If You Don’t Have Something Nice to Say …
Vetted is not for you.
Perhaps the biggest issue we faced in developing Vetted was how to handle negativity. To say the least, many apps before us haven’t handled it well. Take Lulu or Peeple as examples.
Lulu originally allowed women to rate men. As a result women got asked, over and over, by their guy friends to see what was being said. One of my female colleagues called it a new form of harassment. Even if they relent and let the guy have a peek, they then had to hear his rant about how it wasn’t true. That’s certainly not the kind of experience we want associated with Vetted.
Peeple originally allowed negative comments and got blasted for it by user reviews and the press. Ultimately, they included an approval process but still allow folks to view the negative posts via a ‘truth license’. We certainly tip our hat to them for creating a monetization scheme around a feature folks hate. Nonetheless, it also is not the experience we set out to create.
Plenty of other apps do allow for negative reviews and have been successful. Take Yelp or the reviews on Amazon as examples. The difference is that these are reviews of restaurants, businesses, and products. They’re not human beings, and as human beings we don’t normally like being exposed emotionally in this way. You don’t want to be reviewed, rated, and ranked. You’re not a Chinese restaurant, you’re a person.
One model we kept coming back to was the ‘Like’ on Facebook. Originally that was the only option and it was hotly debated whether they should have ‘Dislike’. Admittedly they have since added ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’, and ‘Angry’, but the original positive-only sentiment is something we admired.
Negativity is a waste of time and we believe there really is no place for it in an app like ours. If a person is truly that awful, they will struggle to get Vetted and positivity will eventually win out for the rest of us.
The most straightforward way to ensure positive-only remarks is to put the publishing control in the hands of the recipient. This ensures that they approve. Recommendations on LinkedIn follow this model.
The downside to recipient-only approval is that it can jeopardize genuineness. If the recipient can overly alter or influence the recommendation then it can affect its validity. To mitigate this concern we also adopted an ‘only the author can edit’ model.
Only the author can edit and only the recipient can approve.
The result, namely the combination of ‘only the author can edit’ and ‘only the recipient can approve’ is core to our model. It prevents hurtful and unfair remarks without jeopardizing genuineness.
Like grandma used to say, ‘if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’
Skip rating. Get Vetted.
