
‘The Shed at Dulwich’ was London’s top-rated restaurant. It didn’t exist - gk1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/12/08/it-was-londons-top-rated-restaurant-just-one-problem-it-didnt-exist/
======
pronoiac
Previously on the topic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861136)

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astebbin
To me, this suggests the value of professional food critics as well-known
sources of... well maybe not truth, but at least honest opinion.

It's easy to fake a crowd. It's a lot harder to impersonate a well-known
individual's trusted name.

~~~
tinymollusk
Depth (well-known individual who built their reputation over time) versus
Breadth (crowd).

We seem to increasingly incentivize breadth of appeal over depth. TV Shows
that appeal to the lowest common denominator, etc.

~~~
SheinhardtWigCo
Breadth makes more money.

~~~
kbenson
Depth competes on a different level. Depth works when a market becomes cheap
enough to cater to (or the market is so large that a small fraction is worth
it) that you get long tail economics. The benefit for the producer is less
cost petition. We're almost there with television. We're almost or possible
already there for some select markets for YouTube, but coming from the other
direction (high production vs low production).

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mc32
Is this surprising, that you can con gullible people into something. One
cannot reliably question every single thing for fear routine will allow a
false result from loose heuristics. Plus, many people are very trusting and
will be taken advantage of at one point or another in life, IRL or online.

If you put up enough effort, sure, you can trick people into believing all
sorts of near-realities.

The bigger story would be a review site complacent about fake reviews or
tacitly allowing fake reviews undermining people's confidence.

~~~
kbenson
I think the issue being highlighted is that the ratings sometimes have not
just little to do with the restaurant, but _nothing_ to do with it. To become
number one is something in itself. What happens afterwards (to not spoil it)
is something above that entirely, and while it plays into the narrative being
put forth, it goes well beyond what it needs to support that narrative and
expose quite a bit of hypocrisy.

Fashion is subjective, but there's supposed to by quite a bit more to
restaurants than just fashion, and I think it's obvious that sometimes there
isn't much more. This whole story says a lot about people. Whether you think
it says something about a certain type of people that you can look down on, or
about people in general and how our expectations can lead us to weird places
and inform our opinions much more than we would think, is up to the person
watching.

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zappo2938
“You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run
faster than the guy next to you.”

There is beefing up a steak house, however, inversely this can be a vector of
attack. If a restaurant has .2 or .4 star rating higher than the other
restaurants in its class they will do well. It is hard to give a restaurant 1
star without getting noticed. However, it is possible to get their rating to
drop a few small notches below their competition without getting noticed which
can badly hurt their revenue.

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twothamendment
I live in the middle of nowhere. I always see "news" headlines of the top 5
restaurants in the nearby town. I wish I could report them. There isn't a
single restaurant in that town or anywhere close. I'd love to tell Google to
never show me anything from those sites. They don't have news, but they do a
great job looking legit.

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ggm
You can't spoof into michelin, because michelin stand behind their name.

Tripadvisor has a huge buried EULA which basically says "nope: nothing to see
here don't blame me if its lies"

~~~
gonvaled
You can probably buy a spot in Michelin. Whether that happens frequently or is
accepted is an interesting question.

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yelnatz
Vice episode on how they managed to do it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8)

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code_duck
I have also observed that TripAdvisor seems to have rather poor fraud control
on their reviews.

Recently I was driving home after cutting a trip short due to health issues,
and then to compound difficulties, my car was overheating. I asked my
girlfriend to help me find a motel - I knew of one on the way back to town,
about 20 miles closer, and requested she look up reviews online. She told me
the one I was thinking of looked fine, and had several positive reviews
online. One even said “the best part about our trip to Colorado”, she quoted
as I parked and walked inside.

It turned out to be decidely _not_ the best part about anything in Colorado,
unless you are a Satanist who pairs a fondness for shabby 70s decor with an
aversion to cleanliness. I had already paid when I fully realized this, and
only spent 25 minutes at the hotel before I essentially fled in terror.

When researching how this could have happened, I found that Yelp gave this
motel only 1.5 stars, and had several reviews with similar stories, noting
things like how the clerk seemed to be on drugs and was wearing a large
pentagram necklace. This man looked somewhat like an elderly mixture of Frank
Zappa and Bowie with anorexia, and insisted on walking me to my room for
reasons unknown. I was not provided with a key, and the room had no way to
lock from the inside.

Google has mixed reviews for them, with some likely fakes standing out and
also reviews sourced from TripAdvisor. The TripAdvisor reviews are mixed as
well, with many glowing 5 stars reviews balanced by many 1 stars for a total
of 3 stars. Many of the 5 star reviews are defensive about the specifics of
other negative reviews.

I looked into this motel on FB, and found it had the highest rating there -
4.4 stars. Not a trace of anything negative. I was also able to find the
personal page of the man I talked to, who was cited as seemingly drug-addled
and pentagram-adorned in other reviews as well as my experience. His page
mentioned how his partner, owner of the motel, promoted him from clerk to
manager on their 30th anniversary as a couple. He had many pictures of their
satanic altars, references to demons, the pitbulls (referred to negatively in
reviews) being ‘possessed’, and pictures around the motel. I feel somewhat
lucky to have escaped.

So, in summary, Yelp had the most accurate reviews and presented the most
realistic picture. Facebook presented the motel as they would like to be seen.
Google and TripAdvisor are in between, showing equal amounts of true and false
reviews.

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dfee
The tenor in this discussion so far seems to be a bit on the condescending
side. Frankly, I'll pick it up for this guy. What an incredible job – and a
great reminder that marketing your service is often times more important than
the service itself.

Maybe it's the prankster in me, but I don't feel like this is the end of the
world – and it's not an indicator that the world is coming to an end.
Fundamentally, people follow the rules and trust structure. That's probably
why society can exist.

For the many people who don't have their glasses on, this was a brief glimpse
at reality.

I'd recommend watching the Vice video I found in another comment:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8)

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eksemplar
These things, while fun, are frankly rather scary to me. They show us how far
society has moved away from truth, in our value of other people’s opinions,
rather than the institutions that actually factcheck before they spread false
information.

If you watch the vidio in the vice article, they even open up their fake
restaurant and serve pre-processed “shit-foods” to an audience who then
willingly rates their powdered soup and frozen lasagna as above average.

Of courses I laughed at it and it’s certainly a well done troll, but it’s also
a microverse of how we ended up with a bunch of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers,
and, a reality tv star as president of the United States.

~~~
pensivemood
>flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers

Seriously. It hurts me to see the "anti-vaxxers" term thrown around so
loosely. There are very legitimate reasons for being skeptical of vaccine
research. Events like this appear quite frequently [1]. It is not at all in
the same league as "flat-earths".

[1] [https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/12/flaws-in-the-
cl...](https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/12/flaws-in-the-clinical-
trials-for-gardasil-made-it-harder-to-properly-assess-safety.html)

~~~
pintxo
Assuming that "flat-earthers" potential to cause harm is fairly limited, but
that "anti-vaxxers" potential to cause harm is rather significant - population
immunity comes to mind - I would rather say it hurts me to see the "flat-
earthers" term thrown around so loosely.

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Mikeb85
I will say, if nothing else, this guy will have a great career in marketing.
His shed's online presence was top notch, half the restaurateurs I know would
do well to emulate him.

~~~
maxbond
They put all their effort into looking legitimate and none of it into being
legitimate, which confers a certain advantage.

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Overtonwindow
SoDoSoPa

