In Germany if you say a restaurant is just ok they send the gestapo after you | Hacker News Reader

In Germany if you say a restaurant is just ok they send the gestapo after you

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31 pointsbko35 comments

Have been wondering since a long time if there are still any real reviews on the internet, that weren't paid for by someone, something that could be trusted. I really can't remember when was the last review that turned out to be true.

But while I do believe that there is a real hole in the market there, I am not sure how big that market is, if there is really a demand for real reviews - both products and services (and whatever else can be reviewed)

tbf i live in a city in the UK, so YMMV, but after exhausting personal contacts I find asking in the subreddit for that city has only produced stellar results so far

Yes, 99 percent of reviews are paid directly or indirectly. Mattress reviews are the worst offenders, as they are paid by mattress companies.

I think that generally if you ignore the 5 star review and then look for a staircase pattern of 4, 3, 2 and 1 star reviews on yelp or google then that place is generally awesome. If most reviews are either 5 stars or 1 stars then the place probably sucks. It generally indicates tha legit users are giving a bad review and the company is trying to mask this by recruiting or paying for 5 star reviews. I find the histogram shape to be far more useful than the review average.

Basically businesses only pay for 5 star reviews and 1 star reviews are generally a really bad indicator so the quantity of reviewing in all other categories is the most useful and the size and scope of 1 star review in relation to non fake reviews are really useful indicators

The poster is lucky he didn't have it any worse. After a trip abroad where I posted reviews, Google deleted all my Maps reviews, mostly those in the US, going back ten years, and permanently prohibited me from posting further reviews altogether.

An the Gestapo is a US company named Google in this case.

More like the EU and Germany’s version of the Digital Services Act. Google is just adhering to German law.

The DSA doesn't need anyone to remove valid product ratings.

> German law gives businesses unusually broad grounds to challenge online reviews as defamatory. Unlike defamation standards in many other jurisdictions, which typically require proof of deliberate falsehood, German law includes provisions covering what is sometimes described as "malicious gossip" - where the burden of proof shifts to the person who wrote the review. A reviewer may need to demonstrate that their account was factually accurate rather than the business proving it was false.

> According to Google's legal help documentation, businesses can simply claim they have no record of a transaction with the reviewer, and unless evidence to the contrary exists, courts have generally ordered platforms to remove the review. The documentation states that the "not-a-customer" argument is the basis for the majority of defamation removal requests Google receives in Germany.

> The structural asymmetry is significant. A business filing a defamation complaint through Google's notice-and-action mechanism faces minimal friction - the process involves completing a form and selecting the appropriate legal grounds. The reviewer, by contrast, must respond within a defined timeframe or risk losing their review by default. According to prior reporting by PPC Land, if the reviewer does not respond within the given window, the review is removed regardless of its factual accuracy.

Source: https://ppc.land/google-maps-now-shows-removed-review-counts...

Ok. >99% of requests from Germany _is really bad_.

Nope, it's the lawyer firms that come after you. Google removes reviews on request for its own comfort, but if you provide proof, they put it back. Then the lawyers come.

Someone please vibe code a site where you pay to leave bad reviews. The more is paid the worse it is.

All visible reactions should be positive. They also removed dislike buttons from YouTube a while ago.

(this may have changed at some point recently i dont use youtube that much) oddly as well though, dislikes were still exposed through the API, so third party apps still had it

> They also removed dislike buttons from YouTube a while ago.

The dislike button is still there. What was changed was the dislike button no longer shows an aggregate count of dislikes. Youtube did remove the dislike button from youtube shorts like 2 months ago, probably to mirror the experience on TikTok. I think a like button is a more powerful signal for a short form content algo anyways - swiping away from a video before it's finished is equivalent to a dislike for that purpose.

The "Dislike" buttons are indeed missing in many cases today. Particularly the Shorts. There is only a stylized "Like" button (it may be a heart or something, and pressing it produces a stylized animation based on the theme of the channel.)

this post has been flagged.

Ironic

Meh. The Gestapo reference is needlessly inflammatory, and not particularly germane. Few of the comments are useful or enlightening. Google is handling the situation poorly, but "Google Handling X Poorly" ain't news on HN.

HN prefers a certain tone of discussion, and this item was reasonable flagged for being off-key.

"The Gästeführer would like a word with you..."

Even more fun: if you say the title of this post in Germany, that's illegal. Because all comparisons with Nazis are.

I have zero problems with that.

The comparison in this exact case is dreadfully theatric and inappropriate.

Additional context:

> NetzDG (2017/2018): Germany passed the NetzDG legislation in June 2017, which officially took effect in January 2018. Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.

> Strict Liability Precedent: Even before NetzDG, German courts have traditionally set a low threshold for companies to challenge reviews. If a business simply claims a reviewer has no record of a transaction, platforms will often temporarily remove the review and force the user to provide proof of their visit.

> Fully 99.97% of Google Maps reviews taken down for “defamation” across the entire 27-country European Union are for businesses based in Germany, official European data shows.

I'll take unintended consequences for $500

https://www.fastcompany.com/91420303/google-review-germany-t...

Germany manages free speech and democracy as well as it does producing software. I really want to know where the cultural difference originates from. Why are CAD drawing engineers respected while programmers are walked allover. Why is eastern europe exempted from this cultural curse?

What are you talking about?

Lets take the average machine building company, i promise you the engineers drawing the machines sit in quiet climatized rooms. Meanwhile the "software" sits in bustling cattlefarm like largescale offices. There is no money for startups but there is money for playing startup and the various wirecards. Wha are theset the fuck is wrong with that culture, that it stopped innovating and tried to life from rent-seeking on ic vehicles? A d when pressed for answers- all it has is these lame passive aggressive rhetorical questions?

Beside other reasons, one cultural difference is that Germans tend to be more risk adverse. They like just working for big companies for many years and decades, having 30-40 vacation days (aka "PTO"), good to high living standard and getting relatively much retirement money afterwards.

Generally, because Employees are protected to some degree, when you start a startup you introduce a lot uncertainty into your life.

> There is no money for startups but there is money for playing startup and the various wirecards.

Not sure what you mean by "various wirecards", you mean it's always fintech?Oftentimes it's US VC, because there's just not that much VC flying around in Europe. So I guess only well connected and few high profile startups get to receive big money - see Helsing AI as latest example.

> Germany manages free speech and democracy as well as it does producing software.

That sentence works suprising well for the US too: enshitified and completely controlled by a cartel of trillion dollar corporations.

Culturally east europe is hugely different from west europe. No expert, but you can certainly hold a lot to it from the soviet bloc and how industrialisation happened in a given country.

> Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.

To clarify, this is not content that a court or even just the police has determined to be illegal - this is merely content alleged to be illegal by any random complainant. So a company can remove content and suffer no consequences, even if it was perfectly legal, or it can risk an up to 5M Euro fine if it keeps the content up but gets it wrong.

Every free speech and human rights organization under the sun warned them this would result in unchecked privatized censorship, yet they did it anyway. The result was not unintended, but 100% deliberate, and the politicians that voted for it are not stupid, but simply malicious.

Daydream: Sites display 5.0 star ratings for everything in Germany - doesn't matter if it a junk yard, morgue, or sewage treatment plant. With no further details at all, except "Due to current German law, our attorneys have instructed us to say that everything in Germany is absolutely perfect."

Maybe apply the same policy to North Korea, in the spirit of PDR Solidarity.

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