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.
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.
The content is objective, and sources should be cited.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah that’s kinda what I meant by the wealthy liberal thing. Make something good enough and you only need a couple good donors.
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.
You know somehow wikipedia maintains it’s integrity pretty well.
Wikipedia has two significant advantages:
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.
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.