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Online Ratings Are Broken | Companies aren’t asking for your feedback. They’re begging you for data.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Technology
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This is a pretty dumb hot take if you ask me. Yes, they are asking for your feedback, which is data. Everything is data. Why is "data" a bad word around here?
The implication of "leave a review!" is they want info on quality to improve service; the twist is they don't care about that, just getting information about you for ad targeting.
Reviews are good for convincing other customers that you are a real site and the product is what it says it is.
An ethical company leaves up critical reviews and tries to address the issues their customer faced.
The opposite is a company that only allows good reviews to be published or outright fakes them.
I have worked for both kinds of businesses and I can assure you the ethical businesses care very much about bad customer experiences and use the feedback to improve.
Data aside. When asking for feedback, they are asking for my time. My time has value to me. My input has value to them. A request for input from me costs me something I value but benefits them not me.
We went from “how can I make this person buy my laundry detergent” to “how can we make this person vote for a fascist wannabe dictator”
Feedback is one thing, one online shop has the guts to ask me to do support for them. If customers have questions about a product, they "crowdsource" and send the question to the people who bought the product.
I would tell you but then I'd have to [data expunged].