Bogus place ratings

Reads 3546 • Replies 53 • Started Tuesday, January 17, 2017 6:53:27 AM CT

The forums you're viewing are the static, archived version. You won't be able to post or reply here.
Our new, modern forums are here:
RateBeer Forums

Thread Frozen

Message Travlr beers 33878 º places 4582 º 06:31 Wed 1/18/2017 Originally posted by ContemplateBeer More badges. Seriously, some more extensive rewards for place rating, much in the manner of beer rating, might encourage growth in place ratings. +1
Message Travlr beers 33878 º places 4582 º 06:34 Wed 1/18/2017 Originally posted by decaturstevo Originally posted by Travlr Originally posted by decaturstevo Blank ratings are a bad deal. Any goober could circumvent the minimum character # by simply typing a review as a word document and copy and paste it to several new place ratings. Places change more than beers change. People always are expanding or cutting back. These are not reflected in reviews. The new place may be much better than the old one was or vice versa. A couple of local examples are Chattanooga brewing, McScrouges, and Moccasin Bend Brewing. They have either moved to new places or expanded. They are not even remotely similar to the old ones. The old reviews continue to impact their scores for what they once were. How hard would it be make the formula reflect the place ratings for the past 2 years? Blank place like blank beer ratings should be deleted. Lying/cheating on the site is like welfare or disability fraud in that nobody has the time to police it all. I love place ratings and use them more than beer ratings 1000-1. cheerstevo in the areas where I’ve lived, if a place moves or gets a new brewing system, oftentimes we’ll close the old place (which preserves the old ratings, for comparison) and enter a new place. That keeps the place ratings relevant. I like that concept. What do you do about the places like McScrooges that have revamped their beer selection. Many places fall under this blanket in TN. The beer law change has started to make a shift in the beer selection. cheerstevo yeah, that’s a good question. I guess that doesn’t merit a whole new place entry. about all you can do is say it prominently in your review, and hope that people read it. that’s the reason I read the text of reviews, to pick up on key things like this, and it’s another reason why blank reviews disappoint me so much...
Message humlelala beers 1377 º places 89 º 10:06 Wed 1/18/2017 Originally posted by Travlr Originally posted by humlelala Since the subject of how to improve the place rating system has been brought up I’d also like to suggest that a rating should be relatively "recent" in order to count toward the aggregate rating of the place. I can think of a few examples of places, who have started to slide recently but because they have a 10 year legacy of ratings this is not reflected in the average. I suppose you could "retire" place ratings after some period of time - one year? three years? Although this would be a hell of a lot of work for the admins. Unless - since users can edit Places, why not also give users the ability to retire place ratings. Just like beer, the ratings would still show up, but in lighter font so that readers would know it’s old. I agree that any solution should not put any further burdens on admins. Your proposal would accomplish this but to be honest I doubt this would have a large effect on mitigating the issue with old ratings no longer reflecting the true quality of a place since many if not most places have a majority of ratings by people, who only visited the place once and would thus not be in a position to judge whether their review should be withdrawn/retired. A minimalist solution could be to keep the possibility for users to enter text ratings of places but replace a place’s aggregate score with the average overall score of the last 100 beer reviews (or all the beer reviews entered in a given calendar year) entered into RateBeer.com and tied to that particular venue through the availability system. After all the overall quality of the beers most recently drunk at a place probably has the highest predictive value for whether a random Ratebeer user would enjoy visiting the place in the present moment in time. Cleaning the slate of the ballast of old ratings would carry with it the added benefit of also ensuring that craft beer bars stay on their toes to offer fresh, good quality beer at reasonable prices rather than rest on the laurels of their historical accomplishments because a million tourists gave them a 4.5 score ten years ago.

Message jjsint P beers 7715 º places 1335 º 10:10 Wed 1/18/2017 I love place rating but there are obvious issues. One of the main ones being that whatever you do, you end up pissing somebody off.
Message jjsint P beers 7715 º places 1335 º 10:14 Wed 1/18/2017 Originally posted by Travlr Originally posted by ContemplateBeer More badges. Seriously, some more extensive rewards for place rating, much in the manner of beer rating, might encourage growth in place ratings. +1 Or... No badges/stats/rewards for places as this would discourage people from ’ticking’ places. I love place rating, probably as much as beer rating, but even I question whether drive-by ratings of a place are all that helpful? Thinking about a trip to the Continent and there are places that have one place rate from like 2011. It may even have closed. Is that really helpful? Then again I can see improvement as place ratings have gotten better than they used to be (and I;ve only been here for 4 years)
Message ContemplateBeer beers 2092 º places 154 º 19:42 Wed 1/18/2017 Originally posted by jjsint Originally posted by Travlr Originally posted by ContemplateBeer More badges. Seriously, some more extensive rewards for place rating, much in the manner of beer rating, might encourage growth in place ratings. +1 Or... No badges/stats/rewards for places as this would discourage people from ’ticking’ places. I love place rating, probably as much as beer rating, but even I question whether drive-by ratings of a place are all that helpful? Thinking about a trip to the Continent and there are places that have one place rate from like 2011. It may even have closed. Is that really helpful? Then again I can see improvement as place ratings have gotten better than they used to be (and I;ve only been here for 4 years) Maybe tie an award to the average amount of text per rating? It can be faked, no doubt, but at least this would accomplish sending a positive message: detailed place reviews are encouraged here (or are they?)
Message Travlr beers 33878 º places 4582 º 19:53 Wed 1/18/2017 Originally posted by humlelala A minimalist solution could be to keep the possibility for users to enter text ratings of places but replace a place’s aggregate score with the average overall score of the last 100 beer reviews (or all the beer reviews entered in a given calendar year) entered into RateBeer.com and tied to that particular venue through the availability system. this is a great idea

Message humlelala beers 1377 º places 89 º 02:10 Thu 1/19/2017 Originally posted by Travlr this is a great idea I’m glad you like it. It strikes me that a further advantage of this model would be that it would incentivise the venue owners toward encouraging their customers to add beer availability information on RateBeer, which would in turn benefit us craft beer enthusiasts as an increase in the information about current beer availability would make it easier for us to make informed choices (without having to resort to Untappd or similar)
Message willisread beers 7331 º places 126 º 22:39 Thu 1/19/2017 Originally posted by humlelala Since the subject of how to improve the place rating system has been brought up I’d also like to suggest that a rating should be relatively "recent" in order to count toward the aggregate rating of the place. I can think of a few examples of places, who have started to slide recently but because they have a 10 year legacy of ratings this is not reflected in the average. Honestly the same can be said for a lot of beers on the site as well. Not to derail the thread by any means, but I’d like to re-ratings of beers encouraged in a way that doesn’t penalize tickers who wanna tick. I’m not sure how it would work out, but it is one of the few nice points about untappd. There are definitely legacy beers on here that are propped up only because of their history...ideally we could find a way to balance legacy and trendy somehow. My 2 cents
Message humlelala beers 1377 º places 89 º 06:54 Fri 1/20/2017 I agree. That’s why I would favour a solution where no ratings get deleted but rather that in the calculation of the average only more recent ratings count. For place ratings I think this could be implemented without much "pain" or break with the past and would actually lead to better place ratings on the aggregate. For beer ratings I think it would generate a lot more friction among both brewers and tickers if this model were introduced right away without people getting used to the idea and seeing the effects of the model on the place ratings. The thing is for place ratings not only does basing the average rating of a place on the most recent beer ratings solve the "problem" of places that have started to slide. It also potentially introduces a larger and more frequently updated source of data to the place ratings where if it were to be introduced for beer rating averages as well you could argue the change would go in the other direction in the sense that beer averages would be calculated from a (much) smaller subset of data.