from the restaurant-at-the-end-of-this-book dept.
Fake listing for Le Nouveau Duluth raises questions about online tourism platforms:
Yoo Jeung has been running Le Spot St-Denis, at the corner of Duluth Avenue and St-Denis Street for 22 years. Her flower shop is supposedly right next to the top-rated restaurant in Montreal on Tripadvisor, Le Nouveau Duluth, but she says she's never heard of it.
She says she knows the area very well and tourists often ask her for directions to restaurants.
"But Nouveau Duluth? No," she said — and something about the online listing seemed off to her.
"There's a very high ceiling [in the photos]," she said. "On Duluth there are no high ceilings ... it looks fake."
[...] Le Nouveau Duluth does not exist but the ease with which it rose to the top of a travel advice site is a clear example of how easy it is to create buzz with no substance behind it — and what challenges real restaurants face getting noticed in the algorithm.
The page was taken down after CBC sent a request for a response from Tripadvisor. The popular travel site responded saying stunts that create a fake restaurant listing are "uncommon occurrences and do not share the characteristics of genuine instances of fraud."
[...] Though he's never encountered a fake restaurant on Tripadvisor, cybersecurity expert Terry Cutler says fake reviews are relatively easy to spot.
"If you look at the reviews, a lot of the time they're so vague, like 'Great job,' 'Keep it up,' it has nothing to do with what the review is about," he said.
"If you start seeing nothing but five-star reviews — there's never any negative comments — that should be a sign that there's something wrong."
Cutler says it's easy for anyone to subscribe to a bot service and flood websites like Google or Tripadvisor with fake reviews and climb the ranks — to the detriment of legitimate businesses.
"So if you really have a good five-star restaurant that's in the rankings, now it's going to get deranked because this fake restaurant is taking over," he said.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 03, @02:09PM (4 children)
>how easy it is to create buzz with no substance behind it
With about 20 minutes effort, and zero access to half of the voters, I submitted a story to my high school literary magazine that was written by (and attributed to) a student from another high school. Nobody read it. I walked around our classroom and lobbied for a prize for the story. Nobody knew the author, but I still managed to get it tied for third place.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @02:47PM (1 child)
I guess that's sort of similar. In your case you actually had a story and managed to get good votes (reviews) for it with some PR.
In tfa there was no restaurant at all--seems like that's a fairly big difference!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 03, @03:02PM
Another difference is that I did this in person, on the internet nobody knows you are a dog, or a sock puppet.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday February 04, @10:16AM (1 child)
Not bad for a competition that only drew two entries.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 04, @01:54PM
This was out of about 100 short stories, the magazine literally accepted anything submitted.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday February 03, @03:03PM (1 child)
the service was non-existent but the food was 'out-of-sight'!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @06:21PM
(Score: 4, Funny) by looorg on Friday February 03, @03:19PM (4 children)
From just the headline I first though it was some kind of Ghost-restaurant that only existed online for orders. I wasn't entirely sure why this thing actually even existed until it turns out to just be some kind of inside joke. That is clearly causing issues. But even as a joke its quite lame and doesn't really serve a purpose. After all it clearly ain't funny. Waiting for someone angry to put up some fake high traffic shady business (happy-ending-massage-specialists-drop-in-appointments-only open 24-7) as at Deschamps home address. I'm sure he'll find that hysterically amusing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 03, @03:24PM
Well, the phenomena I see at work is: 1) nobody ever really eats there, so nobody ever has anything negative to say (unless they try to find the place and can't, which would probably embarrass a lot of people into silence), and 2) whoever started the ball rolling with the initial 5 star review may well have sparked the "internet snowball effect" where people feel compelled to say what everyone else is saying - not that it makes a lot of sense, but it's clearly an online human behavior - part of the reason behind why many modern rating systems hold the ratings out of view for a period of time before making them visible.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday February 03, @04:36PM (1 child)
It clearly serves a purpose to me: it exposes a flaw in the system. How the hell is it possible for a restaurant that nobody has eaten at (or even been to) to get reviews?
As we all know from computing, sometimes the best way to get something fixed is to draw everyone's attention to it. Publicly embarrassing someone tends to get them off their ass if they can fix the problem.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @07:09PM
e.g. people who live or visit Montreal don't care about Tripadvisor?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 03, @08:41PM
Its purpose is to inform you that such sites seldom have a useful function.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday February 03, @04:33PM
The Shed at Dulwich [youtube.com] that some guy gamed to #1 as a joke as well
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"