Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as having a bad reputation

I've registered at WoT and requested a reevaluation. We're also making a couple of changes the WoT reevaluation request process seems to suggest are important (like more prominently linking the site's privacy policy).

http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/24394-singularity-org
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/singularity.org

It's strange. How can you even measure "Vendor Reliability" of every web domain, when many domains don't sell anything! But don't worry, the "global community of millions of users" will assign you the exact value between 0 and 100 anyway. For example "lesswrong.com" has 95, and "singularity.org" has 31 -- I guess some customers were really angry about Friendly AI delivery time.

Despite having four different criteria, the values seem mostly the same, so I guess it's just a "like / dislike" voting. The website refuses to say many people have voted, so it could have been just one or two people who disliked... something.

The FAQ in the site gives some instructions on how to "increase your site's reputation". These include: join the site, and ask your friends and customers to join the site. (And then, presumably, give yourself a high rating. D'oh.) Before you do that, another part of FAQ says that votes from new users have low value, and only increase gradually. So you should use the site a lot, and preferably install their browser plugin. (You can't pay to increase your website's reputation, but free labor is always welcome.)

But the important part is this: Someone from SIAI should follow the link "Click here if you own this site", verify the site ownership, and request a review. They will be probably asked to provide a site description, link to Privacy Policy, and Contacts. This will generate a new topic in the forum, where someone can respond, and also many users will visit the domain and give new ratings, which can fix the bad result if it was caused by only a person or two. (This is my idea from looking at their forum; I haven't tried it.)

The difficult part will probably be to describe the site in a way that doesn't pattern-match to something bad, because I guess most users will just read the description, spend 15 seconds on the site, and enter some ratings. (The users who rate many sites have high weight in the system, so I bet the ones with highest scores don't waste a lot of time before making their judgement.) Especially it is necessary to avoid pattern-matching to scam sites, as those seem to be the greatest concert for WoT users.

EDIT: Maybe we could do some brainstorming. What Bayesian evidence is there to confirm or contradict the suspicion that SIAI is a scam organization? The "singularity" seems not to be a problem, for example "kurzweilai.net", "singularityhub.com" and "singularityu.org" have high ratings.

there's a "click here if you are the owner of this site" button, although I don't know what that does.

Leads to the claim site page. Luke - or the appropriate SI representative - can register and request an evaluation.

Thanks for bringing attention to this!

Day 2: The "singularity.org" rating increased from 30-31 (red) to 45-48 (yellow). Another two days like this, and the problem can be fixed.

Some more details: Ratings are given anonymously (and the site does not even tell how many ratings did it use to calculate the results). It is also possible to add comments to domains -- I am not sure whether they are included in calculation, but either way they may influence other voters. At this moment, "singularity.org" has two negative comments (and two positive ones).

One negative comment by "Ratingmonster1234" is probably written by a mentally ill person, judging by the content of their own homepage, which also has a very low rating. (By the way, it was written on 23rd July, the same day as this article.)

Another negative comment by "arctur" is accusing us of comment spam in unrelated web forums, if I understand it correctly. First I thought this is something a previous owner of "singularity.org" did, but looking at the dates, this explanation seems wrong. SIAI purchased the domain in April 2011, and this comment was written in January 2012, which is later.

Can this be true? I don't know how to check it; googling "link:singularity.org" reveals nothing (but the functionality of "link:" seems broken or something; I'd be glad if someone could explain me how it works). The user added this comment to over thousand domains using some "mass rating tool", but it does not seem like a random voting (to increase the user score): the names of most domains in that list seem kind of spammy.

EDIT: Now I have a feeling that it is relatively easy to ruin a prestige of a less popular site using this tool. You don't even have to create many sockpuppet accounts, because it seems rather easy to gain "trust" of the system -- just give high/low ratings to many sites that already have high/low ratings. Then give someone bad ratings and accuse them of spam or phishing (no proof required), and it's done.

I always thought that singinst.org was the canonical address (which has good ratings on WOT). Am I mistaken, or is SI switching to singularity.org?

I'm not quite sure how WoT system works, but it seems that an influx of new users all rating a specific website highly over a short period of time could be an indication of a low-quality/unsafe website (e.g. a scammer spends a little bit of money on Mechanical Turk to get a reasonably high rating).

(Also, I'm not sure about the reason for this post, but if it was prompted by Jotto999's comment here it would be polite to acknowledge it.)