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I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor
- ainiriand 9y agoWell, congratulations on gaming a system based on trust. You can try to edit Wikipedia too and make Steve Jobs chinese if you want.
- dgritsko 9y agoFor me it was interesting to see just how successful he was with relatively little effort. Holding the #1 spot for several days _seems_ like it ought to be a big accomplishment -- yet he was able to succeed without any major obstacles. This story pulled back the curtain a bit and showed just how quickly the system can break down.
- bogomipz 9y agoDid you read the article? Besides being part comedy sketch, it's also part sociological experiment and part performance art. It wasn't about gaming a system for financial gain in the least.
- wtf_is_up 9y agoPlease cite where financial gain was mentioned in the previous post.
- bogomipz 9y agoThat's wasn't the point in mentioning 'financial gain", I mentioned that as an example of gaming a system for a nefarious purposes. I mentioned this simply as contrast, that although the system was indeed gamed, it was done so with humor and without harming anybody in the process.
- criddell 9y agoSo you're saying making Steve Jobs Chinese on Wikipedia is a decent analogy?
- mistercow 9y agoOnly if you legitimately convince people that Steve Jobs is Chinese.
- jhauris 9y agoThis was a single person gaming the system as a hobby with no reward. How well do you think you can trust this system when in reality there are restaurants with a real financial incentive and the ability to invest?
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoThis has been pointed out elsewhere, but most security is based on the principle of rational actors. To defend against amateurs, hobbyists, and insane people working without an understandable motivation is often MORE difficult, not less.
- beal 9y agoI think the point is that if the system is based on trust, you can't necessarily trust the system.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chatmasta 9y agoReally cool story, but he never mentioned where he got the fake reviews that propelled him to #1 in the first place. There was one mention of the original “celebrity” endorsement, but what about all the reviews thereafter? Where did those come from?
- dgritsko 9y agoAt the end of the section you referenced, regarding endorsements: > So I contact friends and acquaintances, and put them to work. I think that's all there is to it.
- grahamel 9y ago> Reviews written by real people on different computers, so the anti-scammer technology TripAdvisor utilises doesn't pick up on my hoax. It gets a little lost in the article but this and the above quote is all they did for the reviews
- chatmasta 9y agoSo he has thousands of friends and acquaintances? Or did each leave multiple reviews?
- grahamel 9y agoThe screengrab[1] in the article show's only 96 reviews when the restaurant got to #1 [1] https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1512580232417-no1edit.png?resize=916:* https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1512580232417-n... (edited to update the image and review count)
- speps 9y ago> UPDATE 6/12/17, 17:12: After an eagle-eyed reader spotted that each mocked-up TripAdvisor screen shot contained the same number of reviews, we have edited the images so that the number of reviews match those in the actual screen shots and replaced two of the images.
- coldcode 9y agoEven funnier when he actually served food and people wanted to return.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago>The representative adds that "most fraudsters are only interested in trying to manipulate the rankings of real businesses", so the "distinction between attempted fraud by a real business, as opposed to attempted fraud for a non-existent business, is important". To catch these people out, TripAdvisor uses "state-of-the-art technology to identify suspicious review patterns" and says, "Our community too can report suspicious activity to us." They then quote a 2015 study that found "93 percent of TripAdvisor users said they find the reviews they read to be accurate of the actual experience". If TripAdvisor can't catch out a restaurant which is entirely a farce how can they pretend they're catching out real businesses who might be nudging their results up a bit?
- ivanbakel 9y agoThere could be a difference between a human-manipulated restaurant which still has some real business and a totally fake restaurant which can be manipulated however you like. Thinking along the lines of something I read on HN recently, using Benford's Law[1] to catch fraud in accounting data - the essential principle is that fraudsters are constrained by some unmassagable numbers, like the monthy total or some important transactions, so the figures they do change end up altering the overall distribution in some unrealistic way. But if you can generate your own dataset (and make sure it follows Bendford's), that fraud marker disappears. TripAdvisor might be able to detect when your restaurant is behaving very different to how it's expected to, based on some past or present data - but there's less indication something has gone wrong if you just create a new restaurant out of thin air that behaves totally consistently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoOr their fraud detection is just not very good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
- ivanbakel 9y agoBut the question wasn't "why did TripAdvisor not catch this restaurant?", it was "why might a good fraud detection system not catch this restaurant?", because an answer to the second question is required for TripAdvisor to be able to claim that its system is any good.
- peterwwillis 9y agoVice is what you get when you combine journalism, capitalism, and navel-gazing college dropouts with no skills and lots of ambition. It's Tumblr for Medium. It would be beautiful, if it weren't so blatantly terrible. In a world where where startups with good ideas, talented people and lots of cash fail regularly, these witless wonders turn garbage into viral gold. Kudos to them.
- sincerely 9y agoI respect your bittnerness towards the world, but Vice is no different than any of the other businesses that use easily accessible , low effort content to subsidize their high effort work (for instance: Vice uses articles like “I did everything Siri told me to for a week” to subsidize their video work, Buzzfeed uses listicles to support their genuinely good longform journalism, and Comme des Garçons uses the extremely boring “Play” sublabel to subsidize their avant-garde, expensive runway shows)
- jknoepfler 9y agoIt's a funny article highlighting a cute hole in TripAdvisor's ranking system. TripAdvisor isn't being vile our misleading when they say they don't try to catch fictitious restaurants.There were no real, negative reviews of the restaurant, so it remained a perfect five with all very plausibly real reviews. What they should worry about is detecting fake positive and negative reviews of real restaurants, which can cause businesses and diners a lot of pain and diminish the value of TripAdvisor. Kudos to the author for "hacking" the ranking system in an unexpected way! I wonder if they caught any fake negative reviews of the shed, jealous of its #1 spot...
- pascalxus 9y agoA true entrepreneur. Bringing, sell first and build it later, to a whole new level.
- fasteddie 9y agoSimilar to this, a few years back my then-roommates and I created a fake restaurant at our apartment, named after the nickname we gave to our kitchen. It was meant to be our own inside joke and we gave it a couple reviews ourselves. The 4.5 star review caused us to get some walkup traffic, at which point we thought it was too real and canceled the experiment, although the page is still live if you link to it through our review history. The best was a group of young 20 somethings who showed up and were really good-natured about the joke, so we invited them up for a beer and they dropped us a 5-star review.
- jonny_eh 9y agoI can imagine someone turning this into a heart-warming film.
- vxNsr 9y ago>UPDATE 6/12/17, 17:12: After an eagle-eyed reader spotted that each mocked-up TripAdvisor screen shot contained the same number of reviews, we have edited the images so that the number of reviews match those in the actual screen shots and replaced two of the images. Wait so the whole article is fake?
- mattmillr 9y agoGoogle cache at #263: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V5owX06IiVUJ:https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g186338-d12396027-Reviews-The_Shed_At_Dulwich-London_England.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V5owX0...
- smsm42 9y agoNo, what they are saying is that pictures that look like TripAdvisor screenshots in the article are not real screenshots of TripAdvisor site, but mockups re-created by the author. I guess this is for copyright reasons, since TripAdvisor could plausibly claim copyright on the actual content of the site, and given that the author is messing with them, it's best not to be legally exposed.
- erickhill 9y agoThe foot/egg shot nearly made me spew my beverage onto my monitor from laughing.
- handbanana 9y agoEpic. Tripadvisor is terrible for vetting places, so are google reviews, and facebook reviews. Tripadvisor is big in the UK, more reliable review sites like yelp don't have the adoption yet. Hopefully articles like this start to change that
- jdavis703 9y agoFake restaurants aren't only a thing bored journalists create. I went to a pop-up restaurant at a vegetarian food festival. The food and drinks were so bland and terrible I can only imagine the man running the place was a scammer. For example he was selling a "rasberry lemonade" in a beautiful glass jug with fresh rasberry and lemon slices floating at the top. It looked delicious. The only problem was the lemonade had been diluted by about 100:1 so it was effectively over-priced water. The fake "meat" was so terrible, he might as well should've just sold the ingredients he made the meal with. After loosing $14 on this meal I could only conclude this man just travels around with his fake vegetarian restaurant scamming people.
- dragonwriter 9y agoYou are confusing “fake” with “low quality”.
- jdavis703 9y agoNo, I've been to low-quality, poorly run restaurants. This is like calling "fake news" low-quality news.
- jccooper 9y agoI'm astonished a new entrant was able to make any dent at all. Mostly it's impossible for newer or smaller entries to break into the top. They must have some velocity weight that The Shed exploited. All the social review sites have become review-farming contests, which makes them unreliable on the consumer side and frustrating on the producer side, and I don't know if that can be fixed. Yelp seems to do the best (at the cost of discouraging a lot of legitimate users by making their reviews disappear), but even so is not particularly good. I think a curated review program, perhaps with a taste-matching algorithm like Netflix, could work much better... if the economics can be worked out.
- zeep 9y agothat's not hard, they just let anyone rate stuff... just like Amazon/Google/etc does... One day, you might get sued for doing it though...
- tmaly 9y agoI think trust is still a very challenging problem to solve in the online realm. Even if you can solve it, these types of things still have a very subjective nature to them.
- sjclemmy 9y agoI haven’t laughed so much at one of these since p-p-p-PowerBook [0] 0: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1016390 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=10...
- Udik 9y agoI saw the pics of the 15 years old mock computer that was sent to the scammers, and the first thing that came to my mind is: if the scammers had kept it, they could make good money reselling it now as a piece of internet lore. I guess the internet has corrupted us :).