The Role of (Non-)Conformism in Rating Platforms

Social content-sharing networks allow users to share content annotations. Although convergence and consistency in semantic annotation (tags) has been well-studied, less effort has been devoted to studying evaluative annotations (ratings and reviews) with respect to user characteristics and user-item relationships. In this paper, we first identify trends in both item scores and in the ways in which users allocate scores, these are also associated with some of users´ other activity -- in particular, social links and rating activity are both found to be higher for a moderate level of non-conformism and dissensus. We then conduct a more thorough investigation into how item score distributions might arise and be sustained. The fact that most items have a clear modal score can be attributed to the tendency of items to evoke similar degrees of satisfaction across users. In addition to this however, our findings suggest that social links between users can play a role in stabilising rating distributions. Firstly, we find that socially linked users are more likely to give the same score to an item (possibly due to similarities in taste). Secondly, we eliminate the possibility that distributions of scores arise through attracting users with particular ratings styles (e.g. tendency to agree). Thirdly, we find that a large mean shift is much rarer for items with a large proportion of added scores from socially linked users and that this is most likely to be due to maintaining a stable distribution than to added scores conforming to the mean.