Open Letter to Trulia.Com
Dear Trulia,
I get it. I understand the reason for the Trulia Voices section - the dual purpose of creating an online community where the general public could come to get answers to their real estate questions while also making the site more sticky.
But it’s not working. It’s quite possible I’m only seeing the abuses caused by ranking people by the number of answers they provide, that I’m only seeing the nonsense, but it seems to be fairly prevalent.
Yesterday there was a question from someone asking about the quickest way to complete the Arizona Department of Real Estate’s required 90 hours of classroom time before one is able to test and become an agent. The first response came from an agent in Georgia who recommended online courses, online courses that aren’t permitted for new-agent licensing here in Arizona.
Yes, the information was corrected quickly by a local agent. But the bigger issue is why would an agent from Georgia feel compelled to answer questions about Arizona licensing other than to influence the ranking on the sidebar?
There have been questions from consumers directed at you, the good folks at Trulia, asking about maps and square footage and other upgrades they’d like to see. And all of these are greeted by agents answering “me too!” from states and locales far and wide.
Why? Does that make sense to anyone else?
Maybe I’m the only person who only has an RSS feed for Arizona questions. I’m really not trying to market myself in the Dakotas. I don’t know a thing about the real estate market in the Dakotas. And frankly, answering with non-information seems utterly pointless.
You have the power to make it actually pointless. Take away the rankings. Stop rewarding agents for having the most answers, the most first answers, etc. Heck, don’t reward people for asking the most questions … the fervor has stopped, but I can’t begin to tell you how many out-of-state agents were asking about Phoenix real estate, even if they’ll never step foot in Maricopa County.
You can make the Voices section what you envisioned. I truly hope you do.
UPDATE: I wrote this post after looking at a question in an RSS feed. I hadn’t noticed this post until afterward. So, I’m guessing the rankings probably aren’t going anywhere. Quantity over quality. So be it.
UPDATE #2: Jay Thompson tackled the same topic - based on the same question and the same non-sensical answers - before he saw mine. And he’s one of the better “Voices” out there.
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Century Awards.
I’m NOT saying that any of those so honored don’t deserve it. I’m sure many of them had fabulous answers.
But puhleez. *MANY* “answers” on Voices are complete crap.
Interestingly, I wrote a similar post to yours just a short time ago. Hadn’t seen this one…. off to link to it….
[…] Jonathan Dalton opines on the same subject. He includes a link to Trulia bestowing honors on those with volumes of Trulia […]
Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for sharing your experience on Trulia Voices. We are listening and working on smoothing out the issues you highlight. Over the last few months we’ve seen increasing growth in activity, which is great! New real estate professionals have joined and more consumers are on site asking questions. With growth, however, comes a need for change, which you and other members have observed. We fully agree.
We have been working to implement over the last few weeks a number of changes to help resolve some of the points members of Voices have raised.
As you note, some contributions are great and others are much less helpful and inaccurate. We have built moderation tools to let the quality rise to the top, but it is certainly not enough; we’re working on ways to improve this.
When it comes to quality vs quantity. We think the best way to get great contributions is to drive lots of people to use the service and build the right incentives and moderation tools to ensure that quality level rises (not falls).
We also think that ranking contributors by number of answers regardless of location is certainly not the best way to drive up quality responses in the long run and we’re working on ways to fix this to drive up both quantity and quality. I’m sure you can see why we started with this simple model and are figuring out the best way to evolve the “Top Voices” section to solve the problems you highlight.
I care passionately about the community on Trulia Voices and we’re listening to every piece of feedback and out engineers are working feverishly on ways to improve the service. Watch this space.
Pete
Pete,
Why don’t you just provide a place for people to converse, and stop trying to artificially inflate the number of voices? Ask your “engineers” about the principle of KISS.
John, I think you hit upon it … maybe the counts were necessary at the beginning to get people to participate (chalk it up the the idea of what’s in it for me?)
But it should have been clear from the get go there were issues. Why were agents on the East Coast and in Long Beach asking me about the best restaurants in Phoenix?
Why were questions being seeded by agents at all? It turned me off from the whole idea almost instantly.
Pete, I appreciate the feedback you provided but I think it’s a pretty simple process to “evolve” the voices. Stop counting answers. Stop ranking total answers. It probably can be done overnight with a software change.
If a community will evolve, it needs to evolve of its own accord, not because it was forced through by getting hyper- competitive agents to provide useless answers to things.
Look at Active Rain and what happened when people started posting for points and not to help the general knowledge base.
John and Jonathan,
Great points. Rest assured, we’re listening.
This feedback is really valuable to help us make the right decisions. I full agree that the community has to lead the evolution of the service (not the company ie Trulia).
As you may have seen we’re constantly testing and things on the Trulia Voices and will continue to do so.
You and your agent readers may also want to check out our recent blog post on Agent Best Practices to help raise the quality standards of contributions.
http://www.truliablog.com/?p=191
Pete
[…] Steve outlines so well (as have I and others, particularly yet another Phoenix real estate blogger Jonthan Dalton) is that Voices has a “point system” that ranks agents based on the number of answers […]
[…] to build trust among consumers, but that brings us right back to the tyranny of the ordered list. Jonathon Dalton and Jay Thompson has been posting for some time about the ranking Trulia provides (or provided?) […]
[…] An issue previously discussed by Jay Thompson and Jonathan Dalton, Always answer as many questions as possible, even if you have no idea as to the answer or […]
[…] An issue previously discussed by Jay Thompson and Jonathan Dalton, Always answer as many questions as possible, even if you have no idea as to the answer or […]