> Unfortunately, we are addicted to having someone filter products and services for us, even if they are manipulated.

I don't think I'm addicted, I just don't know what else to do. How would you recommend I evaluate a product or service before buying it, if I don't personally know someone who can give a recommendation?

I do try to look at trusted professional review sites where possible (The Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc), but that only works for certain types of popular products.

Very much this.

Reviews are the worst way of figuring out where to eat without prior knowledge, except for all the other ways we have tried.

In a totally uniform space, even the smallest thing to help you stand out is enough to make first-order decision making latch on to the small thing. I suppose more advanced decision making would do some intentional exploration of the uniform space.

For many things, it just doesn't matter because all the options are basically fine, or they're cheap enough that the occasional dud isn't a big problem. When I want a local business, I just get whatever's nearby. Sometimes I look at reviews to make sure it's not a complete scam, which it never is. But I'm not going to pick one over the other because of a different number of stars on some site.

Say you're on vacation with a group of friends in a different country/city and looking for a nice restaurant one night. How do you choose where to go?

Fakespot is my go-to for some kind of signal to noise for real vs. fake reviews.

Example results include a letter grade, and a few fortune cookies of content like:

Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 58.7% of the reviews are reliable.

This product had a total of 511 reviews as of our last analysis date on Jul 19 2020.

Semi-private groups. You can join the relevant channel on discord/elements/facebook group. Avoid too big communities and you most likely will get better reviews than other places.

Even if the reviews weren't fake, most people just don't share my taste, or at least, aren't very discerning, or are complaining about something other than food and service.

We have poor to mediocre sushi restaurants here in Raleigh, NC if you judge them by the quality of their fish. Now, I'm not saying I'm a sushi connoisseur, but I've been to high end sushi restaurants in major cities (Atlanta, NYC, LA, Miami) and I know what we're getting here isn't even close to premium. But people review some of our restaurants and say "this is the best sushi I've ever had."

But you know, you go to these restaurants and see what most people order and they are rolls with insane amounts of sweet sauce on them and sure, they are pretty to look at, but if you're looking for say, an edible piece of Uni here, you aren't going to find it.

This is a country where people think Olive Garden is good Italian after all.

So anyway, I ignore the star reviews and try to find a review where someone took a few minutes to describe what they liked and disliked. One or two reviews like that are way more valuable than the ratings and it's usually pretty easy to spot the fakes.

Specific example. This place has mediocre sushi, a menu that hasn't changed in years, and their service is often slow:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/yuri-japanese-restaurant-cary

But they treat us like family. I'd never have found that out from Yelp reviews. No, on Yelp you find people complaining that they don't offer BOGO or the parking lot. Other people say it's the best sushi they've ever had. You won't find a review that says "typical neighborhood Japanese restaurant where they treat regulars like family. The service can sometimes be slow and it's not premium fish, but there's a variety of competently made sushi, and decent selection of non-sushi Japanese and Korean menu items. After a few times here, they'll probably start comp'ing you dessert."

Here's a Yelp review from another Japanese restaurant in the area:

> I used Uber Eats to get delivery and it was delicious. Sushi is generally really good or really bad. Not much in between. The disposable chopsticks were the cheapest I've ever seen. Those could definitely be improved.

That's a 5-star review. I mean, come on.

See also: rotten tomato audience scores.

> I know what we're getting here isn't even close to premium. But people review some of our restaurants and say "this is the best sushi I've ever had."

But the fish could be less than premium and still be the best sushi that person has ever had.

That could be a truthful, honest review.

True, but such reviews are often prefixed with "I lived in Japan and ..."

Unfortunately the comment reeks of some classism (though I share the sentiment). When you ain't got the money to travel to find good food or have a nice meal, it's no surprise people like the consistency of a chain restaurant and have their minds blown when the finally try something from a completely different region and have no frame of reference for flavors. I remeber spending my meager savings in college to try Indian, Thai, and even New York-style Chinese as an adult. It was quite scary to know if I'd like it, and I was even a bit afraid to try new dishes on my budget, or a different restaurant of the same style in the same town because I found something I liked. Luckily a developer salary eventually allowed me to open up to trying waay more foods.

I do however feel it's really odd for restauranteurs to feel the immediate need to tailor flavors for the entire menu to the local palate as if people could never dare eat a pepper or something.

When I was in my younger 20s I thought/said some of those same things. People saying how this was the best croissant they’ve ever had and so on, while I’m rolling my eyes thinking “oh come on, this can’t even be called a croissant” simply because I’ve been lucky and privileged enough to (1) eat “real” croissants from living in France and (2) have the time to watch tv/read books about how to make the perfect croissants from scratch and having the time to do so.

At some point I found the r/gatekeeping Reddit and realized what an insufferable asshole I was being.

I find rotten tomato audience scores very informative. Especially when combined with the critic scores.

It essentially gives a 'low-brow' and 'high-brow' rating of a movie. And depending on my mood and who I am watching with, that is very useful information.

The example I've always used is that if somebody uses the words "spicy tuna" in their review of a sushi restaurant, I don't want their rating to affect my view of the restaurant at all. Similarly, someone who goes to a really fancy restaurant for the first time in their life and complains about portion size. Their experiences are valid and helpful to some people, but totally irrelevant to me.

Waraji over by the fairgrounds was always my favorite sushi (and Japanese food in general) place in Raleigh. It fairly traditional, so not swimming in sauces and cream cheese while also having some more ... and they have some really good sashimi, too. I wouldn't say it can compete with truly high-end places that I've been to but still it's quite good and prices are reasonable.

I moved away from Raleigh about a year ago and I miss it.

Waraji is off Duraraleigh near Glenwood. It’s pretty good. A nice neighborhood Japanese restaurant for N Raleigh folks with above average fish. Did you mean Tsune maybe?

Sorry I was turned around, been a while since I was in Raleigh but I meant Waraji on Duraleigh in that little strip mall. I'll always have a soft spot for Sushi Tsune, too, though.

Hey did you ever go to 35 Chinese Restaurant (it was just a little further down the street from Yuri in that bank building)? I've been trying to find where they moved to and have not been successful.

I did. Was the only non-Chinese appearing person there. :-) It's been closed for years and I just assumed went out of business. Great sichuan dishes. The cooks there were not shy with chili peppers.

They had apparently moved to somewhere in Morrisville but I never saw them again after they closed down their Kildaire Farm Road location :(

Hey thanks for that recommendation btw, we’re moving out to Raleigh in January and my girlfriend loves sushi. This should help us to at least get a new regular sushi place!

It's actually in Cary so may be out of the way for you. There's a lot of options in Raleigh proper. I'm sure you can find something comparable that's in your neighborhood. Welcome to the area!

Why is it so hard to get good sushi fish outside of major metros? Doesn’t it all get deep frozen and transported like that anyway?

I suspect the same reason it's fairly difficult to get high quality sushi fish as a regular consumer, the high end markets buy it all up.

But you also have the problem that OP described where people literally have no idea what quality actually taste like so they can get away with selling mediocre fish. Nearly all fruit in the United States is another example. My cousin by marriage was born abroad and he absolutely refuses to eat his favorite fruit, mango, because so much of it is outright trash and even a "good"mango sucks in comparison

You can most certainly find them if you want them and it's a fruit that is at least somewhat cultivated locally. Try peaches when they're really in season, which only seems to be a few weeks a year. I've had them right after picking from a farm in the Bay Area but I'm sure Georgia and other peach-growing areas have access to this as well. I don't know if I'll ever find peaches that give me the experience I had of biting into peaches as juicy and flavorful as those.

Or, try apples in a place that actually grows a large amount and diversity of apples. In season, you can walk into some grocery stores and find 20+ varieties that all actually taste unique.

Wait what? I grew up in Miami and ate mangos off the tree. I've also had store bought mango and Ataulfo (Champagne) mangos from Mexico. I don't think I'm missing anything with the store bought mangos. So I think that's a bad example.

But, there's a variety of pineapple you can only get only in Hawaii that's way better. And I've only ever sourced really good key limes from friends and family trees in Florida.

Store bought tomatoes are also usually shit, but you can get ones from the farmers markets and road-side stands.

I can't specifically speak to mangoes since I haven't tried them in that many places, but melons in the United States are outright terrible in comparison to anything I had when I lived in Japan. They cost more but you're pretty much guaranteed quality. A relatively inexpensive melon in Japan might be about 10 bucks but its going to be as good as the best melon you can get in the crap shoot at the grocery store. When you start moving up in price the melons basically become so good that they are an out and out replacement for any kind of high end dessert. Theres no need for ice cream, yogurt, honey, etc because the melon is just that good.

What kind of melon? We have fantastic watermelon here if you get it in-season and local and I've been pretty happy with cantaloupe and honeydew. A lot of problem is Americans have no clue what in-season fruit is and don't buy local.

NC has a bounty of fruit and vegetables available locally grown:

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/central-north-carolina-planting...

"Melon" (メロン) in Japan always means honeydew. $100 is a perfectly normal price for a high-end melon (Yubari etc) and the record is over $20000.

https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-melons-cost-price-s...

That said, the pricy melons are usually bought as gifts, not eating yourself. Compare with eg. high-end whiskey.

I'm very happy with my $3 honeydew in season so I don't think I want to ruin that by having $100 melon. Ignorance is bliss!

(I'm also pretty happy with $30 bourbon compared to what single-malts are up to these days.)

I miss fruits in general in japan. It’s one of those things I’m willing to pay a premium for because they are just that much better. I can’t eat honey dew and cantaloupe in the states anymore.

Eat a mango from India or Pakistan (in the summer) before you die. Hard to find in the US unfortunately, but you'll realise that the mangoes you're familiar with taste like tree bark.

No idea, and I'm kinda afraid to look into it. I stopped going out to restaurants for like a year after I read Kitchen Confidential.

>I'm dying for an alternative to the 5-star review

Trusted source, e.g. particular friends/family/reviewers. I've had far better experiences trusting one knowledgeable person than 100s of anonymous reviewers.

It would honestly be so nice to just rate a bunch of restaurants (or anything, music would be really nice) and have it spit out recommendations like “people with really similar taste to yours also like x,y,z”

This was literally the rationale behind the relaunch of reviews in Google Maps in 2010-11, and what you describe was exactly the internal demo that got the project staffed and funded. I'm not sure how much of it still exists, but for a while, when searching on maps, there were little tags on recommended places that said something like "recommended because people like you also liked X".

That project never really reached its full potential for other reasons, but it turns out that even with a lot of data, it's hard to make big gains in ranking over just using the aggregate of all users. The intersection of two people's tastes is sort of surprisingly not very helpful.

It's present for me as a % match to a restaurant I'm a regular at back home. Signals I have seen in this are menu item similarity, photo count by similar reviewers, and more basic metadata.

It didn't really translate well to visiting Japan, but does great when in a new metro and not having any personal recommendations to go off.

Good to know. I remember the Tokyo team working on menu item extraction back then, hopefully they managed to make it work. I don't believe we were looking at photo count at all - probably user submitted photos weren't a feature on Maps at the time.

The cross city problem is one of the things I've looked at a lot (I actually wrote a design doc for it at a different company). Even with really good coverage in New York/San Francisco/London/Tokyo due to our teams being based there, it was hard to get significant personalized ranking improvement. Maybe it's better now that they have a lot more data.

The one area where I have had success with this approach is with music. Various services will have public playlists that random listeners have put together. If I find a list that has a number of songs I like on it, there's a good chance I'll find something new I like on it that had never been suggested by one of the algos.

Google maps does this, for me at least. If I look at a restaurant in the app, it'll give a little XX% match score based on their algorithmic impression of my taste.

You used to be able to do searches like this with facebook graph, right from the search field.

"Restaurants liked by people who like x and y and z"

It's almost like... there's a demand for professional critics.

As if, all problems can't be solved by building websites connected to databases.

Strange.

There's a demand for quality information about a place.

Professional critics may help with that, but they could suck at that, too. It's pretty common for them to echo common thought so they don't get considered a moron by the community of professional critics.

If you want to run a business that is professional criticism, my feedback to you is that while I'm in the market for quality information (so I pay the WSJ and the Economist), I won't pay for what you're talking about.

I would probably pay for a timely recommendation from a friend at 100x what I'd pay for a professional opinion. Maybe I'd pay like 5 cents for a professional opinion. Hope that helps.

I remember before online reviews were a thing, tv shows would make fun of how consistently out-of-touch critics were. Particularly those who who judge film or food.

I mean because a lot of critics were hopelessly out of touch. I don't fault them because they were part of a community that rewarded that behavior but evaluating a restaurant like it's an interactive art exhibit didn't help anyone except foodies find cool places to eat.

There was absolutely zero chance that a restaurant that made spectacular food but didn't do anything novel would even be on their radar.

Websites connected to databases of aggregated professional critics works pretty well, for example metacritic.com.

Removing names and ratings could work. Recreate the experience of overhearing good or bad things about a place and then draw your own conclusion. Sort by recency since you don't have to account for ratings. Then maybe you see one like "the service improved a bit since 2 months ago".

I have two tricks.

1) ignore 1 and 5 star reviews. This filters out the gut reactions, and the 2s and 4s reviews are generally a lot more level-headed and informative

2) pick an area with a good density of restaurants. Just go there and go into whichever is busy

I'm shocked that anyone even pays attention to online reviews, given how bad and unreliable they are. Why would you trust random people to tell you if something is good or not? Name one example online where the aggregated opinions of randos ever successfully produced a signal of quality. At best crowdsourced ratings and voting can surface popularity but never quality.

There _is_ an end in sight. It is becoming increasing dangerous for publishers who host the reviews, and users to write them. There have been a few high profile defamation suits here in Australia.

Would not normally link to life hacker, but it has a good summary of the situation here is Aus.

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/02/is-it-legal-to-post-a-...