jayeff

Good grief. In other words, turn a "review" site back into the same kind of bullshit sales spiel to which review sites were a response in the first place???

There are over 10,000 sites you can pitch at surfers. On a review site, the top 20-30 on the main page and the top 5 on category pages are going to catch the bulk of a review site's sales. From those numbers it should be obvious that the review site operator doesn't need to soft-pedal, so the only relevant question is whether he would gain anything from doing so.

For this discussion to matter, we have to accept the premise that if a surfer arrives at a review site and begins reading, there is a good chance he cares about what he reads. If not, he would presumably move on and find a TGP or whatever.

With that in mind, it would be a nonsense to assume that a surfer wouldn't care if a review failed to cover the issues which concern him. Although there are some "filler" polls on http://www.pornusers.com/browse_polls.html there are also some which suggest that pornsite members have very definite likes and dislikes relating to certain site features.

Every experienced surfer knows there is no such thing as a perfect porn site, so the very first step in establishing credibility must be to highlight the bad as well as the good. To judge the value of a review site I haven't visited before, I find the review of a site with which I am familiar and see if the reviewer's take on it is similar to mine. I'm especially going to look to see if he picks up anything which really p*ssed me off.

When a review site makes a sale, the surfer buys a membership with the expectations that the review site created. If those expectations are realized, in a couple of months there is a pretty fair chance he will check some more reviews. But if you found that a review site had done no more than remove some of the most obvious "extravagances" from the site's own sales pitch, would you bother taking its advice again?