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Do you remember how people used to ship blocks of ice a century ago? It was a massive industry. Thousands of pounds shipped over thousands of miles of water.
by DantesKite 7y ago
Do you remember how people used to ship blocks of ice a century ago? It was a massive industry.
Thousands of pounds shipped over thousands of miles of water. A miracle for its time. The improvements in food storage that came afterward were nothing short of a marvel. The ability to preserve food, to hold it in statis; it bought people time to ship and eat food (a very precious commodity indeed).
Looking back now and it seems strange. So much effort for so little gain, relative to what we're capable of doing now. Plug in a refrigerator and you're done. Ice cold for a lifetime.
There's still a lot of effort going on, but much of it is hidden—a landscape of electrical grids, mathematics, steel and gold mined from the Earth to create the technology in our kitchens.
Most people probably didn't even know things could be much better; that's all they ever knew. The leap to refrigeration was by no means an easy or obvious one. And it seemed to happened slowly as the infrastructure was slowly built up bit by bit over the course of a few decades.
Review systems remind me of the ice shipping industry: A marvel for its time, but only for its time. The ability to filter information about locations and products; to make informed choices by aggregating a large set of human opinions is remarkable. You can make choices about things you've never experienced, across a wide variety of domains: Amazon, Airbnb, the App Store, Shopify, Google Play.
But it's slow. It's tedious and subject to error. It's easy to miss great insights. It's the lowest common denominator for gaining information about a product, subject to manipulation and noise.
Nowadays, whenever I go on a 5-star review website, I'm thankful for the information when I can get it, but I always wonder when my refrigerator is going to arrive.
- lisper 7y agoNowhere is this more evident than when you want to do comparison shopping on an expensive product like a camera or a car. I am actually in the market for a new car right now. I know pretty much what I want. But trying to figure out which product is the best fit for what I want is a nightmare. I go on a manufacturer's web site and it's all marketing. Trying to extract technical details is a chore, and trying to figure out the actual differences between different models and trim lines can range from a nightmare to downright impossible.
- dawnerd 7y agoWith car shopping I’ve always hunted down fan forums. There you can usually find out if there’s any issues and whatnot - and even sometimes when deals are about to happen.
- Agenttin 7y agoI just tack reddit on to the end of every search.
- basch 7y agoCars (and cameras) are even more complicated because of prestige and reputation influencing price so greatly. Hyundai and Buick end up as two of the best values right now because nobody wants a used Buick. Cameras have a similar but different thing going on where most people think they need a "DSLR" to take professional pictures, and they buy something three times as big as they need because they dont want to "downgrade" to a mirrorless. Obviously branding and status play a factor in many purchases, but the larger ecosystem / maintenance agreement ones are a different magnitude. Buying a camera is buying into a camera ecosystem, and buying a car is both a product and its serviceability. The Buick can be greatly reliable, but if its perception is that of something less reliable, you pay for perception not reality.
- andrewblossom 7y agoWhen trying to discern the details between trim levels, I've found looking for actual PDF brochures for that model year is the best route (something like this: https://cdn.dealereprocess.org/cdn/brochures/mazda/2020-mazda3.pdf https://cdn.dealereprocess.org/cdn/brochures/mazda/2020-mazd...). Nearly every vehicle brochure I've found has a table outlining what is included with different packages and trim levels.
- anthonypasq 7y agoThis is why professional reviewers and critics exist.
- allovernow 7y agoThis has been my experience with any complex product. All our media is regressing to the layman's mean. Why bother posting technical specs and information if 90%+ of your customers won't bother looking at them? Frankly it makes us all dumber.
- daseiner1 7y agoi absolutely love this comment, you’ve got a great writing style
- volkk 7y agoreminds me of joe from halt and catch fire
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SilasX 7y agoThen maybe you can clarify what its actual insight is? I still don't understand how ice shipping is analogous to reviews, or what the common dynamic is. Simply expressing that [1] got me 30 net upvotes and no attempts to explain. I think a more reasonable hypothesis is that the comment is fluff -- it doesn't communicate anything relevant but somehow makes you feel you learned something and changed your mind. That is not what I want to see more of on HN. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507740
- baddox 7y agoCan you think of some innovation that might replace review systems in the same way that refrigeration replaced ice transportation? This seems more like a cycle where review systems will be nice until they inevitably get gamed, at which point some new company will come out with expertly-curated reviews and recommendations, but then that company will sell out and compromise their curation, at which point the new crowd-sourced review website will take over. Ad infinitum. I suppose you can come up with ideas like AI curation or spam prevention, or some decentralized reputation system. Those sound pretty wild, but hey, I reckon refrigeration would have sounded pretty wild too.
- zyang 7y agoThere needs to be an independent outsider that can give uniform and unbiased reviews. i.e. Michelin reviews for airbnb. Question is how many people are willing to pay for these.
- SilasX 7y agoIsn’t that Consumer Reports? Although Airbnb listings are too extensive for them to independently review. Edit: I suppose they could step in and evaluate it as a platform and validate whether issues get addressed.
- amelius 7y agoYou could imagine a network of trust, where some people have more trust than others. And there could be clusters where people with a lot of trust are not necessarily trusted by everyone. So this would be more general than a central authority like Michelin.
- saurik 7y agoShipping ice was inefficient, but it worked: it actively provided the same benefit as refrigeration later did and it didn't have an "adversary" (as in, people or food that were actively undermining it). In contrast, the research on five star rating systems is that, mathematically, they don't work (as no one is using scales that are compatible, you cannot do algebra on the values to get an "average"). Meanwhile, they are actively gamed, and so can be worse than noise, making people believe something harmful. If you want a better analogy, it is like a bunch of people relying on some combination of apple cider vinegar (which might do something, or might not, but may as well try it), snake oil (which definitely does nothing, but is claimed to do everything), and garlic (which does something, just not that well, but is often placebo effect) in an industry already attempting to indiscriminately deploy antibiotics (which works, but only temporarily, as once an infection adapts it is all downsides and no upsides)... and no one is even sure if a cure is possible. Ice works, we knew it worked, we knew why it worked, and all we needed was more engineering to make it efficient and scalable (by eventually figuring out how to simulate ice using carbon, chemicals, and metals): don't pretend for a second that rating systems have anything in common with something that worked.
- nkingsy 7y agoIce keeps things cold, and someone has to keep bringing new blocks of it to your icebox somehow. Reviews are free data, and you have to know how to navigate them. I don't see the difference.
- gruez 7y agoRight, but with ice, the mechanics are pretty simple: heat gets in and warms stuff up, and its behavior is predictable. OTOH, reviews are "free data", but you don't know whether it's a real review or a fake review. If you decide incorrectly (eg. believing the fake reviews over the real ones), you would end up in a worse position than you started out with.
- pjc50 7y agoIce is not an adversary. If reviews, or any post-review substitute technology, become the thing that helps imperfect humans make decisions, then that becomes the target for attack by misinformation. If reviews drive business, then so do fake reviews. Reviews are valuable, so there's a market in reviews. > You can make choices about things you've never experienced, across a wide variety of domains: Amazon, Airbnb, the App Store, Shopify, Google Play. Reviews steer hundreds to thousands of dollars of spending from every consumer. Nothing that valuable can be allowed to remain authentic.
- amelius 7y agoPerhaps this future review system could be used for voting in elections, or perhaps even for fair wealth distribution.
- SilasX 7y agoI have no idea what the analogy is supposed to be here or what the insight is.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]