Some truths but also a lot of BS.

It's well established that people are many times more likely to bother leaving reviews after bad experiences than good experiences, so comments are bound to skew negative. I've never motivated to leave a "reasonable, adequate experience" review. But yeah, way too easy to fake reviews. I'm more leary of exuberantly positive reviews.

Lots of butthurt in this article. I am (and have been) a professional reviewer too, for the travel industry, for the software industry and for the music industry. My professional skills aside - anyone can review anything. If the user experience of any product or service doesn't make the immediate benefits clear, then it failed.

The reason that review aggregation works is that when you take a lot of people with no "industry expertise" and average their opinion - you get something approaching an accurate opinion. More so than with the opinion of an "expert" too. (Though in reality, there is no such fucking thing - hotels are a matter of personal preference and not subject to any objective criteria in their assessment whatsoever.)

Yes, people game TripAdvisor (though this has become much more expensive and a little bit harder to achieve than it once was) but any place with a large volume of reviews which offer a range of opinion (always suspect anything which is all 1 star or 5 star reviews - real life rarely works that way) will have a reasonably accurate assessment of whether it's worth your time.

If you want to be a professional reviewer nowadays... good luck with that. You'll be paid by the industry you work in (indirectly or directly) and that means lots of non-judgmental crap that fails to inform your readers of anything useful. The exceptions to this are the music industry (which doesn't pay well enough to buy off reviewers) and the restaurant review industry (because reviews of this nature are cheap to generate and there are lots of restaurants to choose from in most places - there's no weight to the restaurant's marketing budget).

That article got tl;dr when he started whining about the quality of reviews. I'm more likely to listen to hoi polloi's reviews than professional ones as they are more relevant to me. "Don't get a room at the back because there's a brothel next door" is something relevant and only a normal punter would make that type of comment. Those are the nuggets I look for - yeah, there's plenty of fake reviews and stuff but they're mostly obvious and as you are reading more than one review you ignore the outliers. Sometimes people have a bad experience but if loads of people had a bad experience and it's more than just - 1 star, no tomato sauce on table - it becomes informative.

General Mackevili wrote:Here is someone asking business owners in Siem Reap to exchange reviews on Trip Adviser:



"I know a lot of people may not agree with this but would any business owners be open to a Trip Advisor swap? PM me if you are. Many people who have experience with them will understand the frustration in business's being held hostage to Trip Advisor. PM me if interested. Thanks "

The feedback she received was not great.

With a pic like that, there's surely some way she could get positive reviews b b b j

Pretty wild business are suing/ pressuring negative reviewers. Then again, in US anyhow, you can litigate over anything.

bvanfossen wrote: ↑Sat Aug 18, 2018 9:12 pm Pretty wild business are suing/ pressuring negative reviewers. Then again, in US anyhow, you can litigate over anything.

Its 2018 the concept of free speech has flown out the window.