ottawa foodies

Interesting discussion on the brewers list which lead me to post to a restaurant on this site, which was rated poorly by us. The contention was :

"That's normally way things work though. People are much more inclined to write a negative review than a positive one..."

To which someone else replied (below not written by me) :

I suspected that too, so I went through the vendor pages and ran some stats:
Number of vendors ranked:1492
Average Rank: 3.96
Highest Rank: 73 (Wellington Gastropub)
Lowest Rank: -16 (Jazz'oo European Bar and Lounge)
Number of Vendors with positive ranks (>0): 863
Number of Vendors with neutral ranks (0): 504
Number of Vendors with negative ranks (<0): 125

So although the general rule of thumb is that a dissatisfied customer is 5x
more likely to tell associates of a bad experience than a good one, this
rule of thumb doesn't really apply to OttawaFoodies.com They seem to be
very supportive of good service, rather than just "out to burn" restaurants
they don't like.

But, consider that rating a place is different than reviewing it. It's possible that people are more inclined to write a review of a negative experience, but to use the thumbs up for a restaurant that maybe isn't worth their time reviewing?

A lot of hit and run newbies will post negative or inappropriate reviews, but won't actually take the time to consider how the thumbs up/thumbs down reviewing system works.

Also consider timeline. I would expect a positive review is less likely to instigate a flurry of negative reviews. A negative review is much more often immediately followed by a positive review. I can only assume the follow-up positive review is either by a foodie defending an establishment they like, but had not found the time to review, or by vendors trying to offset the effect of bad review.

I bet some neat statistical trends might emerge from some further analysis. FreshFoodie.. going to provide us with an API? ;-)

Re: Negative review followed by positive review
Excellent point, Pete. I know I'm guilty of this!

Yessi, I didn't mean it's a bad thing necessarily, just an interesting effect. I'm more bothered by some new users who feel that they have to write 10 reviews within 60 minutes of creating an account. Often (not always) the reviews are what I would call stale; sometimes seemingly from years ago. I don't know what motivates people to want to tell everyone they were there 3 years ago, and thought it was 'ok'. I don't think there is a lot of value in reviews like that.

That being said.. it has been a while since I have written a review, so maybe time I dusted off my notepad and hit some fine dining.