I'm fed up with TripAdvisor, Yelp and similar review sites. Too many of the negative reviews are off topic and they bring down the overall ratings (similar issue for positive reviews as well... people tend to rate things they love or hate, but not things in the middle). For example, Amazon is loaded with one-star reviews from people complaining that they received counterfeit items. This has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with a supply chain issue at Amazon (and more so its 3rd party merchants). Similarly, on TripAdvisor and Yelp, I regularly see one star reviews from people who have a specific issue and don't review hotels/restaurants on their own terms. For example, if you are a health nut, you really aught to not post a review of a BBQ joint to complain about lack of healthy options. Family taking a vacation? Don't post reviews of a hotel in the financial district that caters to business travelers because you are upset that they lack good facilities for kids. I highly prefer professional reviewers who have a breadth of experience and also know to review movies on their own terms. That's why I find the aggregated professional movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes more helpful than the crowd-sourced reviews on IMDB.
I think there's a solution that would help the problem a bit though. Have two tiers of reviewers. For example, on TripAdvisor, the first tier would include everyone, similar to what you have right now. Second tier would be an aggregated number by "gold" reviewers. To qualify, a gold reviewer would need to have:
- More than N number of reviews
- An individual review would only count if it was more than a minimum number of words
- Let users mark reviews as helpful or not helpful. A gold user will need to be above a threshold for percentage of helpful vs not helpful reviews, with a minimum number of helpful reviews.
Amazon already marks some reviewers as being, for example, a "top 1000 reviewer". What I'd like to see is for those top tier reviewers' reviews to be broken out as a separate score.
They aggregate professional reviews for hotels, restaurants, and things-to-do. The list, however, does skew heavily towards Michelin-star establishments, so it's not the site to find excellent hole-in-the-wall places.
There is a great flattening in what it once took to publish a thought or an idea and have it reach an audience. Unfortunately almost everybody is deluded, insane, stupid, at the very least totally uninsightful - or some sort of weird combination of all these things.
The web is a great place to be uninformed or even deceitful, I strive to be cognizant of this.
I don't understand the last part of your comment. But I wonder hard almost weekly about that flattening effect of the computer era.
People (and I at times) complained how institutions were imposing too much on whatever content (articles, music, movies). Without their curating effect, everything goes. Some say it's better because now you're sure you'll never miss a great thing that would have been killed by some radio or studio. But I'm less and less convinced of that.
I was thinking about that part of my comment and I believe what I failed to convey was that there seems to be no real cultural or educational priority to question what you see communicated on the internet, at least to my limited understanding.
Alternate.de, Amazon.de,… no idea how it is for the US equivalents, but on German sites I regularly see information about how bad or good the shipping was. Seriously? You are reviewing the product, not the store, your review is literally useless.
I think there's a solution that would help the problem a bit though. Have two tiers of reviewers. For example, on TripAdvisor, the first tier would include everyone, similar to what you have right now. Second tier would be an aggregated number by "gold" reviewers. To qualify, a gold reviewer would need to have:
- More than N number of reviews
- An individual review would only count if it was more than a minimum number of words
- Let users mark reviews as helpful or not helpful. A gold user will need to be above a threshold for percentage of helpful vs not helpful reviews, with a minimum number of helpful reviews.
Amazon already marks some reviewers as being, for example, a "top 1000 reviewer". What I'd like to see is for those top tier reviewers' reviews to be broken out as a separate score.