J2O is a site where users can review content with valid opinions. An opinion is never wrong. An opinion, however, is invalid if it has no support whatsoever.

That said, the quality of many of the reviews on J2O is excruciatingly dismal and the invalidity of the opinions disallows the respective reviews to warrant an actual rating.

Those who submit poor reviews have no excuse at all for posting poor reviews. He or she only has to ask him or herself a few questions and submit a minimum of three to five well-developed sentences to support his or her opinion.


The following is what one could ask him or herself to help justify his or her review:

1. If someone were to read my review, would he or she be able to determine that I have actually evaluated the content thoroughly?

2. Do I have a solid statement about the content?

3. Do I have sufficient evidence to support that statement?

4. Does my explanation for the evidence's correlation to the statement effectively support my conclusion about the content?

5. Is the statement in my review justified by the support? What can I add if it is not justified?


These questions are already integrated into various reviewers' thinking processes. If one finds his or her reviews constantly having his or her ratings removed, he or she better believe that he or she can strongly answer with "no" to one of the questions above.

Users really should not have to write too much about the content that they are reviewing because they have other things to do and cannot make the full-time commitment to J2O that some think they can. On the other hand, users should not be able to write off or praise another user's hard work with just a few unsupported statements. One would be right to say that opinions are never wrong, but he or she would be illogical to say that they are always valid.

I do not necessarily represent the views of J2O's administration or any of J2O's individual reviewers. In my opinion, the removal of older reviews' ratings was not a good idea because the general opinion had been established by many other reviews of the same content in the past; also, the users were not under the same magnitude of enforcement of the rules. However, J2O's administration has still been relatively lenient in the removal of ratings if one considers the fact that various monitored reviews would get negative responses with the questions above.

The writing of reviews does not have to be systematic, but the enforcement of the rules does. This issue is nowhere near as big as it has been made out to be, but it does need to be addressed more systematically.