
I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor - grahamel
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor
======
fasteddie
Similar to this, a few years back my then-roommates and I created a fake
restaurant at our apartment, named after the nickname we gave to our kitchen.
It was meant to be our own inside joke and we gave it a couple reviews
ourselves.

The 4.5 star review caused us to get some walkup traffic, at which point we
thought it was too real and canceled the experiment, although the page is
still live if you link to it through our review history.

The best was a group of young 20 somethings who showed up and were really
good-natured about the joke, so we invited them up for a beer and they dropped
us a 5-star review.

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frgtpsswrdlame
>The representative adds that "most fraudsters are only interested in trying
to manipulate the rankings of real businesses", so the "distinction between
attempted fraud by a real business, as opposed to attempted fraud for a non-
existent business, is important". To catch these people out, TripAdvisor uses
"state-of-the-art technology to identify suspicious review patterns" and says,
"Our community too can report suspicious activity to us." They then quote a
2015 study that found "93 percent of TripAdvisor users said they find the
reviews they read to be accurate of the actual experience".

If TripAdvisor can't catch out a restaurant which is entirely a farce how can
they pretend they're catching out real businesses who might be nudging their
results up a bit?

~~~
dawnerd
That’s why I just go right to the negative reviews. Usually points out right
away if the place is as it seems. Really helpful when booking hotels.

~~~
jonny_eh
You mean the negative reviews created by the competition?

~~~
jdavis703
Is that really a thing? Like you I also try to read the negative reviews. If
they're for dumb complaints like "the waiter had an attitude" or "the food
took too long to arrive" I ignore them. It's only when I see more serious
problems arising in a pattern that I'll discount the restaurant.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup. This applies for every popular site with reviews.

For other funny things with reviews, I have some experience with Polish
eBay/Amazon equivalent, Allegro. The following things are regular occurrences
there:

\- Employees of a seller creating fake accounts (and/or asking their friends
and family to do this) and "buying" things with payment on delivery in order
to leave 5-star reviews and positive comments. The things obviously never get
sent, so it costs only as much as Allegro bills the seller per item sold.

\- Clueless people leaving negative reviews because they're clueless. Like
e.g. a seller I know just got a 1-star review on quality and delivery time
with a comment that said basically "I got the merchandise and it's fine, but
I've been asking you for the invoice for two weeks and didn't get it". The guy
bought the product only a week ago, and had the invoice sent _twice_ already.

\- Sellers fucking up, getting negative reviews, then calling each of the
reviewers asking them to delete the negative review, and usually bribing them
with discounts or free items.

Reviews on Allegro are very high-stakes thing for sellers; just a few negative
ones can mean you lose a promoted spot or get your account suspended
immediately. Such situations can literally make or break a small business
seller. This leads to them reviews gamed to such absurd levels that you
basically can't trust them at all, if the seller is a company.

Now these are anecdotes for one site only, but given my experience on-line,
I'm pretty confident they generalize to anything popular with a review system.

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jdavis703
Fake restaurants aren't only a thing bored journalists create. I went to a
pop-up restaurant at a vegetarian food festival. The food and drinks were so
bland and terrible I can only imagine the man running the place was a scammer.

For example he was selling a "rasberry lemonade" in a beautiful glass jug with
fresh rasberry and lemon slices floating at the top. It looked delicious. The
only problem was the lemonade had been diluted by about 100:1 so it was
effectively over-priced water.

The fake "meat" was so terrible, he might as well should've just sold the
ingredients he made the meal with.

After loosing $14 on this meal I could only conclude this man just travels
around with his fake vegetarian restaurant scamming people.

~~~
dragonwriter
You are confusing “fake” with “low quality”.

~~~
jdavis703
No, I've been to low-quality, poorly run restaurants. This is like calling
"fake news" low-quality news.

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jknoepfler
It's a funny article highlighting a cute hole in TripAdvisor's ranking system.
TripAdvisor isn't being vile our misleading when they say they don't try to
catch fictitious restaurants.There were no real, negative reviews of the
restaurant, so it remained a perfect five with all very plausibly real
reviews.

What they should worry about is detecting fake positive and negative reviews
of real restaurants, which can cause businesses and diners a lot of pain and
diminish the value of TripAdvisor.

Kudos to the author for "hacking" the ranking system in an unexpected way!

I wonder if they caught any fake negative reviews of the shed, jealous of its
#1 spot...

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ainiriand
Well, congratulations on gaming a system based on trust. You can try to edit
Wikipedia too and make Steve Jobs chinese if you want.

~~~
bogomipz
Did you read the article?

Besides being part comedy sketch, it's also part sociological experiment and
part performance art.

It wasn't about gaming a system for financial gain in the least.

~~~
criddell
So you're saying making Steve Jobs Chinese on Wikipedia is a decent analogy?

~~~
mistercow
Only if you legitimately convince people that Steve Jobs is Chinese.

~~~
DKnoll
That should be pretty easy considering he was born in Shenzhen...

~~~
ibotty
How could he have gotten these great deals producing ipods when Apple was
really struggling, were he not speaking Chinese perfectly?

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pascalxus
A true entrepreneur. Bringing, sell first and build it later, to a whole new
level.

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chatmasta
Really cool story, but he never mentioned where he got the fake reviews that
propelled him to #1 in the first place. There was one mention of the original
“celebrity” endorsement, but what about all the reviews thereafter? Where did
those come from?

~~~
dgritsko
At the end of the section you referenced, regarding endorsements:

> So I contact friends and acquaintances, and put them to work.

I think that's all there is to it.

~~~
chatmasta
So he has thousands of friends and acquaintances? Or did each leave multiple
reviews?

~~~
grahamel
The screengrab[1] in the article show's only 96 reviews when the restaurant
got to #1

[1] [https://video-
images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1512580232417-n...](https://video-
images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1512580232417-no1edit.png?resize=916:*)

(edited to update the image and review count)

~~~
speps
> UPDATE 6/12/17, 17:12: After an eagle-eyed reader spotted that each mocked-
> up TripAdvisor screen shot contained the same number of reviews, we have
> edited the images so that the number of reviews match those in the actual
> screen shots and replaced two of the images.

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erickhill
The foot/egg shot nearly made me spew my beverage onto my monitor from
laughing.

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jonny_eh
I can imagine someone turning this into a heart-warming film.

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coldcode
Even funnier when he actually served food and people wanted to return.

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vxNsr
>UPDATE 6/12/17, 17:12: After an eagle-eyed reader spotted that each mocked-up
TripAdvisor screen shot contained the same number of reviews, we have edited
the images so that the number of reviews match those in the actual screen
shots and replaced two of the images.

Wait so the whole article is fake?

~~~
smsm42
No, what they are saying is that pictures that look like TripAdvisor
screenshots in the article are not real screenshots of TripAdvisor site, but
mockups re-created by the author. I guess this is for copyright reasons, since
TripAdvisor could plausibly claim copyright on the actual content of the site,
and given that the author is messing with them, it's best not to be legally
exposed.

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jccooper
I'm astonished a new entrant was able to make any dent at all. Mostly it's
impossible for newer or smaller entries to break into the top. They must have
some velocity weight that The Shed exploited.

All the social review sites have become review-farming contests, which makes
them unreliable on the consumer side and frustrating on the producer side, and
I don't know if that can be fixed. Yelp seems to do the best (at the cost of
discouraging a lot of legitimate users by making their reviews disappear), but
even so is not particularly good.

I think a curated review program, perhaps with a taste-matching algorithm like
Netflix, could work much better... if the economics can be worked out.

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handbanana
Epic. Tripadvisor is terrible for vetting places, so are google reviews, and
facebook reviews. Tripadvisor is big in the UK, more reliable review sites
like yelp don't have the adoption yet. Hopefully articles like this start to
change that

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sjclemmy
I haven’t laughed so much at one of these since p-p-p-PowerBook [0]

0:
[https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=10...](https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1016390)

~~~
Udik
I saw the pics of the 15 years old mock computer that was sent to the
scammers, and the first thing that came to my mind is: if the scammers had
kept it, they could make good money reselling it now as a piece of internet
lore. I guess the internet has corrupted us :).

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tmaly
I think trust is still a very challenging problem to solve in the online
realm.

Even if you can solve it, these types of things still have a very subjective
nature to them.

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zeep
that's not hard, they just let anyone rate stuff... just like
Amazon/Google/etc does... One day, you might get sued for doing it though...

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peterwwillis
Vice is what you get when you combine journalism, capitalism, and navel-gazing
college dropouts with no skills and lots of ambition. It's Tumblr for Medium.
It would be beautiful, if it weren't so blatantly terrible. In a world where
where startups with good ideas, talented people and lots of cash fail
regularly, these witless wonders turn garbage into viral gold. Kudos to them.

~~~
sincerely
I respect your bittnerness towards the world, but Vice is no different than
any of the other businesses that use easily accessible , low effort content to
subsidize their high effort work (for instance: Vice uses articles like “I did
everything Siri told me to for a week” to subsidize their video work, Buzzfeed
uses listicles to support their genuinely good longform journalism, and Comme
des Garçons uses the extremely boring “Play” sublabel to subsidize their
avant-garde, expensive runway shows)

