https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Farol_Bar_problem
He also talked about this on Mindscape
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/08/23/161-...
Instagram doesn't help -- gotta get a shot of me eating noodles at the hot new place! There's a new ramen shop in downtown San Mateo that has a 30-person line outside at all times... I can't imagine it's that much better than the half-dozen other ramen places within 3 blocks, but by god it's new, and anyway would people be lining up like this if it wasn't good? I better get in line too...
That’s why new restaurants hire people to line up outside.
Totally tangential but follow-ups on that psychology:
* some people would walk in and see the still mostly-empty bar and get fed up that they waited in line for "nothing". This was surprisingly few people though.
* some people would ask and buy just about any explanation - "oh that guy is new and still learning", "we had someone get in on a fake ID and got a fine the other day so the guys are just being careful" or whatever and the people would be glad they got in early to get a good spot.
* sometimes we'd slow down the bar staff a bit too so that there was a line to buy drinks and people were happier that they had to wait in line again - confirming their bias that they must have gotten in at the start of the rush.
* some people were wise to the scam and everyone who called us on it thought it was great. They often offered to have their buddies come through the line a few times in exchange for a free drink.
* for some reason when you let your buddies, regulars and off-shift staff cut the line and get in quick, the rest of the folks seemed more willing to wait in the line.
tl; dr - group psychology of humans is wierd.
Once I became an old fart, I started seeing these lines as a sign to move on. The question in my mind (at any age) was always "is the place worth waiting in line for?" But these days, I already know from years of experience that the answer is very likely "no".
Skipping the line has improved my nights out, though, because in looking for an alternative, I frequently find hidden gems and can enjoy them before the rest of the city discovers them.
This has been a process for me. I still occasionally succumb to the silliness, but for the most part when I see a line, my reaction is, "meh, I'm hungry/thirsty now; let's go somewhere else". One thing that's telling is that some of the places I already know I really enjoy rarely have lines or are completely busy.
And absolutely agree that you often find hidden gems that way. A lack of a line will often just mean the business is too inexperienced or honest to use some of the psychological manipulation practices the GP talks about.
Google is proving the central limit theorem by catering to the average.
It's one of the things that has reduced the usefulness of these tools.
Your search - "abcdfksosifjdjwkdkwotmdnwkqk" - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
Make sure that all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords. Try more general keywords.
————————-
“No results found on Google Maps
Try searching for something else or in a different area”
At least viewing the most recent comments and reading the comment that goes with it helps figuring out if it might be a decent place or not... at least sometimes.
But there's not really any alternative. Apple Maps can't show me things because it's missing the entries entirely. Yelp became useless years ago. I feel like we're going back in time because the best way to find local restaurants has become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations.
Search-based interfaces with ranking, controlled by someone else, are all screaming to be gamed and monetized. We should hate this but we don't.
Let's face it, that never stopped being the best way. There have always been problems with internet reviews, if only the ones inherent in the 1-5 star mechanism. But, it is very inconvenient to ask around for recommendations when you're (for example) hungry and passing through an unknown town or something. So I get why we need a source that isn't completely unreliable.
Often it’s a place a bit off the road or harder to find, but I’ve had as good luck or better vs the mapping tools.
I think they are trying to integrate their bard UI into search and it is killing the results.
At this point, I use google to search reddit in order to find organic results. Unfortunately, that will probably be taken over by spammers soon enough.
I'm grateful for places like Rumble and Twitter, where real news can be found. :)
And targets often have a Starbucks inside thier belly.
Google maps is still getting worse and worse though.
There's also a lot of brigading on Maps. You'll see 5 1-star reviews in a row, and realize they are either duplicate accounts or friends who are all reviewing the same experience.
For example some of my favorite Asian restaurants in the city are rated 3.5ish while Uber Eats is rated like 4.7. It leads me to believe a lot of people are rating Google Maps restaurants also based on service. One in particular
https://www.ubereats.com/ca/store/china-lan-lanzhou-beef-noo... (4.7)
https://goo.gl/maps/GnLmwJNRjBHP9UnN8 (3.9)
This place is awesome, and personally have experienced bad service but don't really care, so I do understand the Google Maps rating, but do find the whole rating system not helpful for me as I'm interested in good food and willing to accept bad service.
You're correct. This is a problem with ratings. You really have to read into them to see what they're complaining about or praising. This is true even for individual reviews, written solo. Many are unhelpful, or stuff that doesn't concern you.
One of the best examples I can remember is a venue that had 2-3 stars. However, all the negative reviews were like: "They have massive parties going hard late into the night... but my kids go to bed at 9:30, so 1 star".
If only. Its more like "these are the businesses that have paid me. They don't match what you want, but tough cookies."
Same with the much vaunted Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines. They stopped recommending stuff that you would like a long time ago, around the time everyone was trying to copy their recommendation engines, and started recommending stuff that makes the company more money.
A good restaurant directory - some exist for restaurant niches, but none in general - could clean up with non-obtrusive ads if the focused on completeness and accuracy with a fairly minor feature set. It would just require having enough capital and time to establish social trust.
Curating reviews is just broken, just like SEO has turned out to be. It is unavoidably gameable. Yelp seems like a zombie site. They are free-riding on their prior reputation and gradually spending it away to acquire revenue. When the reputation is gone, the revenue will be, also.
People must have read a different article than I did. This woman is finding tons of third-parties that are either posting fake positive reviews for money, or extorting businesses by writing bad reviews and offering to reverse them for money. She's looking for people who are trying to scam Yelp, or trying to scam businesses through Yelp.
But HN seems stuck in a narrative (for a decade, not new) that Yelp is some sort of organized crime syndicate, and refuses to budge.
I just mean that Yelp has chosen to filter and limit in addition to what I'm actually searching. It might be a conversion thing - if I have one really good match it's easier to decide than if they actually show me all 10.
But it means it's really really important to the business now to be that 1 that doesn't get filtered.
And THAT really increases the market for all these fake-review things.
> Dean said [Yelp's] notices validate her work, but also perfectly exemplify what she calls Yelp’s “whack-a-mole” approach ... she showed SFGATE several sketchy posts that she hasn’t mentioned in her videos — and which are still up and active.
> “I find it annoying, like, ‘You need me?’” she said. “... They’re a billion-dollar tech company that’s got teams of engineers and a trust and safety team.”
> ... Yelp said its automated recommendation software checked the 21 million reviews submitted last year for “quality, reliability and user activity” and had filed 75% into the “recommended” category, which are the reviews that figure most prominently on businesses’ pages and affect their star ratings. Of the remaining 25%, just 4% were removed by Yelp’s own moderators, 2% were removed by the reviewers themselves, and 19% were categorized as “not recommended reviews” — which don’t affect companies’ star ratings but are still accessible on businesses’ Yelp pages.
> In Dean’s mind, it’s not enough. She feels Yelp should better use account data to proactively identify problematic users and ban them altogether, and speculates that Yelp might be avoiding a crackdown on fake reviews because the positive boosts to businesses’ ratings might increase Yelp’s value to those businesses.
Given that this kind of problem is rampant across social media (where the platform is incentivized to promote horrible things, as we've seen with Meta, Insta, etc etc), it probably should be criminal if we ever want to erase this scourge. As the article shows, _businesses can't opt out from Yelp_ -- which is a pretty horrible state of affairs.
A popular local restaurant came under new management and their food is now atrocious. We actually threw their food in the garbage after getting takeout there a month ago.
Meanwhile, tourists are still leaving thousands of rave reviews on their google maps page. Noticeably, you will see one or two bad reviews every 50 reviews or so, where a person comments about their confusion about the restaurants score.
So you're getting both new reviewers (or travelers) who don't know it used to be better who still call it good, mixed with old reviews calling it good.
It's not even just a management change that causes this. This is when you almost wish Google maps would put your location history to use. It sees you visit the place frequently and thus if you stop visiting and leave a negative review it should weigh that review higher and give it more visibility. An old stale review or a review from someone who visited once I don't think should be as impactful or useful on the experience.
Overall I find discovering new places to be frustrating as reviews often seem useless. Usually I find the best method of discovering new places is still via word-of-mouth in person.
But how would that make Google more money, this quarter?
I could imagine an argument that, over a long enough time period, (re)gaining user trust would lead to an increase in ads revenue, but at best that long-term increase goes into the promo packet of the T9 leading "Geo/Commerce" or whatever the product area that contains Maps is these days.
The other option is using a bank api but seems too much friction..
The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
This is:
Change.
Read it through again and you'll get it.”
-- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Any information repository eventually comes to face the problem that the phenomena it is describing is no longer the same, for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons.
If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street.
And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to try to keep people from talking about it, and the moral interests just get worse and worse.
Google Maps isn't any better; OpenTable seems the "least bad" of options I've looked at recently, at least for fancier reservation-having places, in terms of actually showing my options.
(It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending" algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when probably there's half a dozen other options within 10% of taste and quality, that some people very well could legitimately like better if they heard about them too.)