Harvard Business Publishing

User reviews are the lifeblood of many great websites, from amazon.com, to yelp.com, and even Apple iTunes. What we don't often here are stories from the people who manage these user generated comments and the challenges of depending on the crowds.

Check out this informal, but good analysis by Scott Ruthfield, former manager of the amazon.com customer review business:

All of this sounds good, of course, but then people get involved. And customer service reps are trying to interpret the philosophies (if they can find them among hundreds of pages of other rules), and some of them are judgment calls (what is "demonstrably false?" If I say "the defibrillator didn't work and my dad died," is someone going to check? are comments on voting records trustworthy? etc.) that different people will make, and of course you don't want Jeff or Steve Jobs or anyone making every decision. So it's messy, and when it's messy, strange things happen - reviews appear and disappear,

Read his full post here. Also read his excellent advice on what to do when you're stuck.