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There are so many fake or manipulated reviews across all sites -- Yelp, Amazon, Uber, eBay -- that I just don't trust them anymore. Unfortunately, we are addic

There are so many fake or manipulated reviews across all sites -- Yelp, Amazon, Uber, eBay -- that I just don't trust them anymore. Unfortunately, we are addicted to having someone filter products and services for us, even if they are manipulated. I'm dying for an alternative to the 5-star review, but seems like there's no end in sight.

superhuzza 6y ago
>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.
- Spivak 6y ago
  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”
  - splonk 6y ago
    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.
    - awslattery 6y ago
      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.
      - splonk 6y ago
        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.
  - mNovak 6y ago
    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.
  - basch 6y ago
    You used to be able to do searches like this with facebook graph, right from the search field. "Restaurants liked by people who like x and y and z"
  - rurp 6y ago
    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.
js2 6y ago
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: https://www.yelp.com/biz/yuri-japanese-restaurant-cary https://www.yelp.com/biz/yuri-japanese-restaurant-cary 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. That's a 5-star review. I mean, come on. See also: rotten tomato audience scores.
- koolba 6y ago
  Why is it so hard to get good sushi fish outside of major metros? Doesn’t it all get deep frozen and transported like that anyway?
ErikAugust 6y ago
It's almost like... there's a demand for professional critics. As if, all problems can't be solved by building websites connected to databases. Strange.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  Websites connected to databases of aggregated professional critics works pretty well, for example metacritic.com.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  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.
  - cuddlybacon 6y ago
    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.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      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.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> 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.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Very much this. 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.
- vz8 6y ago
  Fakespot is my go-to for some kind of signal to noise for real vs. fake reviews. Example results include a letter grade, and a few fortune cookies of content like: Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 58.7% of the reviews are reliable. This product had a total of 511 reviews as of our last analysis date on Jul 19 2020.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  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.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Say you're on vacation with a group of friends in a different country/city and looking for a nice restaurant one night. How do you choose where to go?
jay_kyburz 6y ago
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. https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/02/is-it-legal-to-post-a-negative-online-review/ https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/02/is-it-legal-to-post-a-...
lhorie 6y ago
I have two tricks. 1) ignore 1 and 5 star reviews. This filters out the gut reactions, and the 2s and 4s reviews are generally a lot more level-headed and informative 2) pick an area with a good density of restaurants. Just go there and go into whichever is busy
opan 6y ago
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".
ryandrake 6y 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.

superhuzza 6y ago

>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.

Spivak 6y ago
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”
- splonk 6y ago
  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.
  - awslattery 6y ago
    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.
    - splonk 6y ago
      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.
- mNovak 6y ago
  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.
- basch 6y ago
  You used to be able to do searches like this with facebook graph, right from the search field. "Restaurants liked by people who like x and y and z"
- rurp 6y ago
  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.

js2 6y ago

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: https://www.yelp.com/biz/yuri-japanese-restaurant-cary https://www.yelp.com/biz/yuri-japanese-restaurant-cary 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. That's a 5-star review. I mean, come on. See also: rotten tomato audience scores.

koolba 6y ago
Why is it so hard to get good sushi fish outside of major metros? Doesn’t it all get deep frozen and transported like that anyway?

ErikAugust 6y ago

It's almost like... there's a demand for professional critics. As if, all problems can't be solved by building websites connected to databases. Strange.

bosswipe 6y ago
Websites connected to databases of aggregated professional critics works pretty well, for example metacritic.com.
renewiltord 6y ago
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.
- cuddlybacon 6y ago
  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.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    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.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

> 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.

rocqua 6y ago
Very much this. 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.
vz8 6y ago
Fakespot is my go-to for some kind of signal to noise for real vs. fake reviews. Example results include a letter grade, and a few fortune cookies of content like: Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 58.7% of the reviews are reliable. This product had a total of 511 reviews as of our last analysis date on Jul 19 2020.
lopmotr 6y ago
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.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Say you're on vacation with a group of friends in a different country/city and looking for a nice restaurant one night. How do you choose where to go?

jay_kyburz 6y ago

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. https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/02/is-it-legal-to-post-a-negative-online-review/ https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/02/is-it-legal-to-post-a-...

lhorie 6y ago

I have two tricks. 1) ignore 1 and 5 star reviews. This filters out the gut reactions, and the 2s and 4s reviews are generally a lot more level-headed and informative 2) pick an area with a good density of restaurants. Just go there and go into whichever is busy

opan 6y ago

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".

ryandrake 6y 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.