Farhad Manjoo, a tech columnist and fledging blogger for Salon, has always entertained when it comes to writing about technology without being too techy.Aside from his man-crush on Steve Jobs, he usually writes smart, incisive articles that hit it in the nuts and gives a unique and accessible spin. Today, he juuuust missed it.
In writing about user reviews on websites ranging restaurants to consumer products, Manjoo nails the crux of the phenomenon.
Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call "response bias." Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way -- either positively or negatively -- ratings for most items brim with extreme opinions.True, that.
A peculiar aspect of working in Chicago is how much the user review websites matter, especially with the start-ups. Metromix, the Chicago Reader, Lth Forum and a new entry Yelp have been poured over daily by the owners I've worked for in a vein attempt to find a vibe.
For poops and cackles, I check them out on a semi-regular basis. Aside from the copious amounts of spelling errors and general ignorance when it comes to the menu/cuisine, one thing sticks out above everything else and it's the thing Manjoo misses. These people are morons!
A restaurant atmosphere is like a sewing circle, everything talked about, gossiped about, cursed at and analyzed to the point that you can recall the excruciating minutiae of every second of every shift from the past week. That includes the customers you just know are going to review their experience later (I've seen notepads).
Scan the next restaurant you visit. Look for the cellphone on the belt. Look for the gray fright wig. Look for the fanny packs. Look for the hiked-up pants and pastel shirt. All these, in my experience, qualify as a probable reviewer. But more importantly, look for the people looking around, watching the bussers, the hostess, the owner. Most importantly, look for the middle-aged couple not talking to each other. At all. The whole meal.
And most, most importantly, look for her.
They're a miserable lot, lamenting a life passed by, dumpster-diving for a shred of importance to salvage, wipe off and place of their mantle. User reviews provide that elusive, that lost, that gone-by. It's a chance for people to scream into the dying of the light and say, "My opinion matters, Damn it!" In it's very worst incarnations, it allows their Ignatius J. Reilly to come out with a bellowing of "that meal was an abortion!"
It's not personal. I've come out relatively unscathed in my time in Chicago. The only quasi-bad review I personally have ever had was 'a little haughty, but informative and responsive'. I'm lucky to currently work at a restaurant that's impervious to such review website influence, though we've had some doozies.
And waiting tables for eleven years brings with it an 'I don't give a crap' attitude about nearly everything. But I've known these people, the situations and their beef when it comes to the bad ones. Trust me. They lie, they exaggerate, they misrepresent, they have a compulsive need to be appalled.
So the next time you scour the user reviews to pick a new restaurant and see a scathing review, think of the person you most hate in life and everything that entails. It's a good bet he or she or someone just like them probably wrote it.
2 comments:
I remember when i was involved in the whole theater thing that reader reviews were often used and put on the poster or website. I found that to be a bit silly seeing as anybody (writer, actor, producer) could just go in and write something.
mate famber
That just seems terribly desperate.
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