Record Store Review

Record Round-Up

After spending one of my morning walks to work planning an elaborate independent shop review / database site, I discovered that one has already been made. At least for record stores. It's a neat resource and I'd like to see it expanded. The problem is that by focussing on user reviews, the whole thing could turn south in a second. We've seen it happen on practically every other major database; individual reviews would be less than meaningless if it weren't already a suffix. So, the major sites generally either favor the Top Reviewer awards to those who consistently write well (or, well, write consistently) or just create a giant database giving average ratings and demographic stats. Smaller sites don't have the traffic to do the latter effectively, so they must rely on the former but don't have the traffic to effectively run "review the reviewer" scripts. Even on larger sites, the most interesting subjects and reviews get ignored or thrown into a giant

Maybe the large question is how do you effectively filter democracy? I haven't yet seen a system work extremely well at sorting out cheese from the deli meat (our own government included). This, incidentally, has been the subjct of talks between politicians and video game designers in the past week, as the two discovered their problems and solutions are almost identical. (I will link as soon as I can find it, but the story after being everywhere yesterday is buried today). A site I thought would filter well was Plastic. Plastic automatically assigns moderator status to frequent, registered readers which allows them to endorse the quality of individual posts. Two major problems have befallen Plastic. A. The left-leaning readership majority mods up liberal bitch-fest sessions, while conservative participants struggle to get "karma" points for even the most well thought out posts... (A well-recognized issue which generally frustrates the community's most active members.) B. As posts build up in popular conversations, readers use karma points to decide what to read, so fresh posts--no matter how astute--are ignored.

But.

Plastic is a pretty fair system and is one of the best, if not the best, mass public message boards on the internet.

I'm realizing I'm getting way too long with this post, so I'm going to stop for now and continue on specifically how an early era Plastic model could help sites like RSR from drowning in their own democracy.