6 ms·

1995 Q: How can you verify the quality of a < mover / restaurant / hairdresser / babysitter / dentist / chiropractor / handyman / etc.>? A: Ask your < friend

• grogs 15y ago
  The Internet should not replace the 1995 solution. You should always use a hybrid approach. If a friend recommends Avengers Assemble, I go see it. If I end up at the cinema out of boredem, I'll let imdb help me. I want some website to come along which solves this for me, and neither Facebook nor Hunch nor IMDB do really.
• mcknz 15y ago
  1995 corollary: the < mover / restaurant / hairdresser / babysitter / dentist / chiropractor / handyman / etc.> is invariably a brother- or sister-in-law.
  • TylerE 15y ago
    Not always a bad thing. All but the worst of the worst are going not want to screw over a relative, even a distant one.
    • JeffBlauser 15y ago
      That's why they say, "Always do business with family."
    • aperrien 15y ago
      Not always true. People look guard and abuse their own first. "Exploitation begins at home"
• gdilla 15y ago
  Maybe a shamless plug, but I work on mobile apps at Fodor's Travel. We've been doing print travel guides for 75 years. We now have apps, in addition to books. We're professional curators. That means every restaurant review (and shops, hotels, etc) has been written by an actual human professional who's opinion we hope you trust (we're a little more upscale than Lonely Planet, but we have our hip moments). So in a way, we're the anti-UGC. When you have crowds of people, all the ratings become a noisey 3-4 stars. Including Burger King. That's why I think Fodor's content is a good alternative. We're in the travel space, not local, but, it's a refreshing alternative. Oh, and all our apps are FREE. http://www.fodors.com/mobile-apps/ http://www.fodors.com/mobile-apps/
  • rogerbinns 15y ago
    Places have good days and bad days (or even hours). Your reviewers could get made. While the reviews may be spot on, they are a one point in time random sample. The other problem is that not everyone is the same. For example I absolutely hate "attentive" staff in a restaurant (let me eat in peace and if I want something I'll ask for it), but want the check as quickly as possible on finishing while others like to slowly wind down. A regular reviewer probably won't mention either of these because that is normal to them. The existence of multiple reviewers means one will be more like me and would mention these issues which would make me go somewhere else while others who enjoy that kind of experience would be more likely to come. This doesn't make anyone right or wrong, but does show how different reviewers help and why the lowest review scores have the most informative reviews.
    • klodolph 15y ago
      As a counterpoint, I don't like the same movies Roger Ebert likes. But his opinions are consistent, and I know well enough where we are different, that I can usually estimate from the text of his reviews how well I'd like a given movie. Reviewers may prefer attentive staff, but the good reviewers (which exist) know that not everyone shares their preferences. That's the difference between a good review and a bad review: you can translate a good review into your own viewpoint and decide for yourself. When I think of noisy one star reviews, I mostly think of the one star review for a microprocessor where the guy didn't use a heatsink and the motherboard melted. There are plenty of folk who come across well in writing but are monstrous in person, I'd never expect to trust their restaurant reviews, and I might not be able to identify them either.
• josefresco 15y ago
  Fixed the last one for you ... Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it? A: Use the 1995 solution but because it's not 1995 anymore you'll use Facebook and Twitter to ask your friends which is still using "the Internet". But that kind of blows up your point/argument.
  • reitzensteinm 15y ago
    That's nitpicking. The internet might make it more efficient to ask your friends, but it's not a paradigm shift from what came before. Yelp was.
• praptak 15y ago
  > A: Use the 1995 solution. But not in the "back to square one" meaning, it is rather "next level of a spiral staircase". I believe there's still room for improvement (definitely there is over the '95 low tech and probably over what we have now) in the way we can combine internet and the '95 solution to find good <mover / restaurant / hairdresser ... etc> Time will tell - lots of money goes into social, someone will do it right or at least we'll know what obstacles prevent this from happening.
• joshu 15y ago
  we built the 1995 version, but online: jig.com ... everything old is new again?
• sbochins 15y ago
  No need for the 1995 solution, Yelp is just doing a very bad job at detecting bad reviews. It's usually rule #1 that in any type of "bad" user filtering that many people that are good users may not engage your site.
• benatkin 15y ago
  This point doesn't apply very well to this case. The problem is that there was a lack of verifiable people on Yelp posting negative reviews. Yelp has many more semi-verifiable people on it (i. e. people who've left multiple reviews) than the typical person has friends with experience with a given rarely-used service. If in this case the problem were likely to be solved by acquaintances, it would also be likely to be solved by Yelp, under its assumption that people need to leave multiple reviews to be considered credible.