch and I only got all the way down to the ideas with a vote count of 8 or higher. Who knows how many more ideas there were to go through? Who knows how many gems there are with only one or two votes that nobody noticed?
Anyway, at least I can show you those that I did find so you can vote on them if you like them so that Xanga knows more about how to maximize the effectiveness of Recommendations.
OwenHiggins – Recommendation with Reason
slamjoe – De-recommend a Post
Simbathe2nd – Recommeding to certain users
juliebeanss – Recommend posts to certain users
Lithium98 – Opt-Out for Rec’d Posts
SpiderDad – Comment when recommending
vwagenjetta – Make Recommendations Meaningful
MagisterTom – Recs in footprints
Kontzicles – Limited Recommendations Per Day
radicalramblings – Undo Recommendation
chenmeicai – “My” Recommended Posts
pureboy123 – Recommend Comments
SucioFuego – Rec Entire Sites
vangelicmonk – Recommend Blog Entry to Friend
Xx_IWannaWWIIRomance_xX – Recing
That’s it for now. I have a million ideas and there are hundreds of good ideas out there but just doing a few of any of these I think would be very helpful.
What do you think? Are recommendations working? Are they good enough? What if anything would make them better?
Comments (13)
I think you set the bar too high. Recommendations are just a way to say “attention please!” And they work for that – in a very messy way.
@moritheil - perhaps. I am going by the logic that Xanga used when they thought up recommendations, or at least how they advertised it. Back then they were having weekly video chats with the Xanga Team and they were saying that there was a problem with Stars and Eprops and that their new awesome system would fix all that by enabling a means of selecting better posts while imposing a cost to prevent the kinds of abuse the anonymous stars system engendered.
I always thought there should be a limit as to how many times one could rec-so that one person doesn’t get to rec constantly.
But eh, that has some holes in it too.
Up until a while ago, the rec button’s greatest power was its ability to get you on Top Blogs. A post with many recs could beat a post with many comments, so a really slam-bang post had a strong chance against posts written by the consistently popular.
Of course, Top Blogs is randomized now, so everybody has a little-bitty chance of getting on the front page. It’s still nice, but not what it once was. And recs are now worthless, because even ten comments or so get you on Top Blogs. Bleh.
I’m somewhat curious, why did you use me in your post? Not offended or upset, I don’t write anything really interesting to others, so I was just curious.
@Xx_IWannaWWIIRomance_xX - really I was just going through all the ideas and including almost anything that had to do with recommendations that seemed interesting. I think your idea of being emailed when your post gets recced is a good one! I’d say it should be in some sort of a digest form rather than one email every time you got recced but something like that could definitely be helpful. I voted for it.
@nephyo - (sorry under my other account and didn’t have time to sign out and back into my other) Ok, I didn’t realize some others liked it. Thank you!
I think you deserve a rec for this.
The mind. I do not have the mind. I’m not really sure if people read the entries I recommend. All I’m sure of is that I am trying to get all the attention I can possibly get and let them read what I think is interesting.
Recommendations are just for more promotion but sometimes people go overboard.
i used to get a lot of recommendations. at first, i saw a lot of people stopping by, but traffic from recs slowly tailed off when people realized i had the audacity to talk about sports and zombies and sharks and video games all on the same blog.
Kinda agree with some that recommendations are being used for the wrong reasons. Some entries aren’t really that good, but they get ratings that hit the roof. I’ll give you one eprop…lol
I didn’t realize my name came up on here until I searched and found your site. (^_^) Yeah I support recommendations.