Italy seeks to curb 'fake' online reviews for hotels and restaurants
rte.ie
rte.ie
The kinds of subjective assessments you'd typically see in a review such as "I liked (or didn't like) the service" or "the establishment was gross" are ultimately meaningless. They're written by randos with values and expectations that may not necessarily align with mine, so it's a waste of time trying to parse that out. And that's assuming an environment of honest reviews written in good faith, which isn't a realistic assumption.
What am I missing here? Why do people place so much weight on online restaurant reviews that establishments are willing to fake and game the system?
I exclusively shop around the bad reviews. All the fluffy positive comments are noise. People writing real, substantial complaints are much less common an issue. If everyone has the same complaint about a rude owner or a bland dish, that’s some good signal.
You don’t care about the intangibles, or things that may be unsavory that a business owner would want to hide? If the waitstaff are consistently rude or horrible in some way, that wouldn’t be put in a website (besides those places where that is the schtick).
> The kinds of subjective assessments you'd typically see in a review such as "I liked (or didn't like) the service" or "the establishment was gross" are ultimately meaningless. They're written by randos with values and expectations that may not necessarily align with mine, so it's a waste of time trying to parse that out. And that's assuming an environment of honest reviews written in good faith, which isn't a realistic assumption.
Just because your values and expectations don’t align with every rando, doesn’t mean you can’t get signaling cues from reviews. It’s just like product reviews: if most people consistently complain about a specific thing, it probably has some flaw or problem. Praise and general 5 star flattery is less useful, especially in review gamification though.