Learn why "social influence bias" affects crowd-sourced ratings sites.

And when you do, please don't insist to me that somehow the same science does not apply to RateAdvocate.

Because it does. I'm a liberal arts kind of guy, but even I can appreciate science on widely scattered occasions.

How Yelp Is Giving You Bad Advice, by Jessica Leigh Hester (City Lab)

 ... It’s no secret that many of us turn to crowdsourced sites to gather information and weigh options. Quantcast estimates that Yelp’s traffic—combining desktop and mobile visitors—is in the realm of 5,270,925 unique monthly users. We’re trying to find the experience that gels with our specific cravings, however niche. But are we actually learning anything from this “collective intelligence?”

Turns out, we’re suckers. In a study published in Science, researchers found that reviewers are easily manipulated by “social influence bias,” a feedback loop in which positive reviews beget more positive reviews. Another study, this one by Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca, corroborated these findings, concluding that restaurant reviews are influenced by ones preceding them—sometimes bumping up Yelp-style evaluations by as much as half a star.

One-star restaurant reviews and online reviews in general inspire anguish and upheaval.

Synonyms for trauma include stress, ordeal and derangement. Among the antonyms are blessing, contentment and alleviation.

What sort of aberrant psychology is it, then, to be compelled to share trauma like this with others?

With complete strangers?

How does that relieve the pain?

Whatever happened to the simple, eloquent, "I won't be back ... you won't see me again ... never purchase this one, ever again," and so on?

One-star restaurant reviews show signs of trauma, linguists say, by Ian Sample (Guardian)

A bad meal out might ruin your night, but the ordeal could leave you traumatised too, according to linguists who analysed hundreds of thousands of online reviews.

Diners who left one-star reviews on the website Yelp adopted the same phrases as trauma victims, using the past tense to distance themselves from the event, and terms such as “we” and “us” to share the pain, researchers said.

Essential reading for the New Year: "Crowd-Sourced Ratings and Why They Suck."

Steve Foolbody goes into detail to make a point running somewhat parallel to my thoughts from a recent diary entry.

Diary: The Taylor Swift Theory of RateAdvocate.

 ... 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.

He fluently demonstrates just how subjective the entire process really is, and more power to him for doing so.

Crowd-Sourced Ratings and Why They Suck (The Pour Fool)

... Crowd-sourced ratings – for anything; beer, whiskey, wine, chocolate, movies, restaurants, you name it – actually do the people they’re intended to help about as much good as they’d get from opening the yellow pages or a beverage catalog or standing in front of a store rack, closing their eyes, and picking at random.