Great review by one traveler about Futourist
Fancy a Dinner at The Shed? — Or, Why We Absolutely Need Review Platforms With Built-In Trust
Ok, this story has been floating around the web for several weeks now, and I still feel that not a lot of people have seen it. If you’ve read my last post (find it right here), you know I have a bone to pick with TripAdvisor and other travel review sites. And, this here just amplifies all my concerns ten-fold.
Early last year, Oobah Butler, a freelance journalist obsessed with the fake news reality we all seem to inhabit these days, decided to serve absolute crock to the gullible people of London — a fake restaurant that no one has ever visited — and see if they would eat that bullshit up. He had some experience writing fake TripAdvisor reviews before (and watched how those restaurants reaped the benefits), but now he wanted to push the envelope further.
If you want to check out his whole story, I suggest you take 20 minutes to watch his video. It’s both hilarious and disturbing, and nicely underscores why your reliance on TripAdvisor (and most other review platforms) is completely misguided.
If you don’t have 20 minutes to spare, here’s the crux of it.
Oobah created a listing on TripAdvisor, calling his backyard shed The Shed At Dulwich. He got a burner phone (for verification) and the listing was approved in May, 2017. He then proceeded to add fake reviews to it by enlisting his friends and family. He knew he was dealing with a fad-oriented crowd, so he wanted to create a buzz by giving emotion-themed names to his meals: love, lust, comfort, you get the drift.
Here’s one of those famous meals:
In early November, after only five months, The Shed At Dulwich secured the coveted first place on TripAdvisor — WITHOUT ANYONE EVER SETTING FOOT IN THE PLACE!
I can’t stress this enough — Oobah never served a single customer in his make-belief restaurant. The description said it was ‘appointment-only’ and he was pretty good at blowing people off when they called to make a reservation, saying that the Shed was booked solidly for months. Oh, and guess what? People called from abroad to make a reservation!
In December of 2017, Oobah decided to cash in on his story (as any good journalist would), and the jig was up. Before that, he hosted an impromptu dinner at the Shed and finally took some real reservations, serving frozen instant dinners to the unsuspecting crowd. At least one customer attempted to make another reservation.
Man, hipsters make it really difficult to like them.
You see now why you need to know about this? If a bogus restaurant can manipulate TripAdvisor into thinking it’s a real place, how easy is it to skew rankings for restaurants that actually do exist?
The answer: very fucking easy.
How Did TripAdvisor Answer To This Colossal Screw Up?
If you think that TripAdvisor vowed to change the way it vets the reviews coming in, you’d be sorely mistaken. Their spokesperson said that the listing was already being investigated before the story broke (fat chance, really) and that, in anyway, this wasn’t a real-world case: who manipulates rankings for a non-existent restaurant when there’s nothing to be gained there?
That’s true, Oobah had nothing to gain. However, he did manage to expose the current travel review industry as mostly a sham. While a good number of reviews are real, an astounding number are not. In the world where we trust large information providers with our decisions, this is not acceptable.
Can Online Reviews Earn Our Trust Again?
They can, if we flip the system on its head. Right now, the Futourist team is working on a platform that will incentivize travel-related reviews, as well as people who vet those reviews.
It’s an ecosystem in which reviewers get paid not under the table, but in plain sight. The community then votes on the reviews of places they’ve visited, dined at, or shopped in, earning fractions of the FTR coin.
How is this better than the current system?
It’s not perfect and the Futourist system can still be gamed, but not as much as what we have now. Here’s why:
Futourists heavily weighs video reviews, which are difficult to fake.
Everyone is incentivized for reviews, so the allure of getting paid by a business goes out of the window — review what you know and get paid anyway.
The community votes on reviews — obvious fakes will have a hard time standing out.
To learn more about the Futourist check
www.futourist.io 
