We checked her rating and it's 4.5 or so. But it's funny, she looks like a deadbeat here because of more discerning/critical NYC Uber drivers who gave her 4 stars 50% of the time.
Their yelp reviews are completely unreliable, everything is 4 or 5 stars. I'm used to Chicago where even a great restaurant can have 3 stars because everyone is so picky, and the 4 or 5 stars are reserved for the truly extraordinary.
I find Yelp so strange with complaints about how someplace that really doesn't do someone's favorite food style gets some stupid reviews.... or they wish a place was more like a place that is 3x more expensive (how is that fair?). I just have no clue where anyone is coming from.
We had a Neapolitan pizza place open up in in our neighborhood. Great ingredients, amazing Neapolitan pizza. It was inundated reviews complaining about how thin the crust was and floppy the pizza sometimes is. .... they were basically complaining it wasn't some fast food style pizza place where they could stuff their face.
Eventually their ratings did recover and they've got reasonable reviews now, but ... people are dumb. I need some elitist type review system I think ;)
Maybe yelp and other review sites have changed but I've given up on them for a while.
Then you shouldn't "ask" random people you don't even know. That elitist type review system is anything from a newspaper with an established critic, to a Michelin Guide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Guide
These days, reviews on all platforms are more useful as a way to avoid genuninely awful places. As someone else said, ignore the average rating, but check a few comments to see if there's a consistent negative theme.
https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-thumbs-rating-system...
That's ridiculous, and only helps inflation to be normalized. For me, I've found it means it is hard to give credit for truly exceptional service. When I have to give 5s to those that just do the job like I wanted, I have few options to highlight when someone truly goes above and beyond.
3 stars in LA crushes 5 stars in other cities in the US.
And yes, I’ve lived 10 years in the Bay Area and the Chinese food pales in comparison.
Seafood: Newport Seafood(SGV). The restaurants listed above are decent for the Bay Area with Mayflower a notch or two below.
Best Taiwanese street food: Sin Ba La (Arcadia). Southland Flavor Cafe(Cupertino)
Lastly, in LA, the 626 Night Market is lots of crazy street food.
(Bistro Na is great too.)
My favourite is "Oriental Canteen" near South Kensington station. At lunchtime I would order takeway, and then go browse a neighbouring bookshop. One day, as I was heading back the manager (who was rude on the best of days) just wordlessly held the bag with my lunch out the window so that I just grabbed it from her hands without even setting foot in her restaurant.
An excellent combination of impoliteness and efficiency for busy people who are there to exchange money for food rather than to make friends.
And I agree with how you feel about the Oriental Canteen. A really inexpensive place to get a quick meal. Can’t expect much more from it.
I reckon the food there is pretty good quality, especially by London standards. Though the menu is pretty basic. At least that was my assessment 10 years ago when I lived there.
* jiaba: for taiwanese food
* orient: best dimsum
* joyluck: good hotpot
Ratings generally have become nonsensical. Between paid reviews, influencer reviews, bot-generated reviews, one-dimensional reviews that confuse multi-dimensional experiences, friends-and-family reviews, bucket reviews where you can't tell which product of a range is being reviewed (Amazon...), and hostile fake reviews, reviews have become all-but useless.
FWIW I had to pick a removals company recently, and I crossed one company off my shortlist when I found they used a suspect ratings company for their review listings. It's possible they were fine, but any company that pays to hide or remove bad reviews may easily not be.
I'm not sure if it's even possible to create a reliable independent review system. It might seems like a trivial problem, but given all the issues it's actually incredibly hard to get it right.
I really wish that google maps, yelp etc. would have 2 or 3 categories being
Food, Service and Facilities
5 stars are just too simple, i feel the same way about Netflix thumbs up and thumbs down. Are we really so fucking simple minded that we can't handle nuanced ratings ?
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." -- Yogi Berra
If I have to wait one hour to get the food, that is detrimental to the experience in my opinion
Curt, even surly service is pretty much trademark for Chinese/Vietnamese restaurants in my mind. I find the notion of "good service" actually a little overbearing sometimes honestly
Now, white people not realizing that different cultural norms are at play and calling Chinese waiters rude, now THAT is definitely deserving of contempt.
Find people you trust. Follow their reviews. Use socially gathered reviews as indicators when all else fails, and understand that half of them are probably worthless.
Generally we need to stop this because it's a major culprit in turning our world into an exhausting, low-trust, paranoid slog. Already, I mistrust non-OSS computing devices with their mystery-meat forced updates and non-removeable apps and barrage of legal agreements. If current trends hold, I'll have to second-guess my fridge because it's also serving a grocery-conglomerate, or the insurance company, my car is serving the insurance company and the state, my toilet works for pharma, and my washer and dryer... well, it goes on like that.
Constant wariness and justified cynicism are exhausting and dehumanizing and will do their part to sap an entire society. We know how this goes in the case of corrupt illiberal states, but ending up in that same place via a corrupt corporate culture/state is also possible, happening as we speak even, and halting that should be seen as another layer of defense for the liberal order.
People don't care unfortunately. Services are convenient and offer a better bang for the buck in the sort term. At some point though you lose your job and your music library is gone, you have nothing to watch because everyone streams and thus the movie/show selling market was never forced to solve it's copyright issues. You have no car because it was leased and you have no place to stay because the landlord kicked you out when you missed a rent( and buying an apartment or a house is crazy expensive across the board for some reason I still don't understand).
>Do we want to live in a world where every device is a black box that's only reparable by "authorized" personnel, where some hobby-level engineering skill won't help you prevent a 1$ dishwasher repair from costing 100$? Where every appliance comes with a plan, favors a "platform" and will make your life a headache if you disagree, serves you but also who knows how many other masters and economic agendas, and inexplicably goes dark because bankruptcy, bugs, hacks, your guess is as good as mine?
We need to find a way to make manufacturing electronics cheap. The cat is out of the bag and electronics and software will become part of everything. Maybe a smart fridge is a stupid idea now but it might make sense in a different context. I think Japan has been big on various home automation for many decades now before sv decided to reinvent the wheel but the cases I read about were much more respecting and user-controlled.
>Constant wariness and justified cynicism are exhausting and dehumanizing and will do their part to sap an entire society. We know how this goes in the case of corrupt illiberal states, but ending up in that same place via a corrupt corporate culture/state is also possible, happening as we speak even, and halting that should be seen as another layer of defense for the liberal order.
There is no liberal order anymore. Have you noticed how everything today is tense? Like every interaction has to be within very narrow and at the same time arbitrary limits? How everything even slightly political turns into a shitshow and not just online. Everyone has to be super careful of his/her personal ratings and there is no room to vent off and do your own thing because if society finds out it will tear you apart.
Connected straight to your smartphone without a server in the middle or not connected to the internet at all. E.g. make your bathtub automatically fill up with water at your preferred temperature on a specified time every day and then maintain that for x amount of time. Flush it automatically after that time if you haven't pressed a button manually. I could see coming home after work and jumping straight to the bath being convenient and this setup doesn't even need connectivity.
Maybe some stuff could connect with each other only via LAN. E.g. night/day sensors that will turn the outside lights on when there isn't enough sunlight. Or a monitoring panel( basically a tablet) that will tell you if your fridge is struggling to keep the temperature down( maybe the underside needs cleaning). That could also be used to create various profiles for your smart lightbulbs so you can get the exact type of light that you want. Slowly increasing in luminosity to wake you up or getting a red led-like light profile for when you want to watch a movie. Maybe a more blue oriented light to help suppress melatonin when you have to stay late. A coffee maker( using regular grounded coffee, not capsules) will notify you when the internal coffee storage is low. I hate it when I run out of coffee without realizing it and I have to leave the house early in the morning without any caffeine.
The possibilities are there but those that make these devices need to look and listen to how people actually live instead of just trying to impress with useless and dangerous gimmicks or try to get extra money by extracting data.
I find all of the seeming incoveniences are often interaction points, chances to bump with the world around us. Ran out of coffee? ... hmm, dig out an old stash of tea (it may even taste better), or stop by a coffee house, maybe meet a love of your life, or just live a 'different' day.
On the other hand, commute/traffic jam is indeed life-wasting -- it would even upset the smart bath-tub.
Notice that e.g. on the coffee example I specifically didn't suggest ordering coffee automatically for you or something. I buy fresh grinded(is that the right word?) coffee myself that I buy from a local coffee shop so all I would want is a reminder-maybe a specific text file where I input the stuff that I need to buy and the coffee machine adds coffee on it automatically. Then I can sync that file to my phone when I go shopping( maybe a couple of QR codes?).
Anyway the point of home IOT for me would be to get ease the mental load of keeping up with the house and maybe save some time with e.g. the bath tub( maybe if you decide to connect the system to your smartphone with e.g. a key exchange via lan you could tell the bath tub to extend the time that it keeps the water ready).
Services are indisputably a good thing and they are absolutely the way forwards. There is no reason for anybody to own much of anything and with global middle class approaching 4 billion it's simply not possible for the extremely wasteful concept of "ownership" to survive. Metering is the only way forwards besides catastrophe.
> Already, I mistrust non-OSS computing devices with their mystery-meat forced updates and non-removeable apps and barrage of legal agreements.
You've stumbled upon the actual issue which is nothing more than compelled business (in Europe and Asia) and what I guess the US calls a "coercive monopoly" [1]. The fundamental problem with Apple's App Store is that there is no reasonable alternative. Individuals and businesses which purchase IPhone devices are forced to do business with Apple if they want to actually utilize those devices to their full potential. Similarly developers who wish to provide services around IPhones have no choice but to do business with Apple.
> We know how this goes in the case of corrupt illiberal states, but ending up in that same place via a corrupt corporate culture/state is also possible, happening as we speak even, and halting that should be seen as another layer of defense for the liberal order.
Ironically, if you want to see a government who gets this "right" take a look at China. Chinese governments have moved aggressively to prevent monopolies and the laws were modified ten years ago to draw a clear distinction between a market (where all businesses interact freely and there is fair competition) and a platform (where a single business dictates virtually all the economic terms). This, along with the relaxed IP framework, is why the Chinese market is much more competitive and dynamic than anything else going on out there. At this point I don't think anybody seriously expects America's ultra-right-wing Supreme Court to break Apple's monopoly, but earlier this year there were a lot of indicators suggesting that Apple's coercive practices were not welcome [2]. (Though this issue might solve itself if Apple's market share in China continues to plunge.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercive_monopoly
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/business/china-apple-app-...
Also, I like the idea that it's not services themselves that are the problem, but rather platforms being used to force them down people's throats. Coming up with policy to discourage services seems much more conceptually difficult than rediscovering serious antitrust, a simple oldie-but-goodie.
On the other hand, I love perusing those 3-star restaurants as I find so many hidden gems covered in the tears of LLC owners and bored hostesses.
If I were a lesser man, I totally am, I would write a book concerning that social theory called the Star Divide.
I dislike systems that end up being like this: 1 star = -8, 2 star = -4, 3 star = -2, 4 star = -1, 5 star = 0.
I need to be able to express when things are good as well as when things are bad. When everyone and everything has a 4.5-star average rating, there's no way to tell when anything stands out as being better than similar things. You can only see when things are significantly worse.
Someone above mentioned due process. I second that. What we have right now is no where near robust enough.
So, I will have a friendly conversation with someone. The human means, ways, methods work well and are time tested, production proven.
5 stars, unless it is really bad, and they do not have some cause for that being the case.
Honestly, the income is thin, many of these people are working their asses off, and is that not harsh enough?
Not much to like in all of it.
Some removed without explanation and assumed it is because they competed with Alphabet in some way.
Scary to think two or three companies effectively have total control over your digital business and you have basically zero rights without any course for appeal, you're absolutely at the mercy of good will if there is any (often none).
Regulation is needed here, the old 'regulate thy self' is a sham soundbite, proven time and time again.
I guess gig unions could be a thing? Can we build apps for worker coordination? What if there was a way for all Uber drivers to coordinate global strikes?
We should be open for regulation that protect the rights of workers to unionize.
Uber can press a button in response to a strike and send out a push notification to potential scabs offering a bribe to cross the digital picket line. The strikers both don't know and can't efficiently tell who scabs are, and as such can't put pressure for solidarity on them.
Edit: looks like this is now legally permitted, https://tcf.org/content/report/virtual-labor-organizing/
”Due to a little-known, but far-reaching change made by the NLRB last year, virtual labor organizing by employees is now sanctioned by law in many situations and could possibly be transformative in the workplace ... NLRB recently reversed years of legal precedent that allowed employers to ban the use of workplace e-mail for organizing or communicating about the terms and conditions of work. Last year, in its decision in Purple Communications, Inc., the NLRB emphatically endorsed the right of employees to use workplace e-mail for such activities. It held that “employee use of email for statutorily protected communications on nonworking time must presumptively be permitted by employers who have chosen to give employees access to their email systems.” The NLRB added that: “Employees’ need to share information and opinions is particularly acute in the context of an initial organizing campaign.”
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_SF17_Case_Studies_02_Nidan_...
What scares me even shitlesser is that the legislative and regulatory momentum is pointing in the wrong direction. Governments and political movements are calling on platforms to policing their users more tightly along various axes. They are doing little or nothing to help folks act independently on the net.
I share your intuition that any good solution will involve government action. But if we just shout "there oughtta be a law" then law we get will do the opposite of what we want.
A torrent remote app would never be allowed on the IOS app store, but going to https://remote.vuze.com and pairing your Vuze app can't be banned....
It's also unfortunate that web pages have the disadvantage that they have the browser UI around them, so it reduces the space available to the page versus an app, and web pages don't have permissions that apps do like sending notifications. Some people view this as a good thing and I tend to agree, but it's still a big disconnect that my weather app can send me a notification saying there is a tornado in my area whereas a weather website needs me to actively be checking it.
On iOS, this is literally a two-tap process (share sheet -> add to home screen). I can't speak for the masses, but the reason I don't do it more often is because so many web apps are just bad on mobile. Slow, poor rendering, no attention paid to extended usability...
When you visit a proper PWA multiple times, your browser is supposed to notice and ask you if you want to save it to the Homescreen.
But you're right, web on mobile is still miserable in general.
I just pinned a few sites I use.
Or worse. This reminded me of this recent comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17694032
The paragraph in question:
> After an agent had been terminated, their punishment points would decay over time until such a time they reached zero (or another configurable threshold depending on how desperate the company was for warm bodies), at which time they would be sent an e-mail to their personal e-mail (which was collected during the application process), inviting them to “re-apply”. Being an early telephony company we also would send them a robo-call with the “good news”. This process was known as a “life-cycle” and it was common in certain labor markets for employees to have many such lifecycles.
Seriously, give it a read and cry, if you haven't...
I can't help but think of a platform like that but international and for all jobs. Hellish reality.
Because the problems that need to be solved aren't technical ones and won't be solved with technology. They are meatspace-based cultural, economic and social problems.
Not sure how to get general users to rate with 1-star = bad, 3-stars = ok, and 5-stars = great. Sounds like a social engineering problem. It may be more reliable to use trained evaluators, like the system used by Consumer Reports or the Michelin Guide.
... except China. In other words, China is just stealing EVERYTHING FROM EVERYONE and not even Apple or Google can stop it from happening.
This article is about pushing Google and Apple to lower percentages -- perhaps 5% from what once was 30% and that these two giants are the dangerous entities in the world? Let me know when Google and Apple shut down the wikipedia or block news about Tienanmen Square or block pictures of Winnie the Poo.
Until then I hope Apple and Google get stronger. If you want a balance against the central state, then capitalism might be your best option.
Companies in China do fine without the Google App Store.
I couldn't disagree more with this sentiment. The answer is not to intentionally sabotage competitive market forces that are driving better outcomes for consumers. That's the equivalent of a jobs program. If you can't compete, you don't compete. Businesses are inherently risky and some people will lose.
If an inordinate number of sellers are failing or struggling, that reflects a failed assessment of market risk and ill-informed decision-making. The answer is to improve the decision-making capability of participants or otherwise improve the social safety net for people who are facing new realities of economic obsolescence.
Ideally, the 5-star rating system should work like:
- 1-star means Awful
- 2-star means Bad
- 3-star means OK
- 4-star means Good
- 5-star means Excellent
- 1-star means Couldn't be worse
- 2-star means Awful
- 3-star means Bad
- 4-star means There was a problem
- 5-star means OK
Being more accepting of 4-star or 3-star ratings is not sabotaging competitive market forces; it's trying to use the 5-star rating system like it should be.
I'm definitely not going to voluntarily get worse food so I can protest the idea of ratings.
And as long as that's the case, there will always be pressure for people and services that aren't "Excellent" to go for the 5 star anyway, and as long as they're going for it, there'll be a social pressure to provide it.
The problem isn't linguistic, it's game theoretic.
>I'm definitely not going to voluntarily get worse food so I can protest the idea of ratings.
Yeah, but most people (maybe including you) certainly will "voluntarily get worse food" if you consider the price difference sufficient. In a system where 3 stars means good or excellent it can be expected there will be a non-linear increase in cost and skill requirements to hit 4 or 5 stars. They will be rarer, likely less convenient, and certainly more expensive. For a special occasion sure, maybe you go for the very best. But in general many people will be perfectly happy with a lower starred establishment that is more affordable and convenient and still perfectly decent. Sometimes people just want to fill their stomachs for the purpose of continued survival in a reasonably pleasant fashion, not have a magical gourmet experience. Scale compression removes visibility for this basic tradeoff right?
I mean, we can even find a direct example of this in the food world right now: Michelin Stars. It's a 1 to 3 scale and even a single one is a big deal. But the standards necessary to qualify and maintain it are not cheap for the restaurant. I remember reading of a very nice restaurant in a more run down area of France that had earned a star, and were very proud of it, but ultimately decided to give it up because it resulted in them being priced out of the general range of locals. Conversely there is nothing bad about going to even a 1 Michelin star restaurant, it'll still be likely to be very good.
https://www.eater.com/2017/12/27/16821648/chef-returns-miche...
The reviewers need to have their own ratings statistically analyzed, so that their median rating is adjusted to 3 stars out of five for the purposes of averaging across multiple reviewers.
If you only rate things as 5 stars, you have no dynamic range. I want your reviews to all be 3 stars in the average I see.
Another optimization could be to change the aggregation function such that reviewers that rated well the same things I rate well, and who rate poorly the same things I rate poorly, and those reviewers I explicitly mark as having helpful reviews, would be weighted more heavily in the number I see. That would effectively filter out bots that rate their brand as 5 stars and competitors as 1 star, because that pattern is so dissimilar from normal consumer behavior. The bots see cheap white-label crap as 5-star because the recommendations of their fellow ratings-gaming spam-bots dominate their own aggregate rating. If you rate a microwave oven as 1-star because it shipped in 3 days rather than 2, I don't really want your reviews polluting my averages. If you rate a cheap-ass USB cable as 5-stars because it "works good i had no problems", I don't want your reviews polluting my averages. If you rate a USB charger as 1-star because it "Violates USB 3.0 spec and will probably burn your house down; I am an electrical engineer and here's how I figured that out..." then you're danged right I want that reviewer's reviews to have more weight.
I don't see how a system like that would be any more complex than Google's ranking algorithms for search. If they can discover the most useful sites and weed out SEO gaming attempts by analysis of links and traffic, so too could Amazon put an actually useful rating value on the products it ships, and so too could Uber show you what drivers and riders are really like.
My friends and I were recently discussing how we haven't had a bad experience in any restaurant in awhile. But now we are so used to really good restaurants that it is extremely rare to get amazed by any restaurant.
If we compare this to our experiences in pre-Yelp era, it was so exciting to discover an amazing restaurant. Sure we ate at a lot of mediocre restaurants but joy of finding something amazing was greater back then.
I am not sure what the solution is. Stop looking up ratings?
Same goes for app stores, what happens if google and apple ban you for whatever reason? Your company is screwed and you have no appeal or legal safeguards.
I'm scared shitless of "gig economy" platforms. I see a future where one or two platforms rise to the top and all jobs are handled through them. A bad rating can destroy your entire career. The platform will never forget, there will be no second chances.
Scary stuff. We as a society need to start thinking about how we rate people. Right now we all shop for that 5-star rating and punish anyone with 4. We need to mature beyond that as it grows increasingly impossible to maintain perfect ratings.
Regulation is a very very touchy subject, but if millions of people depend on your platform for their livelihood, you can't pretend to still exert arbitrary power of life and death over them with some $5/hr customer service drone trying to go over your case swiftly to meet a daily quota. We need real due process.