7 ms·

The Problem with Feedback

81 points by JeanMarcS 8y ago

jasonshen 8y ago
This is a frustrating piece to read as a startup founder and product manager because I don't think the author understand how much companies already do think about the things established in the piece. > "If thumbs-ups or ratings on a five-point scale are not automatically useful, what kind of feedback would be? Finely tuned feedback that targets the system it’s meant to regulate will always surpass a barrage of angry or ecstatic reviews. Rather than trumpeting the desirability of all feedback, apps and review sites should pursue only the information that is crucial for making the system work better." It's hard to know what data points correlate to making the system work better until after the fact — so developers generally have to "over ask" so you can back test data to outcomes. Probably the best criticism of the proliferation around feedback is that it doesn't always make the customer's experience better, it just creates better conditions for the company to make more money.
- safsexisgoodsex 8y ago
  I think the author's point is much more around intent. Asking for feedback is one thing. Having a plan in place to do something with it is another. It's so easy to bake in a feedback loop but that doesn't translate to any actual change. NPS is popular not because it's necessarily useful, but because it's easy to understand and track. I worked in market research for years and our NPS remained flat because we didn't have the right means of sharing and implementing the feedback we gathered. The same themes came up over and over again over the years and yet we never changed our actual product. This is the point the author is touching on.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  re: "doesn't always make the customer's experience better," Does it really if it does? Or is people __believing__ it does good enough? If your comfortable with the latter then such feedback will create confirmation bias. Which the product dev team (also being human) is also going to fall victim to.
- taeric 8y ago
  "back test data to outcomes" sounds scarily like p-hacking. That is, it seems highly likely you will still not find anything actually meaningful. You are just guaranteeing that you will be able to find something. This is especially true if you have retention numbers, already. Why bother asking if I was happy with a purchase, if I never buy again anyway. Note that I am sympathetic. There is every chance that I will buy something again simply because the exit survey reminded me of your existence. There is also the chance having an exit survey will make me not want to come back. :)
  - stuartaxelowen 8y ago
    Not so - the business is looking for real ROI, and thus will not be satisfied with topics that are "in the noise". Also, you create the measurement that establishes a problem before you apply the treatment (create new feature X or fix bug Y), and then verify after treatment that the desired affect was achieved.
    - taeric 8y ago
      If you are scanning historic data looking for correlations, you will almost certainly fall for some of the same traps that are common in p hacking. Now, can you mitigate some by carefully doing an experiment again? Certainly. But you should also not constrain experiments to only things to have been measuring already.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  The more questions you ask on a survey, the more the results tend to be garbage. Either people will give up on it, or they'll fill in everything with the same value.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
"Think about it: The proliferation of ratings systems doesn’t necessarily produce a better restaurant or hotel experience. Instead, it homogenizes the offerings, as people all go to the same top-rated establishments. Those places garner ever more reviews, bouncing them even farther up the list of results. Rather than a quality check, feedback here becomes a means to bland sameness." The problem is, these rating lack context. Consider a pop song with a gazillion streams on YouTube. How many of those were "unemployed" 15 year olds pretending to be sick and staying home from school? Without some sense of context those gazillion likes have little meaning. And of course, baring some drastically awful experience, there's confirmation bias. The truth is most people aren't objective enough to admit they might have made a bad choice. Of course it was the best ____ ever! It was my ____. I bought it. Even so, there are always idiots who will order pizza at a place that specializes in curry, or curry from a place that does Mexican. Yes, it's on the menu. But that's doesn't mean you should order it and then complain about it.
a13n 8y ago
I've been working on a startup in the user feedback space [1] full-time for the past 3.5 years, and love to see the topic of user feedback on Hacker News. Uber doesn't want your feedback because they care about your ideas/opinions. They want it because it's critical to their business. Put yourself in their shoes. They have 75 million users and 3 million drivers. A critical part of growth is retention: not bleeding the existing user base you have, by offering a quality service. So how do they identify undesirable drivers to maintain the safety and quality of their service? And in a scalable way... You ask users to give drivers a review out of 5 stars. Chances are, if multiple people give a driver 1 star, others will too. It's a pretty good proxy for driver quality. I can definitely see how this feels "dehumanizing" and like you're a "cog in the system". You are a cog in the system. You're a cog in their automated system for keeping their service safe and high quality. There are different kinds of user feedback, for different reasons. One kind is user interviews, where you want to hear people's ideas and opinions for how you can do better. This is pretty human. Reviews are pretty automated, and just a different kind of "feedback". If you run a consumer company (as opposed to B2B), it isn't practical to conduct user interviews on even 1% of your entire user base. So it isn't surprising that giving feedback to consumer companies tends to be a pretty negative experience. [1] https://canny.io https://canny.io [2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/
- fipple 8y ago
  I want to be a cog in 95% of my interactions. I only try to extract meaning from a few of my relationships.
- iaabtpbtpnn 8y ago
  I give Uber drivers 5 stars unless they did something egregiously horrible, because I know that if I give 4 stars, and enough people do the same, that driver will be banned from the platform, even though most people would say that 4 out of 5 ain't bad. Similarly, if I ever actually take the time to fill out a receipt survey from a retail store, I just give full marks across the board, because I know that otherwise some poor underpaid single mom is gonna have to "be accountable" for my responses to an uncaring corporate drone. On the other hand, a person giving a 1 to an Uber driver or bad marks across the board on a retail survey is probably unduly pissed off, and upon further reflection (or exposure to the consequences of their score) even they might not agree they suffered a truly 1-worthy experience. So my question to you is, how do you distinguish signal from noise?
gumby 8y ago
This is why Netflix eliminated the star ratings -- it was too hard to figure out the degree of difference inherent in four vs 5 stars, plus it was a manual step. And to the author: kybernetes (κυβερνήτης) is the steersman of a boat, not a governor.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  If you want a counterexample though, Goodreads seems to work really well with a five star rating system. Goodreads reviewers in particular seem to take the precise number of stars quite seriously, and many reviews include a line like "I really wish I could give this book 2.5 stars, but GoodReads won't let me, so I had to round up/down." I've wondered before if this says something about heavy book readers as a population, since the five star rating system doesn't seem to work that well anywhere else outside of professional critical reviews.
orev 8y ago
One issue I have is when feedback is clearly being collected with intent to manipulate, like with a cable company. They ask you to specifically rate the individual person, and you know that the person sitting in a call center all day might lose their job because of a bad rating. You might give a good rating even if you had bad service (or at least you’ll give a 5 instead of a 3). Then the company turns around and advertises that they have the best customer satisfaction ratings, etc. when in reality everyone hates them, but doesn’t want to blame it on the poor person stuck in the call center.
- maroonblazer 8y ago
  >and you know that the person sitting in a call center all day might lose their job because of a bad rating. It's more likely they'd lose their job if they consistently receive bad ratings, from several different customers. And they should. Given how much it costs to bring on new employees it's more likely that one bad review results in a consultation, additional training, etc.
  - rcw4256 8y ago
    > And they should. Until we have UBI, or a functioning safety net that universally guarantees shelter and food, this is false.
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    Given the economic situation of call center employees, nobody deserves a good service to be honest. I don't swallow the cost excuse because we wouldn't see that much fluctuation in jobs like these if true.
  - Sir_Substance 8y ago
    I don't like getting bad customer service, but I don't dislike it so much that I'm able to discard my empathy and say someone "should" be fired. I picture myself being let go from my job, I begin to feel the stress of doing the first inkling of planning that would be needed to survive that, and I decide that I didn't have such a bad time that I feel like pressing that one-star button, so I just close the feedback page instead. I wouldn't want people to rate me one-star, so I don't rate other people one-star.
stuartaxelowen 8y ago
I think the author has it wrong, what the author sees as a "barrage of angry or ecstatic reviews" is actually a rich array of personal experiences waiting to be interpreted. Traditionally, this interpretation has been done wholly by humans, and was a long and laborious task. However, we can now do much of the manual work with NLP [1] - discovering topics of concern and measuring the prevalence and sentiment. This lets us ask the dataset useful questions, like "What issue is angering customers most?", and "What features should we be talking more about?" It's a move towards a much, much wider sampling of customer experiences (compared to focus groups), and I think it should be celebrated for empowering companies to make products/services that consumers really, really like. [1] https://taggit.io https://taggit.io
mark-r 8y ago
I have trouble completing those surveys - I want to be fair and accurate, but it's simply not possible with subjective impressions and no guidelines. Life is too short for such angst; I generally refuse surveys when they're presented without a second thought.
iambateman 8y ago
Whenever I ask for feedback with friends, I say “on a scale of 1-7” which has the effect of being both a tad off-putting and rather memorable. Assuming I care how they respond, there are a few benefits: - people are conditioned to rate at the extremities with a 10-point scale, whereas they tend to use the whole spectrum more when the scale is reduced to seven points. - most people don’t realize that “1-10” has no true middle number. On the other hand, 4/7 is perfectly “in the middle”. - if you believe psychologists, the average persons working memory is “7, +/-2” items. In my opinion, the brain seems to treat the “2” and “3” responses on a 10-point scale as roughly indistinguishable. There is similar haziness between “6” and “7”. The average person seems more capable of making distinctions across seven points. Anyway, when you’re asking for feedback (and not on a first date), consider the seven-point scale!
- brianmcc 8y ago
  Curious about why you ask for feedback with friends? Do you mean to get a rating of a movie or restaurant or something - or are you looking for feedback on your friendship performance! :-)
  - iambateman 8y ago
    Baha good question. Movies and restaurants is it. I don’t frequently ask friends to rate their interactions with me. ;) Perhaps I should.
robocat 8y ago
Some places want you to rate the employee (e.g. 1 to 5 stars at touchpad at checkout, or at toilet exit at airport in some countries). Just about every time I want to rate the employee as a 5, and the company (or management?) at a low rating because the business has obviously been the one to screw up, not the employee. Asking to rate an employee is a sign to me that the company service is poor.
- tapland 8y ago
  Also, they hired the employee and should be around enough to be able to evaluate if the employee is doing what they want.
lotusko 8y ago
adjust loop
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Cybernetics didn't fail expectations. It works astonishingly well. But it seems people had some pretty weird and dumb expectations when lifting it from the domain of hardware and into more "fuzzy" real-world systems. Feedback loops are an incredibly powerful tool, but they get misused (often purposefully), and then the blame for that misuse somehow falls on the feedback system. Consider: 1) As a user, won't be satisfied with a feedback system if the company on the other end is evil. Take Uber as an example. The tension between drivers and passengers isn't caused by the 5-star rating itself. It has another critical component - that Uber set the system to squeeze out as much value out of drivers as possible. Since they essentially optimize for bad driver treatment, drivers get defensive, and this screws up user experience. Hitting with 1-stars until morale improves isn't the solution; not exploiting people is. Similar thing happens in some customer service interactions, where rating is - again - not a signal on quality, but on whether or not I hate the other person enough to want them to lose their job. 2) A rating system won't work for you if you connect it to a money-printing machine. This one should have been obvious immediately, and definitely should be by now. This is why Amazon, eBay, Yelp, et al. have problems with reviews. As long as their presence or absence impacts immediate sales, they'll be gamed to the point of uselessness. 3) Some companies like to deploy ratings to skip doing the work, and then they cry foul when the results don't materialize. Again, Uber won't solve driver problems with star ratings; that would require actually meeting and evaluating people. I can hear the screams - "but that doesn't scale!". So what. I want to go to the Moon by lifting myself by my own bootstraps, but I can't, because that's not how physics works. I'm not going to cry that I can't get what I want without doing the work that's necessary to get it. 4) Feedback loops must be actually closed for them to work. I.e. not just collecting the data, but acting on it. 5) If you can't capture the entirety of your vision in directly measurable metrics (and you probably can't), then don't follow them blindly. In particular, be mindful of what you actually measure, 'lest you end up pissing off a lot of users and defending yourself with "data told me so". "You make what you measure" works both ways. -- TL;DR: Blame the people/companies deploying feedback systems for being clueless or having malicious intent, not the feedback systems themselves for simply working the way they work.
MrQuincle 8y ago
One feedback loop for the customer might be insight in what type of other customers like a place. I actually might visit a place if I know that a particular group of people strongly dislikes it. People have different tastes and a review system might account for that. It would require people to fill in a few questions about themselves. Or it needs cross-referenced with Facebook likes or something like that. This information can belong to the people!
- dsamarin 8y ago
  Can we identify groups of people by similar interests and personality type and classify them with a label? It doesn't seem like it would promote inclusivity and diversity among people with disparate interests since we are all "equal" but it would be very helpful for this use case. We can create labels by having people self identify who they think they are. U.S. Patent Pending

81 points by JeanMarcS 8y ago

This is a frustrating piece to read as a startup founder and product manager because I don't think the author understand how much companies already do think about the things established in the piece. > "If thumbs-ups or ratings on a five-point scale are not automatically useful, what kind of feedback would be? Finely tuned feedback that targets the system it’s meant to regulate will always surpass a barrage of angry or ecstatic reviews. Rather than trumpeting the desirability of all feedback, apps and review sites should pursue only the information that is crucial for making the system work better." It's hard to know what data points correlate to making the system work better until after the fact — so developers generally have to "over ask" so you can back test data to outcomes. Probably the best criticism of the proliferation around feedback is that it doesn't always make the customer's experience better, it just creates better conditions for the company to make more money.

safsexisgoodsex 8y ago
I think the author's point is much more around intent. Asking for feedback is one thing. Having a plan in place to do something with it is another. It's so easy to bake in a feedback loop but that doesn't translate to any actual change. NPS is popular not because it's necessarily useful, but because it's easy to understand and track. I worked in market research for years and our NPS remained flat because we didn't have the right means of sharing and implementing the feedback we gathered. The same themes came up over and over again over the years and yet we never changed our actual product. This is the point the author is touching on.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
re: "doesn't always make the customer's experience better," Does it really if it does? Or is people __believing__ it does good enough? If your comfortable with the latter then such feedback will create confirmation bias. Which the product dev team (also being human) is also going to fall victim to.
taeric 8y ago
"back test data to outcomes" sounds scarily like p-hacking. That is, it seems highly likely you will still not find anything actually meaningful. You are just guaranteeing that you will be able to find something. This is especially true if you have retention numbers, already. Why bother asking if I was happy with a purchase, if I never buy again anyway. Note that I am sympathetic. There is every chance that I will buy something again simply because the exit survey reminded me of your existence. There is also the chance having an exit survey will make me not want to come back. :)
- stuartaxelowen 8y ago
  Not so - the business is looking for real ROI, and thus will not be satisfied with topics that are "in the noise". Also, you create the measurement that establishes a problem before you apply the treatment (create new feature X or fix bug Y), and then verify after treatment that the desired affect was achieved.
  - taeric 8y ago
    If you are scanning historic data looking for correlations, you will almost certainly fall for some of the same traps that are common in p hacking. Now, can you mitigate some by carefully doing an experiment again? Certainly. But you should also not constrain experiments to only things to have been measuring already.
nitwit005 8y ago
The more questions you ask on a survey, the more the results tend to be garbage. Either people will give up on it, or they'll fill in everything with the same value.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

"Think about it: The proliferation of ratings systems doesn’t necessarily produce a better restaurant or hotel experience. Instead, it homogenizes the offerings, as people all go to the same top-rated establishments. Those places garner ever more reviews, bouncing them even farther up the list of results. Rather than a quality check, feedback here becomes a means to bland sameness." The problem is, these rating lack context. Consider a pop song with a gazillion streams on YouTube. How many of those were "unemployed" 15 year olds pretending to be sick and staying home from school? Without some sense of context those gazillion likes have little meaning. And of course, baring some drastically awful experience, there's confirmation bias. The truth is most people aren't objective enough to admit they might have made a bad choice. Of course it was the best ____ ever! It was my ____. I bought it. Even so, there are always idiots who will order pizza at a place that specializes in curry, or curry from a place that does Mexican. Yes, it's on the menu. But that's doesn't mean you should order it and then complain about it.

a13n 8y ago

I've been working on a startup in the user feedback space [1] full-time for the past 3.5 years, and love to see the topic of user feedback on Hacker News. Uber doesn't want your feedback because they care about your ideas/opinions. They want it because it's critical to their business. Put yourself in their shoes. They have 75 million users and 3 million drivers. A critical part of growth is retention: not bleeding the existing user base you have, by offering a quality service. So how do they identify undesirable drivers to maintain the safety and quality of their service? And in a scalable way... You ask users to give drivers a review out of 5 stars. Chances are, if multiple people give a driver 1 star, others will too. It's a pretty good proxy for driver quality. I can definitely see how this feels "dehumanizing" and like you're a "cog in the system". You are a cog in the system. You're a cog in their automated system for keeping their service safe and high quality. There are different kinds of user feedback, for different reasons. One kind is user interviews, where you want to hear people's ideas and opinions for how you can do better. This is pretty human. Reviews are pretty automated, and just a different kind of "feedback". If you run a consumer company (as opposed to B2B), it isn't practical to conduct user interviews on even 1% of your entire user base. So it isn't surprising that giving feedback to consumer companies tends to be a pretty negative experience. [1] https://canny.io https://canny.io [2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/

fipple 8y ago
I want to be a cog in 95% of my interactions. I only try to extract meaning from a few of my relationships.
iaabtpbtpnn 8y ago
I give Uber drivers 5 stars unless they did something egregiously horrible, because I know that if I give 4 stars, and enough people do the same, that driver will be banned from the platform, even though most people would say that 4 out of 5 ain't bad. Similarly, if I ever actually take the time to fill out a receipt survey from a retail store, I just give full marks across the board, because I know that otherwise some poor underpaid single mom is gonna have to "be accountable" for my responses to an uncaring corporate drone. On the other hand, a person giving a 1 to an Uber driver or bad marks across the board on a retail survey is probably unduly pissed off, and upon further reflection (or exposure to the consequences of their score) even they might not agree they suffered a truly 1-worthy experience. So my question to you is, how do you distinguish signal from noise?

gumby 8y ago

This is why Netflix eliminated the star ratings -- it was too hard to figure out the degree of difference inherent in four vs 5 stars, plus it was a manual step. And to the author: kybernetes (κυβερνήτης) is the steersman of a boat, not a governor.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
If you want a counterexample though, Goodreads seems to work really well with a five star rating system. Goodreads reviewers in particular seem to take the precise number of stars quite seriously, and many reviews include a line like "I really wish I could give this book 2.5 stars, but GoodReads won't let me, so I had to round up/down." I've wondered before if this says something about heavy book readers as a population, since the five star rating system doesn't seem to work that well anywhere else outside of professional critical reviews.

orev 8y ago

One issue I have is when feedback is clearly being collected with intent to manipulate, like with a cable company. They ask you to specifically rate the individual person, and you know that the person sitting in a call center all day might lose their job because of a bad rating. You might give a good rating even if you had bad service (or at least you’ll give a 5 instead of a 3). Then the company turns around and advertises that they have the best customer satisfaction ratings, etc. when in reality everyone hates them, but doesn’t want to blame it on the poor person stuck in the call center.

maroonblazer 8y ago
>and you know that the person sitting in a call center all day might lose their job because of a bad rating. It's more likely they'd lose their job if they consistently receive bad ratings, from several different customers. And they should. Given how much it costs to bring on new employees it's more likely that one bad review results in a consultation, additional training, etc.
- rcw4256 8y ago
  > And they should. Until we have UBI, or a functioning safety net that universally guarantees shelter and food, this is false.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Given the economic situation of call center employees, nobody deserves a good service to be honest. I don't swallow the cost excuse because we wouldn't see that much fluctuation in jobs like these if true.
- Sir_Substance 8y ago
  I don't like getting bad customer service, but I don't dislike it so much that I'm able to discard my empathy and say someone "should" be fired. I picture myself being let go from my job, I begin to feel the stress of doing the first inkling of planning that would be needed to survive that, and I decide that I didn't have such a bad time that I feel like pressing that one-star button, so I just close the feedback page instead. I wouldn't want people to rate me one-star, so I don't rate other people one-star.

stuartaxelowen 8y ago

I think the author has it wrong, what the author sees as a "barrage of angry or ecstatic reviews" is actually a rich array of personal experiences waiting to be interpreted. Traditionally, this interpretation has been done wholly by humans, and was a long and laborious task. However, we can now do much of the manual work with NLP [1] - discovering topics of concern and measuring the prevalence and sentiment. This lets us ask the dataset useful questions, like "What issue is angering customers most?", and "What features should we be talking more about?" It's a move towards a much, much wider sampling of customer experiences (compared to focus groups), and I think it should be celebrated for empowering companies to make products/services that consumers really, really like. [1] https://taggit.io https://taggit.io

mark-r 8y ago

I have trouble completing those surveys - I want to be fair and accurate, but it's simply not possible with subjective impressions and no guidelines. Life is too short for such angst; I generally refuse surveys when they're presented without a second thought.

iambateman 8y ago

Whenever I ask for feedback with friends, I say “on a scale of 1-7” which has the effect of being both a tad off-putting and rather memorable. Assuming I care how they respond, there are a few benefits: - people are conditioned to rate at the extremities with a 10-point scale, whereas they tend to use the whole spectrum more when the scale is reduced to seven points. - most people don’t realize that “1-10” has no true middle number. On the other hand, 4/7 is perfectly “in the middle”. - if you believe psychologists, the average persons working memory is “7, +/-2” items. In my opinion, the brain seems to treat the “2” and “3” responses on a 10-point scale as roughly indistinguishable. There is similar haziness between “6” and “7”. The average person seems more capable of making distinctions across seven points. Anyway, when you’re asking for feedback (and not on a first date), consider the seven-point scale!

brianmcc 8y ago
Curious about why you ask for feedback with friends? Do you mean to get a rating of a movie or restaurant or something - or are you looking for feedback on your friendship performance! :-)
- iambateman 8y ago
  Baha good question. Movies and restaurants is it. I don’t frequently ask friends to rate their interactions with me. ;) Perhaps I should.

robocat 8y ago

Some places want you to rate the employee (e.g. 1 to 5 stars at touchpad at checkout, or at toilet exit at airport in some countries). Just about every time I want to rate the employee as a 5, and the company (or management?) at a low rating because the business has obviously been the one to screw up, not the employee. Asking to rate an employee is a sign to me that the company service is poor.

tapland 8y ago
Also, they hired the employee and should be around enough to be able to evaluate if the employee is doing what they want.

lotusko 8y ago

adjust loop

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Cybernetics didn't fail expectations. It works astonishingly well. But it seems people had some pretty weird and dumb expectations when lifting it from the domain of hardware and into more "fuzzy" real-world systems. Feedback loops are an incredibly powerful tool, but they get misused (often purposefully), and then the blame for that misuse somehow falls on the feedback system. Consider: 1) As a user, won't be satisfied with a feedback system if the company on the other end is evil. Take Uber as an example. The tension between drivers and passengers isn't caused by the 5-star rating itself. It has another critical component - that Uber set the system to squeeze out as much value out of drivers as possible. Since they essentially optimize for bad driver treatment, drivers get defensive, and this screws up user experience. Hitting with 1-stars until morale improves isn't the solution; not exploiting people is. Similar thing happens in some customer service interactions, where rating is - again - not a signal on quality, but on whether or not I hate the other person enough to want them to lose their job. 2) A rating system won't work for you if you connect it to a money-printing machine. This one should have been obvious immediately, and definitely should be by now. This is why Amazon, eBay, Yelp, et al. have problems with reviews. As long as their presence or absence impacts immediate sales, they'll be gamed to the point of uselessness. 3) Some companies like to deploy ratings to skip doing the work, and then they cry foul when the results don't materialize. Again, Uber won't solve driver problems with star ratings; that would require actually meeting and evaluating people. I can hear the screams - "but that doesn't scale!". So what. I want to go to the Moon by lifting myself by my own bootstraps, but I can't, because that's not how physics works. I'm not going to cry that I can't get what I want without doing the work that's necessary to get it. 4) Feedback loops must be actually closed for them to work. I.e. not just collecting the data, but acting on it. 5) If you can't capture the entirety of your vision in directly measurable metrics (and you probably can't), then don't follow them blindly. In particular, be mindful of what you actually measure, 'lest you end up pissing off a lot of users and defending yourself with "data told me so". "You make what you measure" works both ways. -- TL;DR: Blame the people/companies deploying feedback systems for being clueless or having malicious intent, not the feedback systems themselves for simply working the way they work.

MrQuincle 8y ago

One feedback loop for the customer might be insight in what type of other customers like a place. I actually might visit a place if I know that a particular group of people strongly dislikes it. People have different tastes and a review system might account for that. It would require people to fill in a few questions about themselves. Or it needs cross-referenced with Facebook likes or something like that. This information can belong to the people!

dsamarin 8y ago
Can we identify groups of people by similar interests and personality type and classify them with a label? It doesn't seem like it would promote inclusivity and diversity among people with disparate interests since we are all "equal" but it would be very helpful for this use case. We can create labels by having people self identify who they think they are. U.S. Patent Pending