Diary: The Taylor Swift Theory of RateAdvocate.

Okay, so if Taylor Swift "left" Spotify, could a brewery leave RateAdvocate?

You know, revert to incognito mode? When I posed this question on Twitter, my friend RM replied, "I like that idea. Sort of like the EU Right To Be Forgotten."

Here's the Factsheet on the "Right to Be Forgotten Ruling", as well as an excerpt from an article about it at The Guardian.

The top European court has backed the "right to be forgotten" and said Google must delete "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

Another friend simply answered, "No," but then again, he's a big fan of beer ratings and might be just as jaundiced as me, somewhere across the chasm on the other side of the issue.

Granted, I'm mostly writing smack, so seriously ...

I understand "the right to be forgotten" and RateAdvocate are apples vs. oranges. I suppose the conventional wisdom is that only those breweries (and florists, restaurants, muffler shops and hotels, etc) with "bad" ratings would ever want to disappear from on-line ratings aggregators.

I'm told that NABC has good ratings (I seldom look), so that's not it.

I do know that my own use of non-beer ratings aggregators (florists, et al) generally bears little fruit. One tires of seeing a perfect five-star review posted adjacent to a hideous one-star pan, leading to an existential despair over the unfashionability of objective criteria.

I wouldn't know a Taylor Swift song if it walked up and knocked my pint of session ale onto the floor. Still, when I heard she was leaving Spotify, I mouthed a silent cheer. Maybe the grass is always greener on that ever-elusive "other" side.