Why do you hate WOT?

I took the idea for this thread from a comment

GrafZepplin is not alone in his hate
it's common for WOT to provoke this reaction,
but why exactly?

personally I've been using it for 5 years,
and only found 3 times what I consider to be false positives
I also find the written comments to be useful,
even if many of them leave to be desired

but the negative positions, sometimes violent,
must have a basis

so,
for you, WOT haters out there, give us your rationale,
why do you hate WOT?

 

WOT is the point of WOT anyway? It will only tell you, that a webpage might be infected and if you want to go there you will regardless of that, besides, just because the webpage is marked red, it does not mean, that you will get infected. By the way, browsers like Chrome warn you about possible bad webpages, I actually get 2 warnings, I consider it annoying, it can not be turned off. Yandex integrated it into the browser. People do not care about it!

 

I don't hate it, or even dislike it. I just don't have any use for it. It basically exposes human nature. You can't count on the users being objective and neutral when rating a site, and you also can't count on them being very knowledgeable either. It's a flawed popularity contest waiting to be abused, full of both openly biased opinions and ulterior motives , kind of like a reputation system for members on a forum.

 

I simply use WOT.
I've experienced a few FPs.

No hard feelings.

 

They deserve more respect, imho.

 

It is an inaccurate waste of time based on the opinions of the general public. I have found it way to easy to have a group of people get together and manipulate the rating for a site.

 

I'm not a WOT hater either, AFAIK doesn't WOT prevent scripts running on a page it flags as red? I view it as merely another tool in the perpetual fight against malware. I have tried to responsibly comment on sites with it. One of the main reasons that I run Flager in Maxthon is because of the WOT scores.

 

Because dog lovers rate cat pages dangerous.

 

I don't hate WOT, I hate people who misuse it. I once wrote here that some religious zealots there keep labeling adult sites as been malware infected, someone replied that there are also people that do the same with religious sites. And there is always all those 'me too' guys that keep on repeating what they have read elsewhere and that amplify false positives to the point of making legitimate sites look like the devil. So, WOT is sometimes like a playground for dunces.

 

I always understood the name Web of Trust to be wonderfully ironic.

 

I prefer the Safe Preview extension for Chrome, which uses several services to check websites - it uses:
- Google Advisory
- McAfee
- Norton Safe Web
- WOT
- Avast!
- TrustWave
- DrWeb online check!

 

Yes it is kind of oxymoron

hqsec

 

For me it is more a lack of trust rather than hate, but I don't believe in a "crowd" (or you can say "cloud") based opinion when it comes to making a decision for myself about visiting or not a certain site.

 

If WOT was renamed according to how I use it, it would be called PFC (Pause for Cause), because that's what I do when I encounter one of their warnings.
There is no trust involved, no hatred, just pause for cause... then I usually proceed to the site.
Occasionally, when WOT throws up a warning, I recheck the url if I have entered one into the address field, because I sometimes type it wrong and the resulting site is seriously not a good place to be.

 

It's a good companion for NoScript. I have a few hundreds of tracking and not so useful scripts untrusted because of it. Although I block all scripts by default it's very useful to remove clutter on NoScript's list on pages with lots of scripts. It's easier to whitelist good script.

 

Why am I having an incredible amount of hatred towards WOT? Because it's irrational and too unreliable to be considered seriously.

• There's one website that made fan English patches for some Japanese games. Without much thought, some people flagged it for spreading malware. Although it wasn't due to WOT's result, a user had asked about this and the web staff already said it's an FP. I know that website, and it doesn't spread malware like some dumb-dumbs accused.
• Aside of the above example, there are many companies which get quite unfavored comments, although they are usually rated as "Good" in the WOT's flag (or whatever you are supposed to call it). Phishing and spam are the most favorite accusations among the comments. While some companies are actually guilty for the crimes, it gets too hard to believe when nearly everything you throw will yield pretty much the same results. How many times you see comments like "This company is spamming internet forums blah blah"?
• It gave a green a.k.a. "Excellent" rating for a warez website, in which that warez site gave me an infection in the past. Why? Because they hosted a working cracked version of Sony Vegas Pro? Lol.
• They flagged some religious and political websites as red. It really has nothing to do with security and privacy at all. I'm an anti-religion myself, but I won't be happily flagging those kind of websites just because I have different opinions with them.

WOT is just misleading and give a false sense of safety IMO. It's not much different than questions like "Which is the best antivirus to use?" type of question. People just endlessly say their opinions and personal preferences. If people like a website, they'll rate it as green. If they hate a website, they'll rate it as red. WOT is way too opinion based. Users shouldn't have direct involvements in determining a safety of a website or file for the needs of the masses. This is also why I strongly disagree with cloud decision making in some BB or HIPS programs. If WOT changed the way it works to a more reliable concept like Bitdefender's database, then I surely will welcome it.

 

I hate WOT because it leaks data, gives bogus hits, and burns coal supply.

 

Site reputation comes from ratings. Comments are optional and separate from ratings.

https://www.mywot.com/en/faq/website/scorecard

As for the reliability of crowd-sourced system, user input is based on meritocracy.

https://www.mywot.com/en/faq/website/rating-websites

 

i don't hate WOT.

the whole concept is too ridiculous to warrant hate.

 

I don't use it because I have no need for it, but mostly because I feel like it slows browsing.

 

I use it . It's worked for me.

 

Your typical, non-techical web user..................

http://cdn.buzznet.com/assets/users16/praetorian/default/i-am-inbred--large-prf-1198636256.jpg?post_id=33333561

Yeah, I need their input.

 

My use of it, along with the many, many others I've helped install it has convinced me that it is worthwhile. It may not be perfect but nothing is.

 

I use WOT as part of Adguard, and like it. It's given me very pertinent warnings about sites that 'appeared' fine, but were not.

 

The strength of WOT is because of user submissions. Unfortunately their strength is also their weakness. I have yet to come across a single WOT page rating that isnt full of the same word for word ratings. Its far to easy for several users to rate a bad website as good and vice versa. Its simply unreliable. Human error and ignorance also plays a part in the weakness. 99% of all WOT comments/ratings are made by people who arent qualified to make such judgements.