I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor

Similar to this, a few years back my then-roommates and I created a fake restaurant at our apartment, named after the nickname we gave to our kitchen. It was meant to be our own inside joke and we gave it a couple reviews ourselves.<p>The 4.5 star review caused us to get some walkup traffic, at which point we thought it was too real and canceled the experiment, although the page is still live if you link to it through our review history.<p>The best was a group of young 20 somethings who showed up and were really good-natured about the joke, so we invited them up for a beer and they dropped us a 5-star review.

&gt;The representative adds that &quot;most fraudsters are only interested in trying to manipulate the rankings of real businesses&quot;, so the &quot;distinction between attempted fraud by a real business, as opposed to attempted fraud for a non-existent business, is important&quot;. To catch these people out, TripAdvisor uses &quot;state-of-the-art technology to identify suspicious review patterns&quot; and says, &quot;Our community too can report suspicious activity to us.&quot; They then quote a 2015 study that found &quot;93 percent of TripAdvisor users said they find the reviews they read to be accurate of the actual experience&quot;.<p>If TripAdvisor can&#x27;t catch out a restaurant which is entirely a farce how can they pretend they&#x27;re catching out real businesses who might be nudging their results up a bit?

Fake restaurants aren&#x27;t only a thing bored journalists create. I went to a pop-up restaurant at a vegetarian food festival. The food and drinks were so bland and terrible I can only imagine the man running the place was a scammer.<p>For example he was selling a &quot;rasberry lemonade&quot; in a beautiful glass jug with fresh rasberry and lemon slices floating at the top. It looked delicious. The only problem was the lemonade had been diluted by about 100:1 so it was effectively over-priced water.<p>The fake &quot;meat&quot; was so terrible, he might as well should&#x27;ve just sold the ingredients he made the meal with.<p>After loosing $14 on this meal I could only conclude this man just travels around with his fake vegetarian restaurant scamming people.

It&#x27;s a funny article highlighting a cute hole in TripAdvisor&#x27;s ranking system. TripAdvisor isn&#x27;t being vile our misleading when they say they don&#x27;t try to catch fictitious restaurants.There were no real, negative reviews of the restaurant, so it remained a perfect five with all very plausibly real reviews.<p>What they should worry about is detecting fake positive and negative reviews of real restaurants, which can cause businesses and diners a lot of pain and diminish the value of TripAdvisor.<p>Kudos to the author for &quot;hacking&quot; the ranking system in an unexpected way!<p>I wonder if they caught any fake negative reviews of the shed, jealous of its #1 spot...

Well, congratulations on gaming a system based on trust. You can try to edit Wikipedia too and make Steve Jobs chinese if you want.

A true entrepreneur. Bringing, sell first and build it later, to a whole new level.

Really cool story, but he never mentioned where he got the fake reviews that propelled him to #1 in the first place. There was one mention of the original “celebrity” endorsement, but what about all the reviews thereafter? Where did those come from?

The foot&#x2F;egg shot nearly made me spew my beverage onto my monitor from laughing.

I can imagine someone turning this into a heart-warming film.

Even funnier when he actually served food and people wanted to return.

&gt;UPDATE 6&#x2F;12&#x2F;17, 17:12: After an eagle-eyed reader spotted that each mocked-up TripAdvisor screen shot contained the same number of reviews, we have edited the images so that the number of reviews match those in the actual screen shots and replaced two of the images.<p>Wait so the whole article is fake?

I&#x27;m astonished a new entrant was able to make any dent at all. Mostly it&#x27;s impossible for newer or smaller entries to break into the top. They must have some velocity weight that The Shed exploited.<p>All the social review sites have become review-farming contests, which makes them unreliable on the consumer side and frustrating on the producer side, and I don&#x27;t know if that can be fixed. Yelp seems to do the best (at the cost of discouraging a lot of legitimate users by making their reviews disappear), but even so is not particularly good.<p>I think a curated review program, perhaps with a taste-matching algorithm like Netflix, could work much better... if the economics can be worked out.

Epic. Tripadvisor is terrible for vetting places, so are google reviews, and facebook reviews. Tripadvisor is big in the UK, more reliable review sites like yelp don&#x27;t have the adoption yet. Hopefully articles like this start to change that

I haven’t laughed so much at one of these since p-p-p-PowerBook [0]<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.somethingawful.com&#x2F;showthread.php?threadid=1016390" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.somethingawful.com&#x2F;showthread.php?threadid=10...</a>

I think trust is still a very challenging problem to solve in the online realm.<p>Even if you can solve it, these types of things still have a very subjective nature to them.

that&#x27;s not hard, they just let anyone rate stuff... just like Amazon&#x2F;Google&#x2F;etc does... One day, you might get sued for doing it though...

Vice is what you get when you combine journalism, capitalism, and navel-gazing college dropouts with no skills and lots of ambition. It&#x27;s Tumblr for Medium. It would be beautiful, if it weren&#x27;t so blatantly terrible. In a world where where startups with good ideas, talented people and lots of cash fail regularly, these witless wonders turn garbage into viral gold. Kudos to them.