A cafe that's not open yet, has 9 votes including 2 "I didn't like it" votes.
It's interesting that St Ali's other café seems to have a string of recent poor reviews (many written in a suspiciously similar style). Surely it'd be easy for UrbanSpoon to do a quick "sanity check", identify the 9 voters who've voted on a venue they couldn't possibly have been to to form a valid opinion, then remove all their votes and reviews across the board?
That's what _I'd_ do if my objective was a fair and balanced review site. Of course if my objective was a Yelp-like advertising service using poor reviews as a way to blackmail small businesses into paying protection/advertising, I'd obviously _welcome_ poor reviews and vindictive downvotes for businesses that haven't even opened yet… UrbanSpoon, like Yelp, is clearly signalling their intentions to me, and calibrating my expectations of their usefulness...
My current local demonstration of the pointlessness of crowdsourced reviews:
http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/71/1709549/restaurant/Melbourne/...
A cafe that's not open yet, has 9 votes including 2 "I didn't like it" votes.
It's interesting that St Ali's other café seems to have a string of recent poor reviews (many written in a suspiciously similar style). Surely it'd be easy for UrbanSpoon to do a quick "sanity check", identify the 9 voters who've voted on a venue they couldn't possibly have been to to form a valid opinion, then remove all their votes and reviews across the board?
That's what _I'd_ do if my objective was a fair and balanced review site. Of course if my objective was a Yelp-like advertising service using poor reviews as a way to blackmail small businesses into paying protection/advertising, I'd obviously _welcome_ poor reviews and vindictive downvotes for businesses that haven't even opened yet… UrbanSpoon, like Yelp, is clearly signalling their intentions to me, and calibrating my expectations of their usefulness...