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Viliam_Bur comments on Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as having a bad reputation - Less Wrong
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Comments (24)
Day 2: The "singularity.org" rating increased from 30-31 (red) to 45-48 (yellow). Another two days like this, and the problem can be fixed.
Some more details: Ratings are given anonymously (and the site does not even tell how many ratings did it use to calculate the results). It is also possible to add comments to domains -- I am not sure whether they are included in calculation, but either way they may influence other voters. At this moment, "singularity.org" has two negative comments (and two positive ones).
One negative comment by "Ratingmonster1234" is probably written by a mentally ill person, judging by the content of their own homepage, which also has a very low rating. (By the way, it was written on 23rd July, the same day as this article.)
Another negative comment by "arctur" is accusing us of comment spam in unrelated web forums, if I understand it correctly. First I thought this is something a previous owner of "singularity.org" did, but looking at the dates, this explanation seems wrong. SIAI purchased the domain in April 2011, and this comment was written in January 2012, which is later.
Can this be true? I don't know how to check it; googling "link:singularity.org" reveals nothing (but the functionality of "link:" seems broken or something; I'd be glad if someone could explain me how it works). The user added this comment to over thousand domains using some "mass rating tool", but it does not seem like a random voting (to increase the user score): the names of most domains in that list seem kind of spammy.
EDIT: Now I have a feeling that it is relatively easy to ruin a prestige of a less popular site using this tool. You don't even have to create many sockpuppet accounts, because it seems rather easy to gain "trust" of the system -- just give high/low ratings to many sites that already have high/low ratings. Then give someone bad ratings and accuse them of spam or phishing (no proof required), and it's done.
When I looked into it a year ago, my impression was that it was an essentially broken and abandoned Google feature.
See https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55281
They are not, from what I read when I was posting this.
Your comments don't count, your ratings do: screenshot of WOT page showing relevant controls and explanatory text
(look for the green "Rate this website" link above right of the rating graphic)
When you write a comment, you also have to select one of options, such as "Good site", "Useful, informative", "Malicious content, viruses", "Phishing or other scams" etc. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of data was also used somehow.
Perhaps this would explain the small differences in rating -- for example currently "singularity.org" has "Trustworthiness" and "Vendor reliability" 60, and "Privacy" 58, and I suppose that people click the same answer to all of these. (Alternative explanation is that the rating is on the scale, and they simply clicked a different pixel.)
The page expressly says "Supplement your rating by leaving a comment. Comments provide more information, but do not affect the reputation."
If you click "Rate this website" you can rate each scale as you wish. Surely some users choosing different values on the scales is a much simpler explanation than that the site programmers built in a more complicated rating system then lied about it?!
Can this be true? I don't know how to check it; googling "link:singularity.org" reveals nothing (but the functionality of "link:" seems broken or something; I'd be glad if someone could explain me how it works).
Villiam_Bur,
Have you tried visiting www.verify1st.com/justanswers.com. It is like showing a website's resume/CV, except that the data doesn't lie. It will help you identify whether the site is a scam or a fraudulent. I do hope that this could help you somehow.
Thank you, but it seems the problem was already solved. At this moment, both "verify1st.com" and "mywot.com" give Singularity Institute website high ranking.
My guess is that the original problem was simply caused by not enough ratings; probably zero or one positive ratings and one or two negative ratings. At least one negative rating and comment was by a very religious person, who by their voting history seem to automatically give lowest posible ratings to anything in conflict with their religious views. (That's my complaint against the whole Web of Trust system: regardless of official criteria, most people will use it as a Like/Dislike tool, giving either highest positive or highest negative ratings.) Adding a few positive ratings seems to have fixed this problem.
Google Webmaster Tools isn't helping here either: screenshot of webmaster tools
(Webmaster Tools Links to Your Site shows "No data available")