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THERE's something infinitely reassuring about belonging to a group. It could be Mensa, or the Three Stooges. No matter. Man is a social animal and has an ancient built-in tribal instinct to herd.

Groups, or forums as they are termed in modern parlance, are as comforting as they are confusing. The bigger the group, the more the gobbledegook. Simply put, debates can be meaningful and focused when numbers are small, but results dissipate and issues meander as membership grows and, with it, the range of opinion, ignorance and peevishness.

In the online world, the solution is to quantify everything and thereby attach some sort of scientific significance to the results. TripAdvisor is a case in point. With thousands of comments on just about everything, travellers need to be presented an average score. And this score in turn is open to manipulation by fraudsters and pranksters, or inadvertent misrepresentation by those not really qualified to assess the subjects in question.