6 ms·

>It doesn't seem like bakers need to worry about Groupon, or Yelp. Is this just a poor example or am I missing something? You're missing the leverage that soft

>It doesn't seem like bakers need to worry about Groupon, or Yelp. Is this just a poor example or am I missing something? You're missing the leverage that software gives you. A bakery that keeps track of its Yelp reputation and works hard to maintain a 5-star rating will attract customers from all over the city. It might even start attracting out-of-towners who are in for a visit. This bakery's "market" is effectively unlimited because in any major city, there are going to be out-of-towners flowing in and out on a regular basis, and some of them will be looking for a bakery. A bakery that doesn't do as well at maintaining a good reputation on Yelp will have its market limited to reach of its advertising and the word-of-mouth of its customers. Now, in a relatively tech-heavy town like San Francisco, that might be fine. If you provide good croissants, you'll get mentions on blogs and Twitter, which would magnify the word of mouth effect in a manner similar to Yelp. But if your customers aren't bloggers or heavy users of social networks? You could have the best bread in the world and not be rewarded commensurately, simply because not enough people know that you have the best bread in the world.

gizzlon 15y ago
"A bakery that keeps track of its Yelp reputation and works hard to maintain a 5-star rating will attract customers.." Never used Yelp, but do you really need a developer to do that? Would think the easiest way to get a good rating would be to hire some people to write good reviews for you and trash the competition. (OT, but I bet sites like that will get less and less useful as more companies start gaming them)
- arctangent 15y ago
  Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived repuation boost. However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will be found out and your repution ruined. Competitors will likely sue. It's probably cheaper and easier to hire a developer who can write tools to monitor reviews posted online, manage a website, run your facebook group/app, write an app to make it easy for customers to order bread from their mobiles, and so on. All of those things are legitimate activities and add genuine value to your business. They are also things that are impossible to achieve if you don't have technical knowledge.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    > > Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the > > competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived > > repuation boost. > > However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will > be found out and your repution ruined. Short of your reviewers deliberately snitching on you, how exactly is anyone ever going to find out? I'd really, sincerely like to know -- as I can't tell which strongly positive or negative reviews on various sites like Amazon, IMDB, etc, are written by hired reviewers and which are real. Of course, I have my suspicions.. but no real proof. And I don't see any way to ever get real proof -- unless the reviewer confesses. So.. what's the secret?
    - arctangent 15y ago
      First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence. Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors. Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analysing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time.
      - gnosis 15y ago
        "First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence." Why would they go public? They're presumably making (what they consider to be) good money writing fake reviews. By going public they'd be 1 - losing their revenue from you, 2 - undermining the public's confidence in reviews, which would translate in to a less lucrative business for the provider of fake reviews. As for blackmail, I'm sure it happens from time to time. But I don't know how to estimate the frequency with which fake reviewers blackmail their clients. What is your basis for estimating the probability of such blackmail as "very likely"? Furthermore, blackmail is an obvious risk for any secret/illegal undertaking, and yet people attempt try to do things in secret and break the law all the time. Clearly, for them the risk seems worth it (at the time). "Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors." So, the fake positive reviews might be staggered over a reasonable period of time. But even the business receives many positive reviews in a short period of time, that's not proof the reviews were fake. "Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analyzing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time." Are there any such services which claim to be able to detect fake reviews? Or is this mere speculation on your part? Regardless, just because some service or algorithm claims a review is fake doesn't mean it is. Once again, their guess/estimate is not proof.
bambax 15y ago
Is there such a thing as "the best bread in the world"? There are "bad breads", or even "mediocre breads", but beyond that, all breads are interesting, each in its own way. I'm not sure I would want to eat the same bread everyday just because it's the "best" one (according to a bunch of Yelp users). I don't think this "winner takes all" analysis really works for food. Let's think about something else outside of food. There is probably such a thing as "the world's best laundry service", but do I care? I won't drive ten miles (or even 1 mile) to find a better laundry service, be it marginally better or even incredibly better, if the one that's nearest me is affordable and good enough. I will never know they exist because I won't look for them. So I'm not sure "winner takes all" works for proximity services in general. That's not to say that technology cannot disrupt those markets; someone could build a machine that lets people cook incredible bread in the house (it's been tried, and failed miserably up to now, but that doesn't mean it can't happen). But the whole "bakers need to become experts at managing their online social reputation" line of reasoning strikes me as misguided and, frankly, the root of a lot of evil in modern society. I'd rather patronize bakers who are experts at baking. There are many of them.

gizzlon 15y ago

"A bakery that keeps track of its Yelp reputation and works hard to maintain a 5-star rating will attract customers.." Never used Yelp, but do you really need a developer to do that? Would think the easiest way to get a good rating would be to hire some people to write good reviews for you and trash the competition. (OT, but I bet sites like that will get less and less useful as more companies start gaming them)

arctangent 15y ago
Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived repuation boost. However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will be found out and your repution ruined. Competitors will likely sue. It's probably cheaper and easier to hire a developer who can write tools to monitor reviews posted online, manage a website, run your facebook group/app, write an app to make it easy for customers to order bread from their mobiles, and so on. All of those things are legitimate activities and add genuine value to your business. They are also things that are impossible to achieve if you don't have technical knowledge.
- gnosis 15y ago
  > > Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the > > competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived > > repuation boost. > > However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will > be found out and your repution ruined. Short of your reviewers deliberately snitching on you, how exactly is anyone ever going to find out? I'd really, sincerely like to know -- as I can't tell which strongly positive or negative reviews on various sites like Amazon, IMDB, etc, are written by hired reviewers and which are real. Of course, I have my suspicions.. but no real proof. And I don't see any way to ever get real proof -- unless the reviewer confesses. So.. what's the secret?
  - arctangent 15y ago
    First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence. Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors. Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analysing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time.
    - gnosis 15y ago
      "First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence." Why would they go public? They're presumably making (what they consider to be) good money writing fake reviews. By going public they'd be 1 - losing their revenue from you, 2 - undermining the public's confidence in reviews, which would translate in to a less lucrative business for the provider of fake reviews. As for blackmail, I'm sure it happens from time to time. But I don't know how to estimate the frequency with which fake reviewers blackmail their clients. What is your basis for estimating the probability of such blackmail as "very likely"? Furthermore, blackmail is an obvious risk for any secret/illegal undertaking, and yet people attempt try to do things in secret and break the law all the time. Clearly, for them the risk seems worth it (at the time). "Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors." So, the fake positive reviews might be staggered over a reasonable period of time. But even the business receives many positive reviews in a short period of time, that's not proof the reviews were fake. "Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analyzing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time." Are there any such services which claim to be able to detect fake reviews? Or is this mere speculation on your part? Regardless, just because some service or algorithm claims a review is fake doesn't mean it is. Once again, their guess/estimate is not proof.

bambax 15y ago

Is there such a thing as "the best bread in the world"? There are "bad breads", or even "mediocre breads", but beyond that, all breads are interesting, each in its own way. I'm not sure I would want to eat the same bread everyday just because it's the "best" one (according to a bunch of Yelp users). I don't think this "winner takes all" analysis really works for food. Let's think about something else outside of food. There is probably such a thing as "the world's best laundry service", but do I care? I won't drive ten miles (or even 1 mile) to find a better laundry service, be it marginally better or even incredibly better, if the one that's nearest me is affordable and good enough. I will never know they exist because I won't look for them. So I'm not sure "winner takes all" works for proximity services in general. That's not to say that technology cannot disrupt those markets; someone could build a machine that lets people cook incredible bread in the house (it's been tried, and failed miserably up to now, but that doesn't mean it can't happen). But the whole "bakers need to become experts at managing their online social reputation" line of reasoning strikes me as misguided and, frankly, the root of a lot of evil in modern society. I'd rather patronize bakers who are experts at baking. There are many of them.