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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
But you also have the problem that OP described where people literally have no idea what quality actually taste like so they can get away with selling mediocre fish. Nearly all fruit in the United States is another example. My cousin by marriage was born abroad and he absolutely refuses to eat his favorite fruit, mango, because so much of it is outright trash and even a "good"mango sucks in comparison
But, there's a variety of pineapple you can only get only in Hawaii that's way better. And I've only ever sourced really good key limes from friends and family trees in Florida.
Store bought tomatoes are also usually shit, but you can get ones from the farmers markets and road-side stands.
NC has a bounty of fruit and vegetables available locally grown:
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/central-north-carolina-planting...
https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-melons-cost-price-s...
That said, the pricy melons are usually bought as gifts, not eating yourself. Compare with eg. high-end whiskey.
(I'm also pretty happy with $30 bourbon compared to what single-malts are up to these days.)
Or, try apples in a place that actually grows a large amount and diversity of apples. In season, you can walk into some grocery stores and find 20+ varieties that all actually taste unique.
It essentially gives a 'low-brow' and 'high-brow' rating of a movie. And depending on my mood and who I am watching with, that is very useful information.
But the fish could be less than premium and still be the best sushi that person has ever had.
That could be a truthful, honest review.
I moved away from Raleigh about a year ago and I miss it.
I do however feel it's really odd for restauranteurs to feel the immediate need to tailor flavors for the entire menu to the local palate as if people could never dare eat a pepper or something.
At some point I found the r/gatekeeping Reddit and realized what an insufferable asshole I was being.
Trusted source, e.g. particular friends/family/reviewers. I've had far better experiences trusting one knowledgeable person than 100s of anonymous reviewers.
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.
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.
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.
"Restaurants liked by people who like x and y and z"
As if, all problems can't be solved by building websites connected to databases.
Strange.
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.
There was absolutely zero chance that a restaurant that made spectacular food but didn't do anything novel would even be on their radar.
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
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-...