The Wisdom of the Crowd for Wine vs Drain Snakes

If you don't care much about wine, go with the crowd sourced revieww

In my view, there is any number of reasons to trust a single voice over the “wisdom of the crowd” when it comes to aesthetic questions such as the quality of a wine or restaurant or movie or song. But here’s another good reason to question a collective assessment of these things:

“After the holiday weekend, Greg Lutes, owner of 3rd Cousin in Bernal Heights, got an email from Google that his fine dining restaurant had some new reviews. He clicked the link and saw a flood of uniformly bad one-star ratings left with no further comments.

“Knowing this is the kind of thing that can sink a place over time, Lutes fired up an app to try to dispute the reviews, only to have his input denied. He was just starting to get suspicious that he was being targeted when an email arrived to his business account.

“ ‘Unfortunately, negative feedback about your establishment has been left by us,’ read a message from a person identified as Manas Agarwal. More ‘will appear in the future, one review a day,’ the email threatened, unless Lutes paid $75 in the form of a Google Play gift card, to be deposited in a PayPal account.”