Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as having a bad reputation
I’m not too sure who is familiar with Web of Trust, so I’ll start with a brief description. It’s basically a browser app that inserts a circle next to text links in websites. The color of the circle indicates whether or not it’s average rating by users rates it as having a “good reputation” (green) or a “bad reputation” (red). There are four criteria: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety.
Singularity.org’s printout is here. As you may have guessed from the title, Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as “poor” in trustworthiness, vendor reliability, and privacy. There’s a comment that, when translated (via Google translate) says “Mass mailing of non-thematic Forums”. It’s also commented under the category “malicious content/viruses”.
I’m not entirely sure how these ratings are generated, (How Ratings Work, related) but I’ve used it for several years, and this is only the second time I’ve disagreed with a rating. I’ve always found WOT to be very reliable, and a decent way of warning me if a site is unsafe so I don’t have to think about it. So I was fairly alarmed when I saw the red circle there, since I’d imagine it’s turning away people that don’t know any better. If LW had a red circle, I never would have come here. I’m not sure what SI or LW can do about it, but there’s a “click here if you are the owner of this site” button, although I don’t know what that does. I’ve left my own rating on there, but it didn’t seem to change the overall rankings.
Edit: When I made this post, the scorecard read Trustworthiness 30, Vendor Reliability 31, Privacy 31, Child Safety 100.
I’ve registered at WoT and requested a reevaluation. We’re also making a couple of changes the WoT reevaluation request process seems to suggest are important (like more prominently linking the site’s privacy policy).
http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/24394-singularity-org
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/singularity.org
Thanks! So it seems the previous owner of the “singularity.org″ domain did some spamming. The other domain ”singinst.org″ has good rating.
EDIT: See here—SIAI purchased the domain in April 2011, but the spam complaint was written in January 2012, which is later.
Singularity.org had a Wordpress blog installed for a long time by the previous owner while not being actively maintained, which is a recipe for disaster with Wordpress. I would be unsurprised if singularity.org has at some point in history harbored malware.
It’s strange. How can you even measure “Vendor Reliability” of every web domain, when many domains don’t sell anything! But don’t worry, the “global community of millions of users” will assign you the exact value between 0 and 100 anyway. For example “lesswrong.com″ has 95, and ”singularity.org″ has 31 -- I guess some customers were really angry about Friendly AI delivery time.
Despite having four different criteria, the values seem mostly the same, so I guess it’s just a “like / dislike” voting. The website refuses to say many people have voted, so it could have been just one or two people who disliked… something.
The FAQ in the site gives some instructions on how to “increase your site’s reputation”. These include: join the site, and ask your friends and customers to join the site. (And then, presumably, give yourself a high rating. D’oh.) Before you do that, another part of FAQ says that votes from new users have low value, and only increase gradually. So you should use the site a lot, and preferably install their browser plugin. (You can’t pay to increase your website’s reputation, but free labor is always welcome.)
But the important part is this: Someone from SIAI should follow the link “Click here if you own this site”, verify the site ownership, and request a review. They will be probably asked to provide a site description, link to Privacy Policy, and Contacts. This will generate a new topic in the forum, where someone can respond, and also many users will visit the domain and give new ratings, which can fix the bad result if it was caused by only a person or two. (This is my idea from looking at their forum; I haven’t tried it.)
The difficult part will probably be to describe the site in a way that doesn’t pattern-match to something bad, because I guess most users will just read the description, spend 15 seconds on the site, and enter some ratings. (The users who rate many sites have high weight in the system, so I bet the ones with highest scores don’t waste a lot of time before making their judgement.) Especially it is necessary to avoid pattern-matching to scam sites, as those seem to be the greatest concert for WoT users.
EDIT: Maybe we could do some brainstorming. What Bayesian evidence is there to confirm or contradict the suspicion that SIAI is a scam organization? The “singularity” seems not to be a problem, for example “kurzweilai.net”, “singularityhub.com” and “singularityu.org” have high ratings.
Done (with at stretch at the “someone from SIAI” part). Comment above
That’s always really confused me too. It generally is just like/dislike.
Leads to the claim site page. Luke—or the appropriate SI representative—can register and request an evaluation.
Thanks for bringing attention to this!
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”)
I always thought that singinst.org was the canonical address (which has good ratings on WOT). Am I mistaken, or is SI switching to singularity.org?
Singinst.org now redirects to singularity.org, and Michael Anissimov has been using singulatiry.org on twitter, which is where I saw this.
The singularity.org URL seems to be a recent acquisition by SingInst; the Internet Archive shows a non-SingInst blog at that domain this time last year. One would imagine that the Web of Trust rating refers to this other site.
Ahh, interesting. I bet you’re right.
Oh, huh. You’re right. I didn’t notice the redirect when I went to singinst.org.
I’m not quite sure how WoT system works, but it seems that an influx of new users all rating a specific website highly over a short period of time could be an indication of a low-quality/unsafe website (e.g. a scammer spends a little bit of money on Mechanical Turk to get a reasonably high rating).
(Also, I’m not sure about the reason for this post, but if it was prompted by Jotto999′s comment here it would be polite to acknowledge it.)
Oh, it wasn’t. I hadn’t seen that. But thanks for pointing it out.
And the reason was just to bring some more attention to it so that hopefully it would get fixed.