TripAdvisor is democracy for the stupid

Everyone's a critic these days, says Alex Proud, but forget the wisdom of crowds, today's internet is more like an angry idiot mob

For very small establishments, the effects of a bad review can be devastating
For very small establishments, the effects of a bad review can be devastating

We live in the twilight of the professional critic.

The critics themselves know the writing’s on the wall - and they keep telling us we’ll miss them when they’re gone. The funny thing is, I think they’re right. Ten years ago, if you’d told me I’d mourn the passing of the preening self-regarding individuals whose words can make or break a restaurant or book, I’d have laughed at you. But there you are: they’re already much diminished and I miss the steadying hand they had on the tiller of popular opinion.

Still, this seems like an odd thing to say. Why would I, a restaurant and bar owner, lament the decline of people who might write scathingly about my establishments? The answer is that what’s supplanting them is far worse. Where once we had dozens of critics who knew what they were on about, now we have millions of critics who have no idea what they’re talking about.

The reason for this is, of course, the rise of the internet and the decline of print. It’s actually one of those interesting and rather unexpected consequences of the democratisation of publishing. When the web first became a mainstream proposition in the mid to late 90s, we had ringingly, unrealistically high hopes for it. The information superhighway was going to bring down undemocratic governments, stop human rights abuses and usher in a world free of ignorance.

Since then we’ve had a masterclass on the gulf between what idealistic early-adopters envisage and what the mass market demands. Instead of being a gleaming vehicle for intellectual debate and the spread of freedom the net is about porn, chatting inanely to friends, buying unnecessary stuff and, increasingly, watching telly. It has, I suppose, enabled us to fritter our lives away more efficiently.

Naturally we early middle-class adopters cling on to our last shreds of i-dealism. We tell ourselves that we’re reading New Yorker articles online when really we’re looking at clips of people accidentally zorbing off cliffs and discovering that our browser’s incognito mode is really quite useful for, you know, researching those surprise birthday presents.

But I digress. One thing the optimistic geeks of the early internet got right was that the new medium would be used for comparison shopping. Here the web has exceeded their wildest expectations. Just think of the sheer unadulterated boy joy you experience when you type this year’s must have gadget into Google and see hundreds of purchase options before you. It’s like having the shopping power of a mediaeval prince.

What they didn’t foresee quite as clearly though is that once you’d bought your gizmo or book or DVD, you’d be asked how many stars out of five you’d give it. Moreover, they didn’t predict quite how addictive reviewing things would be. Indeed, it’s so addictive that reviewing is now often totally decoupled from purchasing and users provide review sites with nearly all their content for nothing more than the pleasure of seeing their reviews.

In the gadget realm, this actually works OK. If you want to buy a new tablet or laptop, you’ll find a groaning smorgasbord of crowd-sourced knowledge and you’ll briefly become a kind of omniscient God on things like SSD read/write speeds and quad-cored processors which you’ll forget five minutes after your purchase is delivered by City Link.

This is because gadget criticism is based on hard facts. Is the tablet fast? Does the smartphone screen crack when you drop it? Where it works less well is where criticism is subjective, where everything is a matter of opinion. Let’s start with the obvious place, Amazon, and take two books: The Da Vinci code and Cloud Atlas. They’re roughly contemporary and both have plenty of reviews. They get, respectively 3.5 stars and 4 Stars. Not much to chose between them in the court of public opinion. Yet in the court of informed criticism it’s a very different picture. Cloud Atlas was widely hailed as both a dazzling technical achievement and a thrilling read. While Salman Rushdie described The Da Vinci Code as “a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”

Head over to IMDb and it’s a similar story. Here we’ll take the film version of The Da Vinci Code and Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master; the former gets 6.5/10 and the latter 7.1. The fun of IMDb is you can compare it to another site, Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates the opinions of professional critics. This gives The Da Vinci Code 25% and The Master 85%.

Digital evangelists often talk about “the wisdom of crowds” – the idea being that if you get enough people’s input you’re unlikely to be wrong. But while this seems to work quite well on sites like Wikipedia, when it comes to book and film reviews, it seems that the wise crowd is more like an idiot mob.

The classic response to this is that you’re a snob: you don’t like Dan Brown's books because they’re what ordinary people enjoy. But this reasoning is fallacious because its reductio ad absurdum is that Subway is the best restaurant in the world. It’s also notable that back in say, 2006, when Amazon was much less of a mass market proposition, it’s star rating system was a far better indication of what was a good film or book than it is today.

Even so, I can live with this. I’m most interested in history books and this remains a fairly highbrow niche so the reviews are worth something. But the sites that really trouble me – and often hit very close to home - are the likes of TripAdvisor, Yelp, Square Meal and so on.

I’ll start on a positive note. These aren’t all bad. If you want to go somewhere you’ve never been, you could do far worse than check it out the hotels on TripAdvisor. Similarly, a glance at Yelp or Square Meal can be a great way to size up your dining options.

Then you look at a sizeable minority of the the reviews. And you find yourself wondering who writes these things. Some of them have you asking not what the author’s first language is, but if they have one at all. Then there’s the criticism. This ranges from the infantile: “The restaurant wasn’t as dark as I wanted,” and “the beach was too sandy” to the bizarre, “They treat the English like foreigners” (this was aimed at a restaurant in a country where the English are foreigners). Worse still are the vicious, ad hominem attacks: “The owner needs to be sectioned” or “the woman at the bar is a racist!!” All about real people and businesses written by people hiding behind a veil of anonymity.

It’s funny. The British used to be famous for never complaining. We’d sit through the worst meals in the world and when the waiter enquired how it was, mumble “lovely.” But give us an anonymous review site and we declare war over starter that’s a minute late. Psychologists have even come up with a name for this – the online disinhibition effect, where a number of factors combine to make people who would once mumble “lovely” type 500-word diatribes with the caps lock on.

A more recent development is the rise of blackmailers, or “food blaggers” as they’re sometimes known. They pitch up and drink the wine and eat the food and then at the end of the meal, say, “We’d like our food comped or we’ll put a bad review on TripAdvisor.” I find this last group truly bizarre – a weird witches' brew of so many undesirable modern traits. At least the doofus who wrote “I have literally no idea what this book is about [one star]” (of Slaughterhouse Five on Amazon) was sincere.

OK, but does any of this really matter? Perhaps surprisingly, it does. Research at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012 showed that an increase or decrease of just half a star can have a significant impact on the number of bookings a restaurant receives. For very small establishments, such as out of the way country pubs, the effects can be devastating financially and incredibly upsetting, personally. The review sites say they have procedures for dealing with malicious reviews. But honestly, having tried these several times myself, they basically say, “Not my problem, guv” and then invite you to sue them if you want to take matters further. Answerability, it seems, is great for restaurants but not for TripAdvisor.

Of course, I know that it cuts both ways. As has been widely reported, these sites are often abused by PRs and other shills for restaurants and hotels who flood them with fake positive reviews. Perhaps then, the best we can hope for is a kind of equilibrium where the idiots and trolls are balanced out by the charlatans and bribed endorsers. I suppose it’s human nature, but it’s not a very good way to find a restaurant.

And all of which makes me value our remaining critics all the more. I’d hate to run the restaurant where AA Gill had “a funeral pyre of fries” or have served the dish which caused Jay Rayner to observe, “Breaded and deep-fried macaroni cheese is not a topping...it’s the ghost of Elvis Presley on the bog, trousers round his ankles, expelling his last.” But the alternative is often much worse.