Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Tim Carman: the Indignant Diner Goes Online
Tim Carman (food critic for the City Paper) has an interest piece on a diner, who displeased with an experience a restaurant, went online and launched a personal smear campaign against the place. Everybody reads stuff on Yelp, Urban Spoon, Chowhound, and local blogs to hear about new places. That's a good thing, right?
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11 comments:
I get what he's saying, but it made him seem a little cozy with the owner.
Considering how likely it is that restaurants would post fake positive reviews, I don't think a few BS negative reviews are that big of a deal.
I don' a whole lot of places post fake positive reviews. That kind of thing is VERY unethical. And there are plenty of people who will get upset about something and post on like ten different sites in order get revenge, or somehow "prove" that they're "right."
This reminds me of a funny story. Two d-bags walk into a d-bar and act douchey.
hey, it's monkeyerotica of DCist fame!
Hey it's everyone's favorite poster "Anonymous" from Prince of Petworth!
Off-topic, but indulge my pet-peeve:
On PoP he says that "streetcar construction" is blocking the view of the restaurant. I wish people would stop calling the wholesale revitalization of the H Street streetscape "streetcar construction". It's not, it's a total overhaul of H Street.
The installation of rails is a *tiny* part of the overall effort, which DDOT chose to put in ahead of schedule so they won't have to tear up the street in a year or two and do it as a one-off project.
This is a common mis-perception, and fuels some of the anti-streetcar sentiment out there. You constantly hear folks bitch and moan about "all that streetcar construction on H Street, and they don't even have cars with batteries!" or the like.
It would be like referring to tearing down and rebuilding the Bay Bridge as "guardrail construction".
Aren't the restaurant/owner-posted reviews easy to spot from their borderline fellatious reviews? Favorite Item: EVERYTHING
worst experience at this restaurant: WHEN WE HAD TO LEAVE
Off-topic, but indulge my pet-peeve
Took me a second to realize what you were talking about (the "off-topic" threw me, was thinking more like "non-sequitur"), was wondering how "streetcar construction" was affecting a restaurant in Bethesda. Then I saw the Ethiopic article, *click*...
Online reviewing is weird. These days it can make or break a small local business.
I seem to recall that Yelp and others were facing a class action lawsuit not too long ago because business owners said that the online formats didn't allow them a chance to respond to reviews they felt were unfair, were posted by competitors, etc.
One of the biggest complaints is the 'star system' of grading, where you get 1 of 5 stars, etc.
For a new place all it takes is a couple of really bad reviews to lower the star rating considerably, and that's all that some people look at.
And some of those reviews are astonishing, from people that clearly don't eat out much, are ridiculously demanding (I once saw a restaurant in SF rated 1 star because the server had an unattractive hairstyle).
If a place has 100 reviews and a few stand out as being gushingly positive or really negative a savvy viewer can ignore those.
There does need to be some way for business owners to have more recourse against reviewers that are vicious for no reason.
I will say that there was one person who gave the H Street Country Club one star without even visiting it (he said as much in the review). Apparently he didn't like the name. check it out.
There are probably a number of lawsuits against Yelp, but the one that received a lot of media attention alleged that people selling ads for Yelp had implied that buying an ad would protect a business against bad reviews.
Yelp of course denies this and I am inclined to believe them. You can read reviews that are "filtered" but they are not included in the average rating of a business.
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