What I'm not getting about this is how you check cause and effect. How do you know bad reviews cause restaurants to stagnate? Call me crazy, but maybe restaurants stagnate is because they're bad. They also get bad reviews because they're bad and people might not go to the restaurant becaues it's bad. There's no explanation in this article of how this is overcome. Also, they're talking about 0-4 reviews and 5-10 reviews. I could imagine that's the sort of number of reviews that restaurants' family and friends could be leaving when a restaurant opens.
Have you ever worked in a restaurant? I've worked in multiple.
There's a reason Karen is a meme
There are a real lot of very entitled people in the world that will complain on review sites and their opinion is not really justified. The only barrier is having an account and picking a number of stars.
In the past you had to be a restaurant reviewer, like you worked for Zagat or something, so there was a barrier to entry.
The same thing can happen to Uber and Lyft drivers too... If you are very unlucky and your first ride gives you a bad review pretty much forget about it.
None of this addresses the question though. Nobody doubts the existence of unreasonable customers who leave bad reviews for dumb reasons. That doesn't change the parent comment's fact that the study unwarrantedly infers causality from the statistical correlation between bad reviews and popularity.
To address the question, bad reviews can affect popularity based on how things are listed and sorted online. If a restaurant has bad reviews then it will be lower on the list when sorted by average review. This will affect their popularity by not being as visible, and possibly the poor reviews affecting people’s desire to eat there.
I personally don’t go online and immediately sort by restaurants with 1 or 2 stars. I tend to sort by those with higher ratings.
Fake bad reviews by competitors and mean spirited people do know their actions have an affect on that business.
> To address the question, bad reviews can affect popularity...
That's not the question that others are referring to. Everyone agrees that bad reviews affect the popularity.
The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". Yes, initial bad reviews are likely to affect the number of total reviews a restaurant receives. But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews. The press release says that the ratings of the initial reviews determines (causes) the total number of reviews and hence the eventual popularity of the restaurant, but doesn't explain how the researchers eliminated the apparently obvious alternative causal explanation that bad restaurants are more likely to get initial bad reviews, leading to fewer total reviews.
> The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews.
A helpful move for new establishments—especially independent ones which don't have the organizing strategies of large corporations—would be to delay allowing comments for 3–6 months. I've worked in food for a long time, still do, and it's so difficult to have all aspects of an establishment in a good place at the outset. Give restaurants the time to work out those kinks before accepting comments.
> One hopes that the paper (which I haven't read yet) answers this better than the press release
The paper: As the number of reviews is statistically significant and positive in all of the regression models, the more reviews a restaurant receives, the higher rating it has.
The question was - how do they know it's the bad reviews that hurt the restaurants, or if it's actually the bad service (which caused the bad reviews) that hurts the restaurants.
They observe an effect - hurt restaurant - they see bad reviews - they blame the bad reviews. But was it actually the bad service (evident from the bad reviews) which hurt the restaurant?
Is it possible for there to be such a thing as bad service which is not bad reviews?
The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.
I think the only possible thing is “what does the market think.” So the entire problem is correlation.
“Bad service” is, literally by definition, the name we give after the fact to types of service that correlated with bad reviews and low revenue.
> The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale.
at a minimum, the health department disagrees, re cooking and delivering food.
Health/sanitation law is intended to stop people from getting sick from restaurant food. If you get sick from restaurant food, that would universally be considered a bad experience (and for those inclined, a bad review). That's a direct counterexample to the GP claim that there's no agreed-upon way to distinguish "bad" and "good" experiences.
I still fail to see why anyone thinks this is relevant. I agree health law exists for the purpose you cite - and this fact is not related to why patrons in the study give bad reviews of restaurants that are actively operating with permission of the health department.
> The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.
Once we went to a restaurant with hardly any diners, not at all busy. We ordered dinner. They served half our order. We waited for the other half. After about half an hour, we asked the manager. He went to investigate, and came back with the admission that they had forgotten to submit the other half of our order to the kitchen.
That's objectively bad service. I don't see how anyone could see that as "great service".
Now, maybe it was just an innocent mistake, someone having a bad day, and maybe the manager is really apologetic and offers some compensation and I forgive them. It would rule them out of consideration for a five star review, but I wouldn't give them one star just for that. Unless, if I had gone on a review site and saw a dozen other people complaining about the same restaurant messing up their order, then I probably would have left a one star review too.
My psychologist had a bad review saying that he made her talk about her problems and said that it sounded like it was her fault. She got all defensive and put him on blast. I don’t remember the specifics but reading her “bad” review made me think he’d be a good psychologist, tough but fair type. He was!
Can we stop calling these people "Karen". I'm sure its very hurtful to all the people actually called Karen. We tread so carefully around race and LGBTQI issues, but all of a sudden its OK to start labeling entitled assholes "Karen". I don't get it. We don't need a new word for it.
I do feel like we shouldn't attach that to a real name that real people have, but instead use actual words like "entitled asshole" that convey the same meaning without lumping in unrelated people who so happen to share the name who have done nothing bad to anyone.
I dont fully disagree, nor do I think anyone should purposely seek to make anyone feel badly. But at some point can we just bust someones balls/ovaries/whatever they identify as having and maybe have a laugh? If everything is an egregious offense then nothing is...
There’s a difference between a friend “busting your balls/ovaries/whatever” and having a laugh with you vs. a 13 year old redditor calling women they don’t like Karen.
Of course there is! The problem is not with the Karen meme though... Social media dehumanizing interaction (at least for some significant part of the online population) is the problem.
I sort of understand where you are coming from but my name is Jon and I'm British. Jon, here, is short for Jonathan.
I'm aware that John is an Americanism for the bog (toilet/WC.) John Doe is a person whose name is unknown in the US. A rubber johnny is just one nickname for a prophylactic. My mum used to call me Jonny or Johann or even Johannes as a sign of affection.
I'm not so sure that Karens are offended by the term Karen. You see, very few Karens are actually Karens.
Why do you feel that you need to be able to see the point of it for it to be ok or non-offensive? Maybe you don’t see the point of it, but others see their own point and don’t have to justify it.
Should every possible characteristic a living entity can have also be a protected class?
I only see “white supremacy” when I look at a Karen. I don’t see any people named “karen” being conflated with a “karen”. I would only use “Karen” on a woman if I saw her manipulating some authority to her ends.
Personally, I would only be worried if the “Karen” in question was comfortable calling the cops or “speaking to the manager” in a way that would reflect negatively on staff when they don’t deserve it. I don’t see many calling a white, middle-aged woman a “karen” for complaining about an overcooked steak when she ordered “rare”.
I am sorry people named “karen” are caught in the crossfire, but I would treat any resulting conflict as meaningful until you are able to listen to people using the epithet.
If you still have concerns, I probably do not wish to interact with them or you.
My wife's name is Karen, and I've teased her about it over the past 6 months and she's kept mum about it.
She finally admitted to me that it gets on her nerves greatly and she resents all of it. It came as quite a shock to me (because I find I lot of it funny) but I suspect there are a lot of Karens out there that aren't amused.
The kiddos and I have now resorted to calling her "K-Dog" which she gets a kick out of.
I suspect that anyone who's caught grief for their name wouldn't be surprised. We (generally) don't choose our names, and yet it's imbued with a lot of our sense of identity.
I have a name that has been relentlessly mocked for the last 36 years. The suggestion by others to me has always been “if you don’t like people mocking your name, change it”.
So, I’d say the same applies. If people called Karen don’t like the new association with their name, they can change their name.
Otherwise, sticks and stones.
Also, they’re not the ones actually being mocked here - I get grief from grown-ass adults over my name, directed at me - so frankly, I think anyone named Karen who sees this as a personal attack needs to either get over it, or change their name.
If somebody is judging a person called Karen as being "a Karen" just because of her name, then that is the problem, not the word. If you judge a person called Christian as being of the Christian faith then you're weird and stop doing it. Is Greg gregarious? Is Mohammed Ali a prophet? We really just need to stop judging people for bad reasons instead of dumbing down language.
The whole political correctness idea isn't internally consistent anyway so you can't expect new concepts or words to be "correctly" fitted into it. It's just an arbitrary political ideology for people to latch onto.
Have you ever eaten at a restaurant? Bad food and bad service are a thing too. I'm not one to complain or make a scene, but if I have a bad time, I'm just not going to come back.
I may speak for myself but the grand majority of my experiences with restaurants is most of them do a totally passable job, many very good for their price point in my opinion. Of course there’s levels to it but its food and having a decent restaurant should be far from herculean. This article is essentially suggesting that making it in the world of restaurants is like anything else: it hinges a lot on luck and circumstance.
And as an additional personal note, I can tell you that in Michigan I went to many smaller restaurants with one or two bad reviews that were great. If you actually read the bad reviews, you often see some utterly ridiculous shit.
I check the reviews in Google Maps since they’re there anyways, but I don’t use them as a guide. I used to use Yelp as a guide but stopped when I realized how lackluster it was for that, and I assume that applies to probably any rating system where anyone can submit a review.
I think in general people know how to filter out the "Karens". Also I find that restaurants are actually overrated in general. People are more likely to give a 5 star rating to an average restaurant than vice versa. People at least me try to filter out the person that complains about petty stuff vs the real problems. And I also realize when places first open they are working the kinks out.
But more often than not I go to a place that is rated very good but is actually not that good. And usually the bad rated places are indeed bad.
Totally, but that depends how many people actually dig into the reviews to figure what specifically was liked or disliked (and to make their own assessment of the reviewer's judgement), and how many just go by the top-level aggregated number.
> I could imagine that's the sort of number of reviews that restaurants' family and friends could be leaving when a restaurant opens.
I'm truly astonished when I see businesses with 0-4 reviews on Yelp or Google Maps, but they're everywhere. Maybe some business owners just aren't paying any attention to online reviews? Seems trivial to get 4 people to write a review.
Human marketplaces are not perfectly efficient, and my guess is that restaurants, of all places, are very affected by subjective perceptions and trendiness. So I think that the growth-hack concern on early reviews makes a lot of sense.
e.g. A work team went out for an event and got genuinely atrocious service. i.e. Legitimately worthy of a 1 star review. Fair. Shit service, shit review.
...except somehow they hyped each other up to ALL do so. So that party of 20 left 20 bad reviews.
I wasn't part of that but when I heard about it I couldn't help but think about this effect. One table having a bad time (happens) might have just killed an entrepreneurs dream. :(
I think honestly most bad Yelp reviews are mismatches between expectation and reality.
I've seen a 1 star review of a decent restaurant because "they didn't fill my water glass often enough" -- no other complaints. Sometimes you pay enough for this kind of service, but most restaurants (especially the ones that take a risk on a new server) are going to have bad days.
That said, any bad service or review during the early days of a restaurant are impactful on long term revenues. The slope of the curve in the early days has a bigger effect on the area under the curve.
Reviews are fuzzy measurements that humans interpret as individual, independent, samples.
When you go to the reviews section, your perception is that these reviews are uncorrelated. Correlated reviews are less meaningful, they provide less data. Most people arriving at a review section, seeing 20 1 star ratings, would presume ratings were independent individuals. If 20 independent reviewers each had a bad experiences. That amount of data is extremely telling of the service.
1 singular review, on the other hand says much less.
Maybe their waiter was bad and was fired later? Maybe that was a bad day for the kitchen or the staff somehow? Maybe the reviewer came in with a negative expectation and was biased somehow. Maybe there was some kind of culture issue?
Reviews arn't measurements, they're fuzzy. And while a party agreeing that they were not treated well is MORE information than a single person, it is no where near the signal strength of 20 individual samples.
In this way. They had significantly more influence than was due. It wasn't fair.
Unless they are all rabid Yelpers, it's a party of people going out of their way to be cruel. If you had an off day at work for an understandable reason, and 20 customers went out of your way to publicly shame you for it, would you consider that to be cruel or would you feel like you deserved it?
Say you have a bad day at work but usually you’re awesome. This happens to be the day 20 new coworkers see you for the first time. They all tell their manager.
Do you deserve to be ostracized forever because you bombed one presentation to a vocal minority? Or should that be balanced against your amazing work on other days?
The Algorithm just sees those 20 bad reviews. It doesn’t know about your other amazing days.
In the case of a restaurant another dimension comes into play: Serving a table of 20 is a logistical nightmare compared to serving 10 tables of 2. This is why large parties usually call in advance and get a prefixed menu. The restaurant would also ensure extra staffing for that time.
The restaurant experience is based on a different unit, the party. A party of 2, 4, 6, 20, etc dines together and has the same server(s).
So one bad employee can cripple a restaurant because of a dumb algorithm? Lets start by saying the right thing to do would be talk to the manager first and get them to resolve it.
I hope you see the disparity here. The reviews should be one per restaruant experience. You shouldn't be able to gang up and review spam a restaurant, but there's no way we can prevent that without the review service cooperating with the restaurant.
I have a dietary restriction and I make it a point to explicitly call it out when I order my food, ie: “I’ll have the pasta. It’s vegetarian right?” Yet, now and then, I end up getting served something with meat. Especially now with the fake meat substitutes which honestly look 100% like meat to me.
Finding out the burger I’m eating is real meat after taking a few bites and seeing stringy sinew just completely ruins my entire meal.
When this happens, which happens more often than you would think (go ask your vegetarian friends how often they accidentally eat meat through no fault of their own), you can be sure I give them a damning 1-star review. I don’t care how my friends review them, then can give them 5-stars, that’s fine. But I’m giving them 1.
Stop ordering beyond meat because you long for meat even though you've confused yourself into being a vegetarian and you won't have this problem anymore.
>go ask your vegetarian friends how often they accidentally eat meat through no fault of their own
Huh? I've been a vegetarian for two decades, eat at restaurants often nowadays, and I've never had these sorts of issues. I mean, a small handful of times EVER someone made a mistake and served me meat (though once the mistake was mine) but that's quickly fixed. Never had issues where I ate half a real burger or anything like that.
I would never personally leave a one-star review for a mistake like this unless it was something that happened literally every time I went. I think leaving a one star review over a single mix-up is really petty. I also have the opinion that if you absolutely can't tolerate mistakes you should always be preparing your own food.
It’s people like you that we have this problem where giving someone 3 out of 5 stars can get them kicked off the platform. It’s because of people like you who won’t honestly review and rate things, giving them the benefit of the doubt, weighing the review more positively because they compensated for it.
No. It’s not petty.
They get 1 star because they messed up my order. Simple as that. Give me what I ordered and then I’ll consider giving them 2-5 stars. The fact that they fixed the issue does not even need to come into play here. They fucked up. They get 1 star. Simple. Easy. Done.
Mention that they fixed the issue, that they compensated for the meal, whatever. But leave the 1 star.
The world would be a better place if everything was rated properly, with a majority being 3 stars.
> Unfortunately, we are addicted to having someone filter products and services for us, even if they are manipulated.
I don't think I'm addicted, I just don't know what else to do. How would you recommend I evaluate a product or service before buying it, if I don't personally know someone who can give a recommendation?
I do try to look at trusted professional review sites where possible (The Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc), but that only works for certain types of popular products.
Reviews are the worst way of figuring out where to eat without prior knowledge, except for all the other ways we have tried.
In a totally uniform space, even the smallest thing to help you stand out is enough to make first-order decision making latch on to the small thing. I suppose more advanced decision making would do some intentional exploration of the uniform space.
For many things, it just doesn't matter because all the options are basically fine, or they're cheap enough that the occasional dud isn't a big problem. When I want a local business, I just get whatever's nearby. Sometimes I look at reviews to make sure it's not a complete scam, which it never is. But I'm not going to pick one over the other because of a different number of stars on some site.
Semi-private groups. You can join the relevant channel on discord/elements/facebook group. Avoid too big communities and you most likely will get better reviews than other places.
Even if the reviews weren't fake, most people just don't share my taste, or at least, aren't very discerning, or are complaining about something other than food and service.
We have poor to mediocre sushi restaurants here in Raleigh, NC if you judge them by the quality of their fish. Now, I'm not saying I'm a sushi connoisseur, but I've been to high end sushi restaurants in major cities (Atlanta, NYC, LA, Miami) and I know what we're getting here isn't even close to premium. But people review some of our restaurants and say "this is the best sushi I've ever had."
But you know, you go to these restaurants and see what most people order and they are rolls with insane amounts of sweet sauce on them and sure, they are pretty to look at, but if you're looking for say, an edible piece of Uni here, you aren't going to find it.
This is a country where people think Olive Garden is good Italian after all.
So anyway, I ignore the star reviews and try to find a review where someone took a few minutes to describe what they liked and disliked. One or two reviews like that are way more valuable than the ratings and it's usually pretty easy to spot the fakes.
Specific example. This place has mediocre sushi, a menu that hasn't changed in years, and their service is often slow:
But they treat us like family. I'd never have found that out from Yelp reviews. No, on Yelp you find people complaining that they don't offer BOGO or the parking lot. Other people say it's the best sushi they've ever had. You won't find a review that says "typical neighborhood Japanese restaurant where they treat regulars like family. The service can sometimes be slow and it's not premium fish, but there's a variety of competently made sushi, and decent selection of non-sushi Japanese and Korean menu items. After a few times here, they'll probably start comp'ing you dessert."
Here's a Yelp review from another Japanese restaurant in the area:
> I used Uber Eats to get delivery and it was delicious. Sushi is generally really good or really bad. Not much in between. The disposable chopsticks were the cheapest I've ever seen. Those could definitely be improved.
> I know what we're getting here isn't even close to premium. But people review some of our restaurants and say "this is the best sushi I've ever had."
But the fish could be less than premium and still be the best sushi that person has ever had.
Unfortunately the comment reeks of some classism (though I share the sentiment). When you ain't got the money to travel to find good food or have a nice meal, it's no surprise people like the consistency of a chain restaurant and have their minds blown when the finally try something from a completely different region and have no frame of reference for flavors. I remeber spending my meager savings in college to try Indian, Thai, and even New York-style Chinese as an adult. It was quite scary to know if I'd like it, and I was even a bit afraid to try new dishes on my budget, or a different restaurant of the same style in the same town because I found something I liked. Luckily a developer salary eventually allowed me to open up to trying waay more foods.
I do however feel it's really odd for restauranteurs to feel the immediate need to tailor flavors for the entire menu to the local palate as if people could never dare eat a pepper or something.
When I was in my younger 20s I thought/said some of those same things. People saying how this was the best croissant they’ve ever had and so on, while I’m rolling my eyes thinking “oh come on, this can’t even be called a croissant” simply because I’ve been lucky and privileged enough to (1) eat “real” croissants from living in France and (2) have the time to watch tv/read books about how to make the perfect croissants from scratch and having the time to do so.
At some point I found the r/gatekeeping Reddit and realized what an insufferable asshole I was being.
I find rotten tomato audience scores very informative. Especially when combined with the critic scores.
It essentially gives a 'low-brow' and 'high-brow' rating of a movie. And depending on my mood and who I am watching with, that is very useful information.
The example I've always used is that if somebody uses the words "spicy tuna" in their review of a sushi restaurant, I don't want their rating to affect my view of the restaurant at all. Similarly, someone who goes to a really fancy restaurant for the first time in their life and complains about portion size. Their experiences are valid and helpful to some people, but totally irrelevant to me.
Waraji over by the fairgrounds was always my favorite sushi (and Japanese food in general) place in Raleigh. It fairly traditional, so not swimming in sauces and cream cheese while also having some more ... and they have some really good sashimi, too. I wouldn't say it can compete with truly high-end places that I've been to but still it's quite good and prices are reasonable.
I moved away from Raleigh about a year ago and I miss it.
Waraji is off Duraraleigh near Glenwood. It’s pretty good. A nice neighborhood Japanese restaurant for N Raleigh folks with above average fish. Did you mean Tsune maybe?
Sorry I was turned around, been a while since I was in Raleigh but I meant Waraji on Duraleigh in that little strip mall. I'll always have a soft spot for Sushi Tsune, too, though.
Hey did you ever go to 35 Chinese Restaurant (it was just a little further down the street from Yuri in that bank building)? I've been trying to find where they moved to and have not been successful.
I did. Was the only non-Chinese appearing person there. :-) It's been closed for years and I just assumed went out of business. Great sichuan dishes. The cooks there were not shy with chili peppers.
Hey thanks for that recommendation btw, we’re moving out to Raleigh in January and my girlfriend loves sushi. This should help us to at least get a new regular sushi place!
It's actually in Cary so may be out of the way for you. There's a lot of options in Raleigh proper. I'm sure you can find something comparable that's in your neighborhood. Welcome to the area!
I suspect the same reason it's fairly difficult to get high quality sushi fish as a regular consumer, the high end markets buy it all up.
But you also have the problem that OP described where people literally have no idea what quality actually taste like so they can get away with selling mediocre fish. Nearly all fruit in the United States is another example. My cousin by marriage was born abroad and he absolutely refuses to eat his favorite fruit, mango, because so much of it is outright trash and even a "good"mango sucks in comparison
You can most certainly find them if you want them and it's a fruit that is at least somewhat cultivated locally. Try peaches when they're really in season, which only seems to be a few weeks a year. I've had them right after picking from a farm in the Bay Area but I'm sure Georgia and other peach-growing areas have access to this as well. I don't know if I'll ever find peaches that give me the experience I had of biting into peaches as juicy and flavorful as those.
Or, try apples in a place that actually grows a large amount and diversity of apples. In season, you can walk into some grocery stores and find 20+ varieties that all actually taste unique.
Wait what? I grew up in Miami and ate mangos off the tree. I've also had store bought mango and Ataulfo (Champagne) mangos from Mexico. I don't think I'm missing anything with the store bought mangos. So I think that's a bad example.
But, there's a variety of pineapple you can only get only in Hawaii that's way better. And I've only ever sourced really good key limes from friends and family trees in Florida.
Store bought tomatoes are also usually shit, but you can get ones from the farmers markets and road-side stands.
I can't specifically speak to mangoes since I haven't tried them in that many places, but melons in the United States are outright terrible in comparison to anything I had when I lived in Japan. They cost more but you're pretty much guaranteed quality. A relatively inexpensive melon in Japan might be about 10 bucks but its going to be as good as the best melon you can get in the crap shoot at the grocery store. When you start moving up in price the melons basically become so good that they are an out and out replacement for any kind of high end dessert. Theres no need for ice cream, yogurt, honey, etc because the melon is just that good.
What kind of melon? We have fantastic watermelon here if you get it in-season and local and I've been pretty happy with cantaloupe and honeydew. A lot of problem is Americans have no clue what in-season fruit is and don't buy local.
NC has a bounty of fruit and vegetables available locally grown:
I miss fruits in general in japan. It’s one of those things I’m willing to pay a premium for because they are just that much better. I can’t eat honey dew and cantaloupe in the states anymore.
Eat a mango from India or Pakistan (in the summer) before you die. Hard to find in the US unfortunately, but you'll realise that the mangoes you're familiar with taste like tree bark.
>I'm dying for an alternative to the 5-star review
Trusted source, e.g. particular friends/family/reviewers. I've had far better experiences trusting one knowledgeable person than 100s of anonymous reviewers.
It would honestly be so nice to just rate a bunch of restaurants (or anything, music would be really nice) and have it spit out recommendations like “people with really similar taste to yours also like x,y,z”
This was literally the rationale behind the relaunch of reviews in Google Maps in 2010-11, and what you describe was exactly the internal demo that got the project staffed and funded. I'm not sure how much of it still exists, but for a while, when searching on maps, there were little tags on recommended places that said something like "recommended because people like you also liked X".
That project never really reached its full potential for other reasons, but it turns out that even with a lot of data, it's hard to make big gains in ranking over just using the aggregate of all users. The intersection of two people's tastes is sort of surprisingly not very helpful.
It's present for me as a % match to a restaurant I'm a regular at back home. Signals I have seen in this are menu item similarity, photo count by similar reviewers, and more basic metadata.
It didn't really translate well to visiting Japan, but does great when in a new metro and not having any personal recommendations to go off.
Good to know. I remember the Tokyo team working on menu item extraction back then, hopefully they managed to make it work. I don't believe we were looking at photo count at all - probably user submitted photos weren't a feature on Maps at the time.
The cross city problem is one of the things I've looked at a lot (I actually wrote a design doc for it at a different company). Even with really good coverage in New York/San Francisco/London/Tokyo due to our teams being based there, it was hard to get significant personalized ranking improvement. Maybe it's better now that they have a lot more data.
The one area where I have had success with this approach is with music. Various services will have public playlists that random listeners have put together. If I find a list that has a number of songs I like on it, there's a good chance I'll find something new I like on it that had never been suggested by one of the algos.
Google maps does this, for me at least. If I look at a restaurant in the app, it'll give a little XX% match score based on their algorithmic impression of my taste.
There's a demand for quality information about a place.
Professional critics may help with that, but they could suck at that, too. It's pretty common for them to echo common thought so they don't get considered a moron by the community of professional critics.
If you want to run a business that is professional criticism, my feedback to you is that while I'm in the market for quality information (so I pay the WSJ and the Economist), I won't pay for what you're talking about.
I would probably pay for a timely recommendation from a friend at 100x what I'd pay for a professional opinion. Maybe I'd pay like 5 cents for a professional opinion. Hope that helps.
I remember before online reviews were a thing, tv shows would make fun of how consistently out-of-touch critics were. Particularly those who who judge film or food.
I mean because a lot of critics were hopelessly out of touch. I don't fault them because they were part of a community that rewarded that behavior but evaluating a restaurant like it's an interactive art exhibit didn't help anyone except foodies find cool places to eat.
There was absolutely zero chance that a restaurant that made spectacular food but didn't do anything novel would even be on their radar.
Removing names and ratings could work. Recreate the experience of overhearing good or bad things about a place and then draw your own conclusion. Sort by recency since you don't have to account for ratings. Then maybe you see one like "the service improved a bit since 2 months ago".
I'm shocked that anyone even pays attention to online reviews, given how bad and unreliable they are. Why would you trust random people to tell you if something is good or not? Name one example online where the aggregated opinions of randos ever successfully produced a signal of quality. At best crowdsourced ratings and voting can surface popularity but never quality.
There _is_ an end in sight. It is becoming increasing dangerous for publishers who host the reviews, and users to write them. There have been a few high profile defamation suits here in Australia.
Would not normally link to life hacker, but it has a good summary of the situation here is Aus.
The main issue with review sites, in my experience, is that I end up being hesitant to try new restaurants which don’t have a large number of reviews or even one really bad review. They may be delicious but there is always a hesitation factor; “Do I want to spend $20 and risk the food being awful, or do I want to go with the safe option, the place I’ve been to a hundred times?” This problem didn’t really exist prior to review sites, but somehow I don’t remember being all that bothered by it.
It makes me think: new restaurants would benefit from a sort of insurance program. I would be willing to try far more new restaurants if I had a guaranteed way to receive my money back in the event of disappointment. Just like insurance, the less times I use my refund, the lower rate I pay per month.
> “Do I want to spend $20 and risk the food being awful, or do I want to go with the safe option, the place I’ve been to a hundred times?” This problem didn’t really exist prior to review sites
Actually, it very much did.
The answer is that you suck it up and go to the new place--live a little.
I eat at a lot of different places. Normally the food isn't awful--most are just mediocre and I won't be back without some other reason (There is an Asian chain restaurant in London that was so BAD I can't even remember its name--that's one of the exceptions). Some are good, but too expensive for what you got--they go on my "If someone really wants <Food X>, I can take them there."
And then there are the few that are "good and reasonably priced (or maybe even cheap)". And the occasional "Expensive, but worth it".
Those are the ones you will recommend when your friends ask.
> Just like insurance, the less times I use my refund, the lower rate I pay per month.
Huh, what insurance works like that? If you pay a rate based on how much you used it, you might as well pay for the thing you're having the insurance pay for. I get that such an insurance will catch outliers still (saving you from a big boo-boo) but that's the only kind of thing insurances are for: big boo-boos (chance events that cost you disproportionately much compared to how much reducing the risk of them to zero would cost, like surgery or your house burning down). If you use it for frivolous stuff like, say, covering for a $10 meal, imagine the overhead, the management costs of all those claims, the arbitration, and the little you get out of it unless you order at a shitty restaurant and get unlucky nearly every time because you travel a lot for work and don't know the good places around -- oh wait, in your model that means you pay more anyway and it's not worth it, so every subscriber is really only lining the manager's pockets.
Just eat mediocre food for once or order elsewhere if the food is actually inedible. The lack of repeat custom is surely worth more to a restaurant than refunding those ten dollars you're sour about.
Yes. For example no-claims bonuses on car insurance means you pay less if you claim less.
> If you pay a rate based on how much you used it, you might as well pay for the thing you're having the insurance pay for.
No. For example say my car insurance is £500 or something. It goes down £50 a year every year I don't use it, due to no-claims bonuses. But it's still less than paying for a major accident out-of-pocket that could cost £5 million.
Sure but presumably the restaurants would be vetted in some way to minimize negative experiences, and the likelihood of you wanting to use your discount fairly low.
I’m not familiar with insurance companies but I imagine this is precisely their business model: minimize the likelihood of a claim but make the benefit of doing so worth it for the consumer to pay a monthly fee.
As far as I can tell, insurance only makes sense if the cost of the insured event would ruin you. Otherwise, you're better off just setting aside some cash into a savings account and calling it your insurance fund.
Insurers will always set premiums so that you're on the losing side of probability. Their real product is protecting you from the damage of going negative.
"ruin you" may be a bit strong. Take travel insurance.
Do I take travel insurance for routine trips that might involve me losing $200 for having to cancel a plane flight and maybe some hotels. Nope.
But if I have a high 4 figures trip that I'll have to cancel if I sprain my ankle or because a family member who is having health problems needs me to stay home? Or because I know there could be expensive evacuation if something goes wrong. That seems a pretty good use of a few hundred dollars.
Of course, in my case, this is pretty much the definition of adverse selection but maybe the relatively reasonable rates I can get are being subsidized by all the people who buy the insurance routinely.
> Do I take travel insurance for routine trips that might involve me losing $200 for having to cancel a plane flight and maybe some hotels. Nope.
The cost of the flight and hotels is irrelevant though.
If you have a medical emergency while in a foreign country you could be looking at millions of dollars of costs to treat and repatriate you. That would bankrupt most people. Even if you're just popping to another city for a day - if it's in another country I think you really must be insured.
I do have health insurance (which one might need to get money back from after the fact) which does cover when traveling and good luck getting just about any travel insurance policy to pay out "millions of dollars."
Most of the time I'd be covered by my company anyway and I do buy travel insurance when doing activities with greater than normal risk. But I'd be surprised if anyone I know routinely bought travel insurance for foreign travel. I literally have never heard it come up in a conversation.
I think that's true of a lot of insurance for people who aren't on the edge. Travel insurance basically covers two scenarios:
- You've prepaid an expensive trip and can't go on it for some covered reason (injury, family situation)
- Or you're on a trip and have to be expensively evacuated/repatriated (pulmonary edema in Nepal/break both your legs in Paris)
For most of us who normally travel a lot, it's not about having to spend $1K out of pocket because luggage got lost/stolen or you had to do some complicated rebooking because of a delayed flight.
There are also cases where insurance works by aligning incentives, to help make early intervention easier.
Take health insurance where you get free stop-smoking plans. It makes the barrier for signing up to such a plan much lower, which is good for you. It also makes the chance of people suffering from lung cancer lower, which is good for your insurer.
> Insurers will always set premiums so that you're on the losing side of probability. Their real product is protecting you from the damage of going negative.
This is also a legal requirement as underselling the cost of the underlying risks can put your company at risk of insolvency.
States hate having insurance companies go bust in case of a real emergency so there are liquidity, zip underwriting and other preventive measures to keep companies kicking because the alternative causes the state to eat the costs.
I try new restaurants whenever I can. I wouldn't hesitate too much to order from a bad rating one if I don't see too many recent bad reviews and explanation. That said, I have been bitten by this far more than I would like. I apply multiple different filters now and then order. Ruined food costs you a good amount of mood.
What would make me try new restaurants?
Something new and novel. Can you make me something that the other restaurants can't? Do you provide ability to customize my dishes? Maybe call your customers with opportunity for big discount or food, tell them about your restaurant more and listen to their feedback. I recommend a single restaurant everytime someone asks me about food place here because I know their service is consistent and great. They don't care about reviews as much as my word.
I think so, yeah. I’ve often walked by a new restaurant and thought, “That looks interesting” but then end up looking at the reviews before I decide to eat there.
Since we're talking about it,
my usual method for finding restaurants in new places is to ask people and then go to online discussion forums. Some cities have specific ones, like LTH Forum for Chicago.
If not, I visit more general food forums like Hungry Onion. Chowhound used to be a great resource for this, but they got bought or something and the community withered. A lot of them moved to Hungry Onion.
I also have a few bloggers I follow. Ulterior Epicure is a good name if you're interested in "high-end" food. The guy is not a "collector" like a lot of restaurant bloggers, which I like.
That combination is usually enough to get a list of interesting-looking places. Yelp tends to just not have much information in my experience.
For California, it seems like the SF Bay Area Chowhound refugees went to Hungry Onion, but the LA people went to Food Talk Central. It's pretty unfortunate, since CH really was a good resource back in the day, and now neither site seems to have critical mass.
These days (well, not the past couple months) I tend to get more recommendations from industry people. I sit at a lot of restaurant bars and a server who isn't too busy is usually happy to chat. As a bonus, I get way more than my fair share of free drinks and tastes of interesting things.
I have always wanted to give a restaurant an anonymous “tip” instead of a public review.
Like privately: “hey, we love you guys, just FYI the croissants have seemed stale lately. Just wanted you guys to know...”
My hypothesis is most just nod and always say everything is “fine” if prompted for feedback. But you’d get more honest feedback if there was a way to privately “drop a line” to your favorite restaurants.
(I hate writing reviews. I know even minor negative feedback will have a bad impact on someone’s personal business.)
They might start with everything being fresh and high quality ingredients, then when money is tight in one month the quality sinks either temporarily or permanently.
Increasing popularity can also decrease quality. More people more work. If people start coming because restaurant has been discovered, quality matters less afterwards. It tastes good when everyone says it tastes good.
Dumb question - what if the early resturants with early bad reviews are simply bad and death spiral? I didn't see efforts to narrow down actual quality.
Granted would require controlled attempts of opening under different names at different locations to try to see if a somewhat random starting review really drives it or confidental information from a chain resturant's attempts to expand by the same leadership.
I see the opposite happening as well where the high reviewed restaurants can ride the wave of popularity for a pretty long time whilst reducing the portio sizer, replacing free drinks with high margin ones, replacing more expensive ingredients with cheaper alternatives, increasing the wait times before the new lower reviews start to propagate.
It's kinda hard to tell from the article whether "negative" means one-star or, like, three-stars. Because yeah, there are quite a few people who tend to overreact to a less-than-ideal experience where they feel compelled to leave a one-star review because the check took an extra ten minutes to arrive. And surely anyone with a shred of empathy would cut a brand new restaurant some slack if it's not perfect on the first week.
OTOH, people seem to think you're being mean if you leave a 2-3/5 review for a restaurant, and at some point we should acknowledge the fact that some places are just mediocre. And if I go to a thoroughly mediocre Italian restaurant, I don't think it's mean to leave it a mediocre rating, because the average person should know that there are four better Italian restaurants within 15 miles they could go to.
5-star rating distributions are heavily bipolar - maybe like 80% of ratings will be 1 or 5. This is part of why some systems end up switching to thumbs up/down. I don't like it much, but empirically, it's how people seem to use rating scales.
I semi-joke with friends that I wreck the ratings of things just because I try to use the entire scale, so my 4 star "pretty darn good!" rating actually ends up lowering the average.
That's partly the platforms' fault, though: anything less than a perfect rating is assumed to be a sign of a problem that needs to be fixed. There is no room for, "This is as good as it needs to be, but not as good as some other things." The best steak joint in town? 5 stars. McDonald's? 5 stars, unless you're complaining about a specific problem with your order. And many services will send your complaint to the restaurant and the restaurant will respond to you to try to get you to change your mind. Not worth the bother.
When the platform isn't actively hostile to it, I always use the full set of stars with the expectation that it's a normal distribution and 3 stars will be by far the most common rating. It actually works pretty well in some places, e.g., Netflix's DVD rental service, which still uses 5-star ratings, almost always correctly predicts my ratings to within half a star because I've rated a ton of movies.
But I'd never do it to an Uber driver: I may live in a mental world where an uneventful ride ought to be rated 3 stars and someone would have to really go above and beyond to earn 5 stars, but actually doing that would be a cruel act given how the system works in practice.
Back when I looked at the netflix challenge, the baseline above which improvement was barely possible was:
Per person find their average rating, and score movies not by ratings, but by how far the rating deviated from that person's average.
I think that approach got me to 92% accuracy. More advanced math gave me like another 2 percent, with the winner of the challenge having gotten 96% accuracy.
My point being. A very basic recommendation engine system should correct for your 4star is pretty good habit.
Agree that it's very simple to do some basic corrections from individual distributions. I just think it's relatively rare to see any of this in the wild (and when it's there, there's often pushback from people complaining about the process).
Of course bad reviews can hurt a restaurant. That's what reviews are for. I think the problem is two-fold:
1. The ranking algorithm is bad. A simple average is very naive, but many site use just that for ranking. There needs to be some standard accredited algorithms to do rating rankings - which take care of factors like this.
2. Online marketplace makes a wider variety available to users. This automatically ensures that more and more sales go to the highest quality restaurants. If there is a 5-star restaurant you can order from, why would you try a 4.8-star one? There can only be a few "best" restaurants, and everyone wants to eat their food.
Yes. Search "Medical mask" on Amazon. Lots of vague, enthusiastic 5-star reviews. Then read the 1-star reviews:
Link advertised as Medical Grade, CDC approved, CE certified but the box that the mask came in didn't have ANY of the advertised verbiage. On top of that, box had had non-sterile printed & non-CE (non certified). FRAUD advertisement!!
Ordered these believing they were medical masks as described on this page. What I received was clearly labeled "Non-Medical Masks" and had a different part number than the number listed here.
Ad said masks were made in USA. They are made in China.
I bought a medical mask and when opening the package it says NON-MEDICAL-MASK
I ordered these, because they said they were FDA approved. I received a different brand that is not.
Egg-and-chicken debates aside, I can absolutely see this. In any reasonably-sized town or city you'll find a dozen similar establishments a walking distance away. So while you might debate picking between the 3.5 and 4.5-star ones, the restaurant with 1-2 stars is just not going to draw a crowd.
If I was a restaurant starting up I’d just buy my first 20 reviews. Tell customers they get a free appetizer if they leave a review on Yelp (any review, any stars).
Sucks that’s the world we live in but it’s so obviously true and it’s the best investment a new restaurant can make.
Public reviews should be outlawed unless some form of credential system is created. The review system is another example of how the tech industry is unable control their urge to inconsequentially behave like if they were gods with complete lack of empathy.
To one who understands complex systems theory, this is completely unsurprising. All the emergent phenomena (fake reviews, pandering to Instagram, faux-chic, aspirational minimalism) in turn create more reaction, more phenomena.
If we ask ourselves: were online reviews a good thing? To me clearly no. Authenticity has been the price.
Create two restaurants with the same exact look, menu, appliances and prep but different names and Yelp/Google entities. Enter bad reviews in one, and see what happens. That's how we would be able to tell if its the reviews or the restaurant that hurt the restaurant.
An aside: With this mesh of human and company rights [whether or not you agree], does a company -- like people + GDPR -- have the right to be forgotten, or not exist somewhere they wish not to?
