She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering
wsj.com
wsj.com
If it happens again, I'll go straight to blogging without bothering to report it to Amazon. I may not have that many readers, but it's more than the zero that I'd have through a rejected Amazon review.
I thought I could sift through the rubble to discern fake from real but now I know Amazon reviews are absolutely worthless.
Could be useful to fill gaps on other sites too, for example when an uploader turns off comments on youtube.
It would be a pretty big middle finger to amazon if the primary site for amazon seller reviews was not actually amazon, but a third party site/app.
It's possible in technical theory. But sharing the comments would be hard. Federation might work. Spam moderation could be hard. And most websites refuse to go into iframes, so your options are limited to browser extensions, SOCKS proxies, and Opera Mini style apps that re-render the page. Which means you'll get less than a percent of a percent of people to use it.
- Changing the generated HTML so that the extensions selectors no longer grab the right data (this becomes a cat and mouse game and there’s a non-zero chance that the extension authors tap out, especially if there’s not enough money to sustain the workload)
- Filing nuisance complaints (DMCA is a standard one here, but there are lots of others)
- Filing a copyright lawsuit in court
- Filing other court lawsuits (lost income, slander, etc)
In many cases the business knows they are fighting a losing battle but all they need is more resources, more time, or more patience.
Like, I don't judge. And when I was younger and broke half the time, I might've leapt at the easy money. I just wouldn't do it today.
I see it as, somebody acts unethically, and I can either (1) go along with their unethical behavior and personally benefit and encourage further unethical behavior, (2) refuse to participate, or (3) refuse to participate and discourage the unethical behavior.
You choose 2 and I choose 3.
I am not sure what to make of this, I have considered that possibility the company has an employee on their payroll.
Someone should ask Bezos - was that a one or two-way door decision?
One frustrating incident I had was when I stayed in an airbnb and found cockroaches, lack of hot water, and general filthiness. I wasn't able to leave a review because airbnb moved me to another unit (after many hours spent on the phone), and my account showed I had never stayed in the problematic unit. I can see why hosts would like a policy like this, but it's terrible for guests.
They DMed me and told me that was bullshit and if I wanted coffee, I should've filtered by that amenity
Which is amazing because coffee is so expected you can't even search by it
I do see what you're saying, but that's an expected basic amenity.
I wonder what percent of people make use of provided coffee. Some people are pretty strict about what kind of coffee they like, and wouldn't want to use whatever is provided. And some people don't drink coffee, of course.
A study I just looked up said 74% of American adults drink coffee every day. Of those, approximately 9 of 10 would prefer not to have to leave the house for their morning eye-opener, and 1 in 10 prefer papercuts then lime juice in their eye.
Seriously, no innkeeper who isn’t personally opposed to coffee for some reason would risk pissing off 75% of their customers, especially when it’s so cheap and easy to supply. I would genuinely rather a place lack pillows than on-site coffee.
The best situation is having a decent cup while I’m washing up, then a mind-blowing cup a little later while out and about.
The problem is that the scale is now so compressed that 5* means "OK" and 4* means "not OK". 3* is assumed by the system to be a user abusing the review system.
It is like a complaint of a laptop. If you sit on the keyboard, it bends a little bit. If that is the biggest complaint, it's fine.
(you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." No, it wouldn't, that's exactly the type of situation that Gaussians know how to handle. Whatever is the average rating and whatever is the excellent rating will emerge from the collective.)
if you wish to attack my plan, I'll only listen if you offer a defense of the status quo, or offer a better improvement plan.
Sorry but you don't get to set the terms of your own critique. If you refuse to listen then that impugns your character, but it doesn't make the critique invalid.
You method is flawed because some people only leave reviews when they good service or only when they get bad service. Everyone has a different reason why they do things, and what motivates them to do things. This will only work if you force people to leave reviews, and in that case your chances of getting a legitimate rating is much smaller.
You system would be better suited to de-rate the importance of people who leave a lot of reviews that are consistently skewed towards one end, but apply such a system to everyone is not going to make the results more fair.
If you want your positive rating of something to have the most impact (for whatever reason), then you need to give negative ratings to other things (even if they deserve better)?
I get it’s chicken/egg, but I feel like you can’t adjust ratings without retraining people on what ratings mean. I guess that means I think we should probably do away with the numbers and think about a more qualitative approach? Not a strong belief.
if 5 is the center of the new scale where the current grade inflation puts everything, people will not need to be retrained. Then, let them vote. You don't need to understand grading on a curve to be graded on a curve, and the grade you get is the right one.
Binary choice leaves less room for interpretation and fuzzy ness, you either like something or you don't.
Maybe make it a really tiny box in the middle that you need to zoom in to click to encourage mostly positive or negative reviews.
- thumb down
- thumb up
- two thumbs upRotten Tomatoes goes further to emphasize the "love it or hate it" dichotomy - they display a ripe red tomato for a movie with a rating of 60 and a splattered green tomato for a movie with a score of 59.
But human brains don't work like that. We don't compare a dinner at a restaurant to literally the best dining experience we ever had or a trip to a theme park with the birth our child, so you can't realistically expect people to operate in that way when filling out a review form.
Not many people are going to think that a system which weights everything to be distributed that way is useful as a metric for evaluating human experiences.
"Absolutely awful service" / "dissatisfied" / "basically what I expected" / "positively surprised" / "incredibly excellent"
This way, most customers would click "basically what I expected", making 3 star the default.
Adjusting all reviews based on the general mean and standard deviation after the fact makes sense, though.
The low reviews had pictures of holes in the walls, bugs, exposed wires, and dozens of comments of people saying "I don't remember posting it, but this hotel posted a 10/10 review under my name. I think they hacked my account" or "the owner forced me to write a positive review before checking in" kind of stuff.
Since then, I've gone back and given a second look at all the hotels I've reserved so far and order reviews by negative first. So many are just fake or coerced reviews. I compared against places I've stayed in the past and I've seen no such thing. Delhi, in particular, seems overwhelmingly fraudulent and with owners openly getting pissed if you don't leave positive reviews. Small towns in India seem like they're probably okay (guests posting smiling selfies around the hotel and nothing overtly suspicious or anything), but I'm definitely feeling anxious about my upcoming trip.
Then there's the famous case where Thailand tried to arrest a man for a not positive review: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/american-wesle...
Of course, there's also a risk of fake negative reviews, from competitors.
Something you can see patterns of petty complains, and other times you can detect bigger issues that may make you look elsewhere instead
Most of these are present in major cities across India. They're a little on the expensive side though.
(I'm NOT affiliated in any way with any of the hotels mentioned in this post).
We were dropped at a house fifteen minutes walking from beach.
The next day I rented a motorbike and we relocated.
We never saw a refund.
Most of the time, I just leave 4 star reviews for places I didn't like and then mention all my hassles in my public comment.
Booking is much better: They ask you what you didn't like.
(I've used both Airbnb and Booking over 50 times over the last 6 years)
Same thing probably happens on other platforms. Example: Sometimes restaurant ratings on Uber Eats are a full 1 star above what they are on google.
I review every hotel I stay at. From time to time, I switch on a VPN, go into private browsing, and get a bit of joy when I see that my 500+ word Google reviews are the first thing people see.
Most people don’t know reviews are largely gamed, so that’s why people believe them.
I think this often gives at least an indication of what to expect.
Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber for Negative Review