
Ask HN: What would it take to rate the web? - orangep
My need came from browsing services online, and the annoyance of having to go through blogs, other websites, personal references to get a sense of how good, and still “relevant”, those services are. Then came the thought, what would it take to have something like Yelp for websites?<p>Ended up starting a simple project over the week with that in mind [1], but wanted to discuss with others here too.<p>Spam reviews: With moderation and anti-spamming tools, it seems to have “worked” for rating products (Amazon), offline businesses (Yelp), and others so why not online services (websites)? The 5 star rating system measures “satisfaction” somewhat well, but the “popularity” part (number of stars) is easier to spam. I really liked the format used in [2], so I used a modified version of that in my project. I feel the “never heard of it” option could suppress spams.<p>Apathy: What would motivate folks to start contributing? It should probably be dead simple so I thought a browser extension could work well, both for the people leaving and consuming reviews. This obviously has its limitations on mobile. The real motivation probably comes from the fact that the review was helpful to somebody. People seem to go nuts on reddit gold, so I guess that’s validation if any, so I tried to add something like that.<p>Privacy: Related, but some people don’t like leaving traces behind on the web. I feel the best way is to be transparent as to what is happening and give them as much control as possible. For example, make it easy to view and remove everything they know about the user. Still probably won’t satisfy everyone.<p>There are other smaller issues that I can think of (e.g. not all websites fall into a &quot;rate-able service&quot; category), but probably missing some big ones too. Please feel free to share what you think.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;lome&#x2F;necafokehnnolgnjmapmlmhigjmlelpl<p>[2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2018.stateofjs.com&#x2F;front-end-frameworks&#x2F;overview&#x2F;
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adventured
There are two insurmountable problems with rating the Web as a broad concept.

First, you'll never get users to do it at huge scale, which is what you need.
Those days ended - to the limited extent they existed at all - with sites like
StumbleUpon declining and with the arrival of the smartphone with apps
dominating most average usage. Unlike food (Yelp), the average person has zero
passion for the Web and zero interest in taking the time to provide feedback
in such a manner (they have as much passion for the Web broadly as they do any
other utility; they use it, yes, they get upset when it doesn't work, yes, but
they have zero passion for it). To get people to dedicate time consistently,
you need passion. The young Web had that because of who the early users were
(early adopters have passion), and it was a shiny new toy even to the average
person (at least for a few years).

Second, the interface point (for initial rating and discovery sorting) has to
be tied into an already existing epic scale discovery point. That's because
you aren't going to be able to get people to first browse to the rating site
for discovery purposes, the audience for that would be relatively small (which
is why StumbleUpon is dead). There are only a few sites/services that could
even be considered on the short list for that: Google, Facebook, Reddit,
Twitter (and other services in places like China or Russia). You're inherently
competing with the huge platforms for discovery. The next huge platform will
arrive with an inflection point occurance.

I'm not suggesting you can't build a small service that would be popular with
a group of passionate users. I think that's possible. You won't be able to
"rate the Web" though, at the scale that would be desirable. You need millions
and millions of quality active users for that.

~~~
orangep
Yep, my focus was building it for SaaS services. It just so happened to be
that the method of least resistance for something to get rolling, in my mind,
was to do it via a browser extension.

At that point, it seemed more difficult to filter out websites that wouldn't
fit into this category, hence the question: why not everything?

Your points on passion is valid though. Maybe folks just don't care enough
about the web. I do think they do care about the services provided on the web
though.

