New Community Site Offers Views From the Trenches 71
roby2358 writes " TrenchMice is a new community-moderated website that provides 'inside opinions and insights' about businesses and employers. But instead of the reporting bias toward management and venture capitalists that is so common in the mainstream media, on TrenchMice the opinions and information come from posts by the people in the trenches. Users — who can post anonymously if they choose — can provide topics, scoops, or comments, and there is a thorough rating system. To keep the site from turning into a 'whack-a-company' fest, users build up 'Cred' (something like Karma) as they provide insights on companies and employers. The site is based in Seattle and most of the early content is about Seattle companies, but they have ambitions to grow nationwide, with a goal is to see if a site based completely on open-source technology, and rigorously community moderated, can run on a pretty much automatic basis. Could be an interesting model for future social sites if it takes off. Full disclosure: I know these guys and have posted on the site, but I don't work for them."
They already do (Score:4, Interesting)
Major Critical Mass problem (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the point of this site? I'm not flaming, I'm just not totally clear on this. Is this supposed to be a forum where the low guy on the totem pole offers his "insight" into where the company should be heading? Or is it a "vent about your lame boss" site?
The reason I'm asking is: Who will read it? Who is the intended audience?
I just went to the site and saw a bunch of names of people I've never heard of, and with almost 100% probability will never hear of.
I've seen sites with "critical mass" hurdles. But for this site to *begin* to have meaningful data to a majority of visitors, it would need millions of viewers.
Re:can it be trusted? (Score:1, Interesting)
So any _one_ piece of information can be wrong. But short of using only face-to-face meetings with people who carry three forms of identification, that's _always_ true of any online information source. The value comes, I think, from the "wisdom of the masses" (I didn't coin that phrase, I read it somewhere....). Like on Slashdot -- any one post could be crap. But with moderation and meta-moderation and karma, bad stuff _tends_ to disappear.