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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

What I'm not getting about this is how you check cause and effect. How do you know bad reviews cause restaurants to stagnate? Call me crazy, but maybe restaurants stagnate is because they're bad. They also get bad reviews because they're bad and people might not go to the restaurant becaues it's bad. There's no explanation in this article of how this is overcome. Also, they're talking about 0-4 reviews and 5-10 reviews. I could imagine that's the sort of number of reviews that restaurants' family and friends could be leaving when a restaurant opens.

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Have you ever worked in a restaurant? I've worked in multiple.

There's a reason Karen is a meme

There are a real lot of very entitled people in the world that will complain on review sites and their opinion is not really justified. The only barrier is having an account and picking a number of stars.

In the past you had to be a restaurant reviewer, like you worked for Zagat or something, so there was a barrier to entry.

The same thing can happen to Uber and Lyft drivers too... If you are very unlucky and your first ride gives you a bad review pretty much forget about it.

Have you ever eaten at a restaurant? Bad food and bad service are a thing too. I'm not one to complain or make a scene, but if I have a bad time, I'm just not going to come back.

I may speak for myself but the grand majority of my experiences with restaurants is most of them do a totally passable job, many very good for their price point in my opinion. Of course there’s levels to it but its food and having a decent restaurant should be far from herculean. This article is essentially suggesting that making it in the world of restaurants is like anything else: it hinges a lot on luck and circumstance.

And as an additional personal note, I can tell you that in Michigan I went to many smaller restaurants with one or two bad reviews that were great. If you actually read the bad reviews, you often see some utterly ridiculous shit.

I don't use review apps like yelp. My personal experience is there's a weak correlation at best between my experience and the average rating.

I check the reviews in Google Maps since they’re there anyways, but I don’t use them as a guide. I used to use Yelp as a guide but stopped when I realized how lackluster it was for that, and I assume that applies to probably any rating system where anyone can submit a review.

None of this addresses the question though. Nobody doubts the existence of unreasonable customers who leave bad reviews for dumb reasons. That doesn't change the parent comment's fact that the study unwarrantedly infers causality from the statistical correlation between bad reviews and popularity.

To address the question, bad reviews can affect popularity based on how things are listed and sorted online. If a restaurant has bad reviews then it will be lower on the list when sorted by average review. This will affect their popularity by not being as visible, and possibly the poor reviews affecting people’s desire to eat there.

I personally don’t go online and immediately sort by restaurants with 1 or 2 stars. I tend to sort by those with higher ratings.

Fake bad reviews by competitors and mean spirited people do know their actions have an affect on that business.

> To address the question, bad reviews can affect popularity...

That's not the question that others are referring to. Everyone agrees that bad reviews affect the popularity.

The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". Yes, initial bad reviews are likely to affect the number of total reviews a restaurant receives. But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews. The press release says that the ratings of the initial reviews determines (causes) the total number of reviews and hence the eventual popularity of the restaurant, but doesn't explain how the researchers eliminated the apparently obvious alternative causal explanation that bad restaurants are more likely to get initial bad reviews, leading to fewer total reviews.

One hopes that the paper (which I haven't read yet) answers this better than the press release: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/23754931.2020.179...

> One hopes that the paper (which I haven't read yet) answers this better than the press release

The paper: As the number of reviews is statistically significant and positive in all of the regression models, the more reviews a restaurant receives, the higher rating it has.

> The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews.

A helpful move for new establishments—especially independent ones which don't have the organizing strategies of large corporations—would be to delay allowing comments for 3–6 months. I've worked in food for a long time, still do, and it's so difficult to have all aspects of an establishment in a good place at the outset. Give restaurants the time to work out those kinks before accepting comments.

One other option would be to display something like “this restaurant did not receive enough ratings to show them” like some online stores do.

That wasn't the question.

The question was - how do they know it's the bad reviews that hurt the restaurants, or if it's actually the bad service (which caused the bad reviews) that hurts the restaurants.

They observe an effect - hurt restaurant - they see bad reviews - they blame the bad reviews. But was it actually the bad service (evident from the bad reviews) which hurt the restaurant?

Is it possible for there to be such a thing as bad service which is not bad reviews?

The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.

I think the only possible thing is “what does the market think.” So the entire problem is correlation.

“Bad service” is, literally by definition, the name we give after the fact to types of service that correlated with bad reviews and low revenue.

> The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale.

at a minimum, the health department disagrees, re cooking and delivering food.

I don’t see how health / sanitation law is related to the discussion.

Health/sanitation law is intended to stop people from getting sick from restaurant food. If you get sick from restaurant food, that would universally be considered a bad experience (and for those inclined, a bad review). That's a direct counterexample to the GP claim that there's no agreed-upon way to distinguish "bad" and "good" experiences.

I still fail to see why anyone thinks this is relevant. I agree health law exists for the purpose you cite - and this fact is not related to why patrons in the study give bad reviews of restaurants that are actively operating with permission of the health department.

> The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.

Once we went to a restaurant with hardly any diners, not at all busy. We ordered dinner. They served half our order. We waited for the other half. After about half an hour, we asked the manager. He went to investigate, and came back with the admission that they had forgotten to submit the other half of our order to the kitchen.

That's objectively bad service. I don't see how anyone could see that as "great service".

Now, maybe it was just an innocent mistake, someone having a bad day, and maybe the manager is really apologetic and offers some compensation and I forgive them. It would rule them out of consideration for a five star review, but I wouldn't give them one star just for that. Unless, if I had gone on a review site and saw a dozen other people complaining about the same restaurant messing up their order, then I probably would have left a one star review too.

My psychologist had a bad review saying that he made her talk about her problems and said that it sounded like it was her fault. She got all defensive and put him on blast. I don’t remember the specifics but reading her “bad” review made me think he’d be a good psychologist, tough but fair type. He was!

I think in general people know how to filter out the "Karens". Also I find that restaurants are actually overrated in general. People are more likely to give a 5 star rating to an average restaurant than vice versa. People at least me try to filter out the person that complains about petty stuff vs the real problems. And I also realize when places first open they are working the kinks out.

But more often than not I go to a place that is rated very good but is actually not that good. And usually the bad rated places are indeed bad.

Totally, but that depends how many people actually dig into the reviews to figure what specifically was liked or disliked (and to make their own assessment of the reviewer's judgement), and how many just go by the top-level aggregated number.

Can we stop calling these people "Karen". I'm sure its very hurtful to all the people actually called Karen. We tread so carefully around race and LGBTQI issues, but all of a sudden its OK to start labeling entitled assholes "Karen". I don't get it. We don't need a new word for it.

Would you like to propose an alternative? I think it's a great term.

I guess your wife/sister/girlfriend/etc probably isn't named Karen.

My wife's name is Karen, and I've teased her about it over the past 6 months and she's kept mum about it.

She finally admitted to me that it gets on her nerves greatly and she resents all of it. It came as quite a shock to me (because I find I lot of it funny) but I suspect there are a lot of Karens out there that aren't amused.

The kiddos and I have now resorted to calling her "K-Dog" which she gets a kick out of.

I suspect that anyone who's caught grief for their name wouldn't be surprised. We (generally) don't choose our names, and yet it's imbued with a lot of our sense of identity.

I have a name that has been relentlessly mocked for the last 36 years. The suggestion by others to me has always been “if you don’t like people mocking your name, change it”.

So, I’d say the same applies. If people called Karen don’t like the new association with their name, they can change their name.

Otherwise, sticks and stones.

Also, they’re not the ones actually being mocked here - I get grief from grown-ass adults over my name, directed at me - so frankly, I think anyone named Karen who sees this as a personal attack needs to either get over it, or change their name.

It's kind of racist/sexist. Pretty obviously such.

I'm not personally offended but I am bothered by the casual double standard.

Entitled men are beginning to be called Kevins, if that makes you feel any better.

I sort of understand where you are coming from but my name is Jon and I'm British. Jon, here, is short for Jonathan.

I'm aware that John is an Americanism for the bog (toilet/WC.) John Doe is a person whose name is unknown in the US. A rubber johnny is just one nickname for a prophylactic. My mum used to call me Jonny or Johann or even Johannes as a sign of affection.

I'm not so sure that Karens are offended by the term Karen. You see, very few Karens are actually Karens.

I don't see why we need to create a new derogatory term using a persons name. It's not even very descriptive.

People didn't start calling a toilet Jon because they wanted a label for the sterotype of an entitled asshole.

I guess its a form of virtue signaling. You have to be cool and know meems to know what calling somebody a Karen even means.

Why do you feel that you need to be able to see the point of it for it to be ok or non-offensive? Maybe you don’t see the point of it, but others see their own point and don’t have to justify it.

Should every possible characteristic a living entity can have also be a protected class?

I dont fully disagree, nor do I think anyone should purposely seek to make anyone feel badly. But at some point can we just bust someones balls/ovaries/whatever they identify as having and maybe have a laugh? If everything is an egregious offense then nothing is...

There’s a difference between a friend “busting your balls/ovaries/whatever” and having a laugh with you vs. a 13 year old redditor calling women they don’t like Karen.

Of course there is! The problem is not with the Karen meme though... Social media dehumanizing interaction (at least for some significant part of the online population) is the problem.

If somebody is judging a person called Karen as being "a Karen" just because of her name, then that is the problem, not the word. If you judge a person called Christian as being of the Christian faith then you're weird and stop doing it. Is Greg gregarious? Is Mohammed Ali a prophet? We really just need to stop judging people for bad reasons instead of dumbing down language.

The whole political correctness idea isn't internally consistent anyway so you can't expect new concepts or words to be "correctly" fitted into it. It's just an arbitrary political ideology for people to latch onto.

Guys have been called “dick” forever now. Words like “Karen” provide a very clear mental image of a specific type of “asshole.”

That's dick, though, not Dick.

I do feel like we shouldn't attach that to a real name that real people have, but instead use actual words like "entitled asshole" that convey the same meaning without lumping in unrelated people who so happen to share the name who have done nothing bad to anyone.

> but instead use actual words like "entitled asshole"

I always think "douchebag" is quite good for this. You can really pile quite a lot of emphasis onto that first syllable for maximal invective effect.

> That's dick, though, not Dick.

The origin of "dick" is, nevertheless, the name "Dick". Would you be satisfied if we went from "Karen" to "karen"?

Honestly? I'd rather avoid both. It's not nice to do that to people who are unrelated to the entitled assholes.

It's also quite sexist. There's no equivalent male name that is anywhere as popular. Yet there's certainly many older entitled guys.

Was it not always so that you invite your friends and family at the beginning to get some good publicity?

> I could imagine that's the sort of number of reviews that restaurants' family and friends could be leaving when a restaurant opens.

I'm truly astonished when I see businesses with 0-4 reviews on Yelp or Google Maps, but they're everywhere. Maybe some business owners just aren't paying any attention to online reviews? Seems trivial to get 4 people to write a review.

Not trivial at all to fake reviews on yelp. They don't accept reviews from new accounts, accounts related to the business, plus some algo crap.

To get a bunch of friends who don't have accounts related to the business with non-new accounts to leave a review sounds pretty trivial.

Human marketplaces are not perfectly efficient, and my guess is that restaurants, of all places, are very affected by subjective perceptions and trendiness. So I think that the growth-hack concern on early reviews makes a lot of sense.

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