That's exactly the analogy I thought of when I first saw TripExpert:
They aggregate professional reviews for hotels, restaurants, and things-to-do. The list, however, does skew heavily towards Michelin-star establishments, so it's not the site to find excellent hole-in-the-wall places.
when myspace et al started to pop, web 2.0, dynamic webpage interactions was the fastest way to heaven, now it seems we read the map upside down.
ps: maybe we're rediscovering how mobs are bad
The web is a great place to be uninformed or even deceitful, I strive to be cognizant of this.
People (and I at times) complained how institutions were imposing too much on whatever content (articles, music, movies). Without their curating effect, everything goes. Some say it's better because now you're sure you'll never miss a great thing that would have been killed by some radio or studio. But I'm less and less convinced of that.
Wow really? I stopped using RT and moved to IMDB, because critic reviews on RT are so bad.
I think there's a solution that would help the problem a bit though. Have two tiers of reviewers. For example, on TripAdvisor, the first tier would include everyone, similar to what you have right now. Second tier would be an aggregated number by "gold" reviewers. To qualify, a gold reviewer would need to have:
- More than N number of reviews
- An individual review would only count if it was more than a minimum number of words
- Let users mark reviews as helpful or not helpful. A gold user will need to be above a threshold for percentage of helpful vs not helpful reviews, with a minimum number of helpful reviews.
Amazon already marks some reviewers as being, for example, a "top 1000 reviewer". What I'd like to see is for those top tier reviewers' reviews to be broken out as a separate score.