• whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      Nonprofit … crowd funded… build it and all you need afterward are paying for servers. Then you’re just doing donations like Wikipedia. How much would would it cost to maintain such servers? Seems fundable by a wealthy liberal.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        And then a wealthy slumlord does the math and finds out it’s cheaper to pay people to sabotage the website than to lose tenants due to reviews.

          • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Wikipedia has two significant advantages:

            1. The content is objective, and sources should be cited.
            2. Individual editors are volunteers with actual interest in their topics.

            The former makes for a clear and low-effort bar for determining if a contribution is bad. If it’s not cited, or it’s biased, revert and move on. Figuring out if a user-written review is paid for, factually false, or exaggerated is a lot harder.

            As for the latter… aside from doing it out of spite or as a favor to landlord friends, I have a hard time imagining that many people would volunteer their time moderating the review page about the apartment they rented 14 years ago.

            • whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              7 months ago

              Well, I don’t think the content is objective. There are many politically contentious articles and they have systems, disclaimers, and discussions to try to deal with it.

              I think the moderators would be locals looking over an entire neighborhood, sort of like our Lemmy mods.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Just an FYI. Wikipedia is actually privately funded at this point. They don’t need donations anymore. From what I have seen of their financial statements, the donations are essentially building a slush fund for them, at this point, and have been for the last few years.

    • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      Get paid by landlords to remove negative reviews, like yelp. Offer to show all reviews, even removed ones, to renters that pay for the premium service.

      Ew, I feel gross after coming up with that idea.

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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        7 months ago

        It’s a lovely pattern to look out for, your efforts to show just how ugly it is, are welcome.

        For anyone considering implementing this: No.

    • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      shake down bad landlords to delete bad reviews.

      charge landlords for priority in search results.

      sell searcher info as marketing data.

      sell search trends as financial early indicators to hedge funds.

      expand to HOA reviews for neighborhoods.