[ghaff]

Question/comment. One thing that was good about Zagat was that, at the risk of being snobby, it seemed to often have a better class of user-generated content than many other sites. It was curated to some degree of course. And, especially the the paper survey days, I expect the barrier to entry filtered out a lot of people who were presumably less interested in food generally.

Have you thought about this kind of thing and the type of user participation that you'll encourage?

[buckhx]

I fully support snob-mentality and am onboard with your take on most UGC. It's something we are going to be very conscience about as we grow the platform. In general, want to take a top-down approach by identifying quality contributors (probably power users of The Infatuation) to seed the platform with. When interviewing users about problems with UGC, the first answer is almost always that they don't know who the person is and don't know why they should trust them. Want to combat that out of the gate.

Tim & Nina actually took the same approach originally by sending surveys out to people they thought would have valuable opinions and rewarding them with a printed guide.

[arkades]

I don’t know if this is applicable to a restaurant review guide, but:

I find The Wirecutter / Sweethome to be really great for consumer reviews. Specifically, because they’re transparent about the qualifications of the reviewer, and transparent about the criteria on which their subjects will be evaluated, including “we interviewed X, Y, Z and they identified a, b, c as the most important metrics because of R.” So I know why I should trust the author, their metric choices, and the results - which makes it easy for me to decide whether their judgment reflects my own priorities.

That seems like a lot more effort, in a distinct vein, than the usual restaurant review. Food is, of course, more subjective but the usual review seems like a highly evolved version of “I liked this.” I don’t care if a reviewer “likes this,” I want to know if they liked it —and- an indicator of how or why to generalize those results to my own tastes.

[ghaff]

Wirecutter is excellent although, as you suggest, a restaurant is more subjective, has more dishes, has more variance in both the meals and service, etc. The Wirecutter is also pretty focused on identifying one item (with a couple alternatives) as the best choice. What I actually find they're the best for is when I just want to pick something and don't want to immerse myself in research. I find you won't go far wrong.

That said, better restaurant reviewers do try to explain what they liked or didn't like about a dish. But most people are not better restaurant reviewers, are often basing their opinion on just one visit, and are often writing short reviews that are in a different category from a New York Times reviewer writing an in-depth review after going to the restaurant three times.

[buckhx]

We love The Wirecutter and is something we look to a lot from The Infatuation. Their content is fairly "evergreen" and useful. They cover utility aspects great, but generally feel like they don't take design/taste/style into account. That might be that subjective vs. objective nature of reviews that you're alluding to and why their reviews are so effective b/c they take a very objective approach.

[forkandwait]

Probably you meant "conscious" not "conscience".

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/conscien...

[joering2]

Thanks for doing this. Could you share some interesting facts behind the scene of deal maiking? Did you approach google or the other way around?

I'm very interested how this works. I know someone at the big telco company I can't tell name here that was approached about years ago by Google in terms of selling of gmail. But the deal eventually fell between cracks as the price Google wanted for just mailboxes was too big.