A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google’s AI Overview.
Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes. Christian Calgie, a reporter for London-based news publication Daily Express, pointed out this trend on X yesterday, noting the boom of Redditors referring people to Angus Steakhouse, a chain restaurant, to combat it.
Again, at this point the Angus Steakhouse hype doesn’t appear to have made it into AI Overview. But it is appearing in Search results. And while this is far from being a dangerous attempt to manipulate search results or AI algorithms, it does highlight the pitfalls of Google results becoming dependent on content generated by users who could very easily have intentions other than providing helpful information. This is also far from the first time that online users, including on platforms outside of Reddit, have publicly declared plans to make inaccurate or misleading posts in an effort to thwart AI scrapers.
Keep forgetting, I need to upload a slightly AI’d profile picture to LinkedIn.
ML: they are taking my job!!
Often thought of this before leaving an Amazon review, why, if I really enjoy a product, would I wish to make the manufacturer and reseller hike it’s prices, when I just … not leave a 5 star review, thereby driving interest in the product
Also on amazon this would draw attention to a good product lining up a horde of resellers with slightly mis-spelled names to advertise knockoffs of the product and pay for reviews to boost their listing to the top of the listings
Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes.
As Gizmodo deduced, the trend seemed to start on the r/London subreddit, where a user complained about a spot in Borough Market being “ruined by influencers” on Monday:
“Last 2 times I have been there has been a queue of over 200 people, and the ones with the food are just doing the selfie shit for their [I]nsta[gram] pages and then throwing most of the food away.”
So, I don’t know what the situation is in London.
But COVID-19 really clobbered a lot of commercial establishments, and particularly eateries. I’m guessing that at least some traffic might be a return of the public to restaurants, with the supply of restaurant capacity at a low due to having gone through hard times over the past our years or so.
kagis
Ah, right. This is Europe, and while the US got hit by higher energy costs too, the Ukraine invasion really dicked up energy prices in Europe for a while. And then you have the hangover from the COVID-19-related spending happening, as inflation bites, and reducing spending on restaurants is an easy thing to cut on one’s budget. And this points out that restaurants are a labor-intensive industry, and Brexit has driven labor costs up by cutting the labor pool.
https://www.ft.com/content/a36ad5fd-db20-4ba8-89ea-e185838c8aa0
UK restaurant sector hit by cost of living and Covid legacy
Stuart Devine thought his chain of fish and chip restaurants in Aberdeen had survived the worst when the UK government lifted Covid-19 lockdowns for good in spring 2021 and customers returned to enjoy the classic British meal.
But before the Ashvale could fully recover it was dealt another blow, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted global supply chains and sent energy and food prices soaring.
Devine’s struggles are shared by roughly 40 per cent of UK restaurant owners, who are operating at or below break-even point, after the sector was hit by a perfect storm of pandemic shutdowns and the cost of living crisis, according to data from UKHospitality.
The trade body estimates that up to 30 per cent of businesses in the sector have closed since Covid struck. About 1,169 restaurants shut in the past year alone, equivalent to more than three a day, according to UKHospitality and consultancy CGA by NIQ.
“The money coming from the front door is just not enough to offset the significant cost of doing business that the restaurants are facing,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality.
While energy prices have fallen from their peak over the past 12 months, restaurants continue to bear the brunt of elevated food costs. The particularly labour intensive industry has also struggled with staff shortages, worsened by Brexit, and to keep pace with the statutory minimum wage. It stands at £10.42 an hour and will rise to £11.44 in April.
Devine said “the hardest thing is that the only thing you can do is put your prices up”, noting that there was a limit to how much lifting prices could help at a time of already weak consumer confidence and tight household budgets.
So the combination of all those things would tend to have squeezed the supply of restaurants, and it might be that if there’s enough demand to consistently fill restaurants in London, expand existing or open new ones, that things will tend to return to a more-normal state.
Nah that city is just an overcrowded poorly designed shithole.
“poorly designed” is perhaps the weirdest complaint I’ve ever heard about London - those pesky Romans should’ve had a better vision for the city rather than the jumbled mess we have 2,000 years later.
Ten years into the future “Why are all my favourite restaurants closed?”
Word of mouth will become important again.
sincerely the only form of social interaction that can be trusted, and not gamed with seo, because who can be arsed
It’s one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I’m talking to a human.
Seriously, I’m sure ð mom and pop restaurant owners really appreciate ðis active directing of attention away from ðeir shops in favor of ð shitty chain places ðat form a consistent stranglehold around ðeir necks.
Now all restaurants are taco bell.
lmao, nobody cares when it’s big companies silently manipulating the results like this to the benefit of influencers, but once regular people become enraged enough to poison the data, now it’s something to talk about and totally represents how dystopian everything has gotten!
And while this is far from being a dangerous attempt to manipulate search results or AI algorithms, it does highlight the pitfalls of Google results becoming dependent on content generated by users who could very easily have intentions other than providing helpful information
Thanks for joining us in 2009, ArsTechnica. Hang on, I’ll grab my “Three Wolf Moon” t-shirt.
https://www.theregister.com/2009/04/17/time_top_100_hack/
Time Magazine’s poll of the 100 most influential people has been hacked by a motley band of online troublemakers who have managed to manipulate the top 21 names so their first letters spell “marblecake, also the game.”
It’s the new WallStreetBets GameStop saga. Fine when big companies manipulate the market, bad when normal people do it on a much smaller scale.
Also, uh, hasn’t Google been dependent on user generated content since 1998?
Like how is that remotely news that a search engine indexes other people’s data to, you know, provide search results?
You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades because that’s how all of this works, so how is this shocking other than some Job Creator somewhere made $3 less than they would have otherwise and now it’s a catastrophe that must have new laws made?
You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades because that’s how all of this works
That’s the SEO arms race. Ad peddlers have been creating sites to bump up their Page Rank, and Google has been adding secret sauce to detect and deprioritize them.
The difference is that Google over prioritized Reddit pages, trusting Reddit’s updoots. Google now needs to find other signals to determine if a Reddit post is as valuable as the updoots suggest.
You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades
We could have, hence why we did.
Like how is that remotely news that a search engine indexes other people’s data to, you know, provide search results?
Absolutely, even the first Google Bombing goes back to 1999. It’s hardly news at all.
Basically what happened with meme stonks too. The rich want to keep people from playing their game…
keep people from playing their game
No, no. That’s not it at all.
They want you to play, but they also want to make sure you lose.
That’s because It’s just casino logic moved out into the wider world.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
-Gore Vidal
Removed by mod
They do want people in their game, they just don’t want them to have any influence.
“Sure, you can play. Just go sit way over there.”
Nah you never even meet them. They are sitting at the top of the casino making their steady rake.
It’s definitely douchey as hell to try to hurt your favorite restaurant’s chances of success just so you might have lower waits.
It’s a perfect example of where we should hate the game rather than the player because those rules are not some uncontrollable force of nature but something that was set up by big tech.
Relying on info gathered from the copying of info without asking is also selfish.
No I don’t think users “agreed to it” because page 165 of 245 of legalese says Reddit owns the posts. If anyone reading does then why not complain about Reddit, not the users.
It’s gamesmanship, the system is what the system is, the more popular a product or service is, the more people will want it, and the less it’s available and the more is charged for it, the same goes in reverse, the only danger is, when you start the negative whirlpool there’s always the chance the product and service you like will get wiped out and will no longer be able to stay on the market
It’s not “gamesmanship”. It’s being a terrible person. Bad reviews can and do make it incredibly difficult for businesses to be successful and there is no excuse for actively sabotaging businesses to keep them to yourself.
You’re playing games with people’s livelihood and the most likely outcome of a concerted effort to “keep them low profile” is that “chance” that you wreck their business.
and good reviews which make a product, service or establishment in greater demand, allow and promote price gouging with no regard for affordability
So maybe save some of that anger for the giant corporations that pay beaucoup bucks to float their shitty ghost kitchens to the top of search results, using the same gamesmanship. The money they spend has far more influence than individuals do.
And with all due respect if “success” in being a restaurateur is mostly catering to influencers who care more about how your food looks than tastes and are often wasteful and don’t even eat any of it… Fuck success.
And with all due respect if “success” in being a restaurateur is mostly catering to influencers who care more about how your food looks than tastes and are often wasteful and don’t even eat any of it, all while overworking the restaurant staff to make it happen… Fuck success.
Makes you wonder if a “Take a selfie with our prop food” menu item that was £2-3 would be a good idea. Deal with influencer crap quickly, still make a bit of money off it, and keep the actual customers who want to eat your food happy.
Peoples livelihoods are not my problem.
Sounds pathologically self-centered, and a recipe for a sad life.
Unless I misread, the point isn’t leaving bad reviews, it’s making fake good reviews for a chain restaurant.
The way it’s being done is intended to stymie outsiders from crowding out locals.
Now, I agree that it is going to make competition harder for the non-chain restaurants the fake reviews are supposed to be isolating from tourist and traveller customers. It’s still a shitty move that hurts the local businesses. But it isn’t the same thing as actively trying to tank them. It’s a quibble about wording though, not a disagreement with your actual point.
If someone sees an Angus steakhouse and actually goes in and buys food they must be blind. It’s the most obvious looking tourist trap of a chain you can imagine.
It perches itself on corners in busy parts of London next to major tube stations and preys on the dimmest and laziest tourists. It’s genuinely worrying so many people fall for it and go in, reviews or not.
Recommending it is more of a joke than a serious attempt to convince anyone it’s good.
I’ve heard people are starting to do this on TikTok as well. I think it says more about us a civilization than anything. This is a clear scarcity/enshittification issue. Everyone wants good value and good quality products. Unfortunately a lot of mom/pop shops that produce those products don’t want to expand and if they do end up franchised capitalism’s ever growing desire for increased gains ensures that the franchised products only become worse over time.
It’s a clear shame to see capitalism pitting people against each other in this fashion.
Removed by mod
Remember on reddit when we used to upvote an image with a completely unrelated word because we thought it’d be funny if the image popped up in a google search?
Do you remember Boaty McBoatface?
Oh yeah. Peak reddit years lol. Before the corporate enshittification.
Lemmy is good fun though, I definitely appreciate it.
I’m so sad that the meme deteriorated. The original Hooty McOwlface was more complex, but the hivemind made it stupid. Boaty McBoatface should have been e. g. Horny McBoatface.
Boaty Mcboatface (2016) is slightly newer in the history of Reddit meming compared to “upvote this picture of foo so it shows up in google for bar”. Those go back as more than 11 years ago to when people were posting swasticas to make Office Depot look bad (2013) followed by the same meme being done to comcast 8 years ago also in 2016 which might be why you thought of boatface.
