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‘The Shed at Dulwich’ was London’s top-rated restaurant. It didn’t exist

washingtonpost.com

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Re: ‘The Shed at Dulwich’ was London’s top-rated restaurant. It didn’t exist

#3
Is this surprising, that you can con gullible people into something. One cannot reliably question every single thing for fear routine will allow a false result from loose heuristics. Plus, many people are very trusting and will be taken advantage of at one point or another in life, IRL or online.

If you put up enough effort, sure, you can trick people into believing all sorts of near-realities.

The bigger story would be a review site complacent about fake reviews or tacitly allowing fake reviews undermining people's confidence.

Re: ‘The Shed at Dulwich’ was London’s top-rated restaurant. It didn’t exist

#4
post #3

Is this surprising, that you can con gullible people into something. One cannot reliably question every single thing for fear routine will allow a false result from loose heuristics. Plus, many people are very trusting and will be taken advantage of at one point or another in life, IRL or online. If you put up enough effort, sure, you can trick people into believing all sorts of near-realities. The bigger story would…

I think the issue being highlighted is that the ratings sometimes have not just little to do with the restaurant, but nothing to do with it. To become number one is something in itself. What happens afterwards (to not spoil it) is something above that entirely, and while it plays into the narrative being put forth, it goes well beyond what it needs to support that narrative and expose quite a bit of hypocrisy.

Fashion is subjective, but there's supposed to by quite a bit more to restaurants than just fashion, and I think it's obvious that sometimes there isn't much more. This whole story says a lot about people. Whether you think it says something about a certain type of people that you can look down on, or about people in general and how our expectations can lead us to weird places and inform our opinions much more than we would think, is up to the person watching.

Re: ‘The Shed at Dulwich’ was London’s top-rated restaurant. It didn’t exist

#5
post #3

Is this surprising, that you can con gullible people into something. One cannot reliably question every single thing for fear routine will allow a false result from loose heuristics. Plus, many people are very trusting and will be taken advantage of at one point or another in life, IRL or online. If you put up enough effort, sure, you can trick people into believing all sorts of near-realities. The bigger story would…

Yes, it is surprising that you can manipulate the world’s top review site into having a completely fictional location full of fake reviews sitting at the #1 spot for a major city for a long time. If that’s not complacency, what is?

Re: ‘The Shed at Dulwich’ was London’s top-rated restaurant. It didn’t exist

#7
post #6

To me, this suggests the value of professional food critics as well-known sources of... well maybe not truth, but at least honest opinion. It's easy to fake a crowd. It's a lot harder to impersonate a well-known individual's trusted name.

Depth (well-known individual who built their reputation over time) versus Breadth (crowd).

We seem to increasingly incentivize breadth of appeal over depth. TV Shows that appeal to the lowest common denominator, etc.

Re: ‘The Shed at Dulwich’ was London’s top-rated restaurant. It didn’t exist

#10
I live in the middle of nowhere. I always see "news" headlines of the top 5 restaurants in the nearby town. I wish I could report them. There isn't a single restaurant in that town or anywhere close. I'd love to tell Google to never show me anything from those sites. They don't have news, but they do a great job looking legit.
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