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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Another interesting one is trustpilot. According to web shop people I know, it's well known that people who complain require less motivation to write than satisfied customers. So the model is basically that you're forced to pay them to motivate positive reviews to compensate for the negatives.

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Or it's just that most interactions with stores are really mediocre. If I buy something in a store, it was reasonably priced, it gets delivered within the promised time frame and is not damaged then that's very much par for the course in terms of what I expect from a webshop. It's not "5/5 AMAZING store, will always buy things from here!", it's just so much easier to slide downwards on that scale than move up.

Exactly. It's just that in the internet era you can have a restaurant with a queue of everyone who's ever gotten food poisoned, or served late, or served the wrong food, standing outside forever. The thousands of satisfied customers aren't visible.

And TP's business model is to build that queue of dissatisfied people so that you have to pay to compensate for it.

That's a good point, perhaps ratings need a way to indicate the the number of satisfied customers instead of keeping them invisible.

We are already used to seeing the number of reviews next to a rating score, but maybe we can add an additional "total number of customers" or a percentage of reviews-to-customers.

> So the model is basically that you're forced to pay them to motivate positive reviews to compensate for the negatives.

How does paying them result in positive reviews?

They start trying to motivate people to write them.

smart money would pay them to write negative reviews for your competitors

surely that just drives people away from your whole market?

"Oh man, don't go to any of the restaurants on that street, they all look terrible."

“Except this one!”

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