Live Internet Television

The Internet has so  many upsides that it’s easy to put on the rose-colored glasses and feel warm and fuzzy about all the meaningful community building, information sharing, and productivity it has enabled. Without looking at the ugly side. Which I was reminded of this morning looking at a CrunchGear post about Belkin paying people 65¢ on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to write positive reviews of its routers. That’s right…here’s the “job”:

Positive review writing.

* Use your best possible grammar and write in US English only
* Always give a 100% rating (as high as possible)
* Keep your entry between 25 and 50 words
* Write as if you own the product and are using it
* Tell a story of why you bought it and how you are using it
* Thank the website for making you such a great deal
* Mark any other negative reviews as “not helpful” once you post yours

I read this and went to the comments on the post expecting to see a lot of healthy outrage about this incursion of corporate manipulation in product reviews.

Instead, the comments provided a discussion and demonstration of the need for OpenIDs on the Web to ensure identities (As in, perhaps it was a Belkin competitor who posted this “job” to make Belkin look bad? Seems so unlikely, it made me wonder if a Belkin employee was positing that very thought…) And the meme, “who trusts reviews by strangers anyway?”

I guess a cheap and dishonest sales ploy no longer offends? Have we become complacent?

Update:
Belkin issues a quick but fairly standard apology promising to remove the posts, etc. Comenters remain cynical and unconvinced that the company is going to discontinue unethical practices — they think it got off easywith just a few bloggers picking up on the story. I still hope cynicism and skepticality don’t amount to complacency and tacit acceptance.

Update 2:

Gizmodo discovered that the pay-per-review scheme is just a symptom among many of deep problems.