6 ms·

What precisely are you guys doing to ensure review authenticity? This is the number one reason I ignore all reviews all the internet but Yelp.

buckhx 9y ago
On The Infatuation we have staff writers visit a restaurant multiple times and make sure we have our opinion has been as informed as possible. Our biggest problem is scaling that process and we want to use Zagat to help with that via user generated content. We want to take learnings from other UGC platforms to inform the direction we take with Zagat and a big piece of that is authenticity.
- lod723 9y ago
  That didn't answer the question.
- rz2k 9y ago
  Do you have a specific market of consumers you want to target? A while ago there was large thread on Reddit asking anyone who had eaten at the Olive Garden in Times Square, why[1] they had chosen to eat there. There were people who thought it was one of the funniest questions that they'd ever read on /r/askreddit, and people who didn't understand why it was an interesting or funny question. Byant Park Grill is a nearby restaurant that is not a tiny hole in the wall, and the dishes are not that exotic. For context, here are two dishes that are on today's menu at the different restaurants: - Bryant Park Grill[2] $28.50 - Grilled Soy Honey Glazed Atlantic Salmon "stir fried broccoli, snow peas, carrots, roasted potatoes, soy ginger butter sauce" - Olive Garden Times Square $27.79 - Salmon Piccata[3] "Grilled salmon topped with a lemon garlic butter sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and capers. Served with parmesan-crusted zucchini" The prices are not extremely different, the wait times are similar if you show up at the door, and it would be naïve to think that Olive Garden hasn't put a lot of thought and research into exactly how they make their food. I wouldn't be surprised if the diners at Bryant Park Grill are even disappointed in their meals more often than the diners at Olive Garden, but I suppose they also think something is above average more often at Bryant Park Grill and occasionally excellent. The same people at Bryant Park Grill might go to Olive Garden, but it is to bring a group of their summer interns for a celebration or maybe when dining out with elderly family members. When they travel with their own families, they avoid chain restaurants and look for either a generic diner, or a restaurant that has been recommended verbally by a local or someone working at the desk at a hotel. How do people who consider something like the Bryant Park Grill a large restaurant with a safe, but not exceptional menu quickly find the equivalent somewhere like Palo Alto? I feel like asking a dozen people between 30 and 60 would find them all suggesting the same two or three restaurants, but review sites never seem to be able to do this. Instead, sites like Yelp seem to have a lot of reviewers who are talking about themselves as tastemakers, who pride themselves on discovering secret gems, and being offended by something weird at places that have favorable word-of-mouth reputations. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors_who_have_eaten_at_the_times_square/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors... [2] http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ [3] https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028 https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028
  - eitally 9y ago
    Thank you for so clearly articulating an extremely common problem.
    - rz2k 9y ago
      It seems like an unusual problem. Zagat reviewers[1] were volunteers, but they remained anonymous so there was little opportunity to promote themselves. If I remember people seemed motivated by getting a guide sent to them and feeling like they were part of an in group. I don't know what would work now to avoid fake reviews and reviews promoting the reviewers. It would be interesting to see what happened if it were limited to a subset of people who used OpenTable for minimum number of reservations per year or some other metric, and then was based on a Keynesian Beauty Contest[1], where a consensus is divined by reviewers earning prizes for correctly guessing which restaurants other reviewers like. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=CfS7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=zagat+reviews https://books.google.com/books?id=CfS7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=P...
magnetic 9y ago
What is it about Yelp that makes you trust them?
majos 9y ago
Really? I find even Yelp reviews low quality in general, so I use older methods (food forums like Chowhound or eGullet, some bloggers I'm familiar with, sometimes even newspaper critics) to find restaurants. Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher. Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up. Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.
  - azinman2 9y ago
    Disagree. Take El Faro on 1st [1], it’s actually pretty good (their taco dorado al pastor is really good), yet it has a 2.5 rating. It’s also been in business for years, so clearly something else is keeping them alive than their yelp rating. And if you look at individual reviews, there are a bunch of 4 and 5 stars, yet they disappear when scrolling a search list. I’ve also found many 4+ star restaurants entirely overrated and quite mediocre. It’s all about the category and how it fits into the local milieux, which might place emphasis on things you don’t care about or expect (the ambiance sucks at el faro, for example, but it’s a lunchtime tacqueria I could care less). People take away stars from it because it’s cash only. Sorry, but what exactly is it that we’re rating here? That lack of common consensus and the wide disparity between expectations means yelp aggregates aren’t always so useful. I wish they did a better job of showing me the reviews and stars of the things that matter to me, not to the shapeless aggregate. Or at least give me a sense of the distribution to know if there’s more/less contention than normal. [1] https://m.yelp.com/biz/el-faro-san-francisco-3 https://m.yelp.com/biz/el-faro-san-francisco-3
nix0n 9y ago
Yelp's reviews are probably real, but Yelp also throws out a lot of real reviews, and they do this in a way that will skew the star rating up or down depending on whether the business purchases Yelp ads. Yelp is actually still great because they have the only good database of what businesses are open at what times.
- ISL 9y ago
  Google Maps seems to have reliable open/closed times (with histograms).

buckhx 9y ago

On The Infatuation we have staff writers visit a restaurant multiple times and make sure we have our opinion has been as informed as possible. Our biggest problem is scaling that process and we want to use Zagat to help with that via user generated content. We want to take learnings from other UGC platforms to inform the direction we take with Zagat and a big piece of that is authenticity.

lod723 9y ago
That didn't answer the question.
rz2k 9y ago
Do you have a specific market of consumers you want to target? A while ago there was large thread on Reddit asking anyone who had eaten at the Olive Garden in Times Square, why[1] they had chosen to eat there. There were people who thought it was one of the funniest questions that they'd ever read on /r/askreddit, and people who didn't understand why it was an interesting or funny question. Byant Park Grill is a nearby restaurant that is not a tiny hole in the wall, and the dishes are not that exotic. For context, here are two dishes that are on today's menu at the different restaurants: - Bryant Park Grill[2] $28.50 - Grilled Soy Honey Glazed Atlantic Salmon "stir fried broccoli, snow peas, carrots, roasted potatoes, soy ginger butter sauce" - Olive Garden Times Square $27.79 - Salmon Piccata[3] "Grilled salmon topped with a lemon garlic butter sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and capers. Served with parmesan-crusted zucchini" The prices are not extremely different, the wait times are similar if you show up at the door, and it would be naïve to think that Olive Garden hasn't put a lot of thought and research into exactly how they make their food. I wouldn't be surprised if the diners at Bryant Park Grill are even disappointed in their meals more often than the diners at Olive Garden, but I suppose they also think something is above average more often at Bryant Park Grill and occasionally excellent. The same people at Bryant Park Grill might go to Olive Garden, but it is to bring a group of their summer interns for a celebration or maybe when dining out with elderly family members. When they travel with their own families, they avoid chain restaurants and look for either a generic diner, or a restaurant that has been recommended verbally by a local or someone working at the desk at a hotel. How do people who consider something like the Bryant Park Grill a large restaurant with a safe, but not exceptional menu quickly find the equivalent somewhere like Palo Alto? I feel like asking a dozen people between 30 and 60 would find them all suggesting the same two or three restaurants, but review sites never seem to be able to do this. Instead, sites like Yelp seem to have a lot of reviewers who are talking about themselves as tastemakers, who pride themselves on discovering secret gems, and being offended by something weird at places that have favorable word-of-mouth reputations. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors_who_have_eaten_at_the_times_square/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6nod61/redditors... [2] http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ http://bryantparkgrillnyc.com/ [3] https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028 https://www.olivegarden.com/menu/salmon-piccata/prod4040028
- eitally 9y ago
  Thank you for so clearly articulating an extremely common problem.
  - rz2k 9y ago
    It seems like an unusual problem. Zagat reviewers[1] were volunteers, but they remained anonymous so there was little opportunity to promote themselves. If I remember people seemed motivated by getting a guide sent to them and feeling like they were part of an in group. I don't know what would work now to avoid fake reviews and reviews promoting the reviewers. It would be interesting to see what happened if it were limited to a subset of people who used OpenTable for minimum number of reservations per year or some other metric, and then was based on a Keynesian Beauty Contest[1], where a consensus is divined by reviewers earning prizes for correctly guessing which restaurants other reviewers like. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=CfS7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=zagat+reviews https://books.google.com/books?id=CfS7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=P...

magnetic 9y ago

What is it about Yelp that makes you trust them?

majos 9y ago

Really? I find even Yelp reviews low quality in general, so I use older methods (food forums like Chowhound or eGullet, some bloggers I'm familiar with, sometimes even newspaper critics) to find restaurants. Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher. Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.

aphextron 9y ago
>Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up. Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.
- azinman2 9y ago
  Disagree. Take El Faro on 1st [1], it’s actually pretty good (their taco dorado al pastor is really good), yet it has a 2.5 rating. It’s also been in business for years, so clearly something else is keeping them alive than their yelp rating. And if you look at individual reviews, there are a bunch of 4 and 5 stars, yet they disappear when scrolling a search list. I’ve also found many 4+ star restaurants entirely overrated and quite mediocre. It’s all about the category and how it fits into the local milieux, which might place emphasis on things you don’t care about or expect (the ambiance sucks at el faro, for example, but it’s a lunchtime tacqueria I could care less). People take away stars from it because it’s cash only. Sorry, but what exactly is it that we’re rating here? That lack of common consensus and the wide disparity between expectations means yelp aggregates aren’t always so useful. I wish they did a better job of showing me the reviews and stars of the things that matter to me, not to the shapeless aggregate. Or at least give me a sense of the distribution to know if there’s more/less contention than normal. [1] https://m.yelp.com/biz/el-faro-san-francisco-3 https://m.yelp.com/biz/el-faro-san-francisco-3

nix0n 9y ago

Yelp's reviews are probably real, but Yelp also throws out a lot of real reviews, and they do this in a way that will skew the star rating up or down depending on whether the business purchases Yelp ads. Yelp is actually still great because they have the only good database of what businesses are open at what times.

ISL 9y ago
Google Maps seems to have reliable open/closed times (with histograms).