Elissa

I fall into that category of people that read online reviews for everything, and trust it as much as a personal recommendation.

Books will be downloaded onto my Kindle depending on how other customers liked or disliked it. On Expedia, hotels and holidays are based upon user ratings. Films and music follow.

Recently, I found myself browsing in the Toys R Us store for a birthday gift, my purchase couldn’t be completed until I had checked the Amazon reviews. Apparently this is due to ‘Social Influence Bias’ which basically means when we see that other people have enjoyed a certain book, hotel or restaurant and rewarded it with a high online rating this causes us to feel the same positive feelings and then submitting a similarly high online rating. The same pattern follows with negative ratings.

Until recently I hadn’t given much thought to the incentive of fake ratings, but then this changed when I read about The Shed at Dulwich, an appointment-only boutique restaurant, which was successfully promoted on TripAdvisor, taking top spot in all of London.

With TripAdvisor receiving some 200 million visitors a month this was an incredible achievement. It was called ‘London’s best-kept secret’ and the menu was shrouded in mystery as the chef cooked to your mood, choosing from ‘Lust’ or ‘Comfort’ etc, it was the hardest restaurant in London to get into. 

Foodies, celebrities and bloggers continuously called to get a table, however the main obstacle for them was that … it didn’t exist.

This was a social experiment by a young man, named Oobah Butler, a freelance writer, who started his career getting paid from restaurants by writing fake reviews. He used his home, an actual shed in South London as the inspiration for his new restaurant. The restaurant that became London’s ‘top hot spot’ was a total hoax, it never existed.

Note to self: you shouldn’t believe everything you read, don’t always accept online reviews at face value and to think you are always getting the 100 per cent honest truth. Companies write their own reviews or trash rivals, or pay other people for reviews, they often delete negative reviews. I’m not going to ditch user reviews but I am certainly not going to trust everything I read.

l Editor’s note: GulfWeekly’s Eating Out reviews are written from first-hand experience and are probably the ONLY ones published in Bahrain that are not ‘approved’ prior to publication by the restaurant under the spotlight. There is ONLY one editor of this newspaper. See Page 11 for the genuine article.