#3 - Google Reviews are bullshit (But useful. But also bullshit)

We were walking through the night markets of Ita Thao’s Shopping District when I came across a shop with a sign that said “HK Style Dim Sum.” I love dim sum! And the first picture I noticed was for a dish I adored, char siu bao, something I hadn’t eaten on this trip to Taiwan yet! Having experienced the wonders of the Raohe Night Market in Taipei already, I reached for my wallet, pointed at the picture of the char siu bao and raised my index finger to indicate one portion. Pictures help a lot when you don’t speak Mandarin or Taiwanese Mandarin. The lady behind the counter raised 4 fingers and said “4 minutes.” I responded with 谢谢 (xièxiè, or thank you - the only word I knew other than ni hao). Four minutes later, I was chowing down on a fresh steamed pork bun repeatedly saying “I love this country!”

Our extended group of seven cousins comprises a mix of eaters from extremely conservative (only chicken and pork, no seafood) to reasonably adventurous (”where is the tripe and the chicken feet?”). In a new country, dim sum falls squarely in the middle! Everyone knows it, everyone loves it, and it has never let us down. So after I sing the praises of my pork bun, the group decides that we’re having dim sum for dinner.

After another hour of exploring, we found ourselves back at the same dim sum spot. The kind lady put together a big table for seven with mismatched wooden stools of varying heights for us to sit on. I ordered some shumai, more char siu bao, chicken dumplings, and lo rou fan (braised pork over rice). And right after I’d paid and placed the order, when I sat down to eat, I noticed a sign on the wall that said “If you like our food, please rate us on Google.” Next to these words was a screenshot of the restaurant’s Google page with their rating - 3.1 stars, 760 reviews. In that moment, I knew, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”

The thing is, living in the US where reviews are everything, your brain is now hardwired into thinking of everything as numbers. “What’s the rating of this restaurant?”, “Out of five, how much would you rate this book?”, “What’s the rating of this hotel on TripAdvisor?”, “What’s your Uber rating?” Every aspect of our life is now quantified. When Black Mirror premiered Nosedive, it was already starting to hit close to home but now it feels pervasive. Your food delivery gets rated, your Amazon purchase gets reviewed, your flight is followed by a satisfaction survey. One of my favorite authors, John Green, wrote a book on this phenomenon called The Anthropocene Reviewed where he (ironically) rates everything from Sunsets and our Capacity for Wonder to Cholera. The five-star system, however, is a system built for machines, not humans.

"The five-star scale doesn't really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era." - John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

But to be human is to understand (and agree with) this fact, and still choose to live and die by reviews on a five-star scale. Over the years, I’ve built my own System of Reliable Ratings from Yesterday (or, aptly, SoRRY) for Google Reviews.

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  > 4.5 - amazing, trust blindly, low chance of a miss

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  4.4 - reliably good, could be amazing, worth a try

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  4.3 - hit or miss, gamble-worthy

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  4.2 - proceed with caution

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  4.1 - reconsider your choices

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  < 4.0 - is everything okay?

It’s crazy how even on a five star scale, I’m limiting myself to a 0.6 margin. That encompasses my entire spectrum! Unbelievable. I say my system but I’m relying on thousands of people’s reviews, and to a large degree, the lived experience of these ratings. The correlation of the ratings and my actual experiences has given me my SoRRY.

So this 3.1 restaurant kicked my ratings neuroses into high gear. But, I’d already tried the char siu bao (which was great), and we’d already ordered, and paid. What’s done is done, let’s just enjoy what’s ahead of us. And you know where this is going, the food all turned out to be excellent! Everything we wanted from dim sum - we knew it, we loved it, it didn’t let us down. It wasn’t mind blowing food, it wasn’t a one-of-a-kind experience, but the food and hospitality satiated us more than we needed. 3.1 in comparison now felt criminal! This place didn’t deserve that number!

But the reality is that the online world directly influences the physical one. We start our search for IRL experience digitally. When we’re convinced that the probability of the maximization function is the highest possible, we pull the trigger. So, if you are a business with a physical presence but your online presence is not strong - you don’t sell yourself online, you die a slow death offline.

I’m not suggesting that these systems aren’t useful. Quite the contrary. But the weight we give to these systems can only be corrected by the occasional joy of accidental discovery. It’s why bookstores still exist despite Amazon’s dominance. Amazon can deliver to you a book you’re looking for but it can’t quite capture the immersion of walking down aisles of books you might never discover online. Amazon has limitless choice but a bookstore, by nature of limited space, helps you break free from analysis paralysis.

Part of the problem is also cultural. The more liberal rating system with its scrunched up ranges might be an entirely American thing. Friends who have visited Japan tell me that a restaurant with 3 stars in Japan is reliably good, 4 stars is incredible and 4.5+ might mean you’ll have the best meal of your life. There are jokes (facts?) about the best Chinese restaurants having a 3.5 rating on Yelp (ratings on different platforms can mean different things - 3.5+ on Yelp I would personally consider good, but I'd be less inclined to try a place with just a 3). Taiwan had the full range. We ate incredible Onion Pancakes at a place recommended by a friend which had a 3.6 rating, then accidentally stumbled on a very unique music cafe with a 4.7.

I had felt the pull, and ick, of rating everything even before Taiwan - how the nuance in a piece of art was lost once you assigned it a number. It was maybe why one of my favorite film review sites (RIP Film Companion) eventually stopped giving out star ratings for movies. But during the trip and after these early experiences, I allowed my overly analytical maximizing brain to rest and enjoy the country, the food, the spaces and its people for what they were. We found actual hidden gems and holes in the walls roaming alleyways, like potstickers that did not even show up on Google Maps!

My takeaway is that there’s a time for reliability and there’s a time for discovery. The “data” of the reviews can help make informed decisions especially when the stakes might be high - a client dinner, hosting your out-of-town parents, an important date night. But there are also times when the joy of discovery gives you something that becomes just yours - like a perfect char siu bao discovered not through algorithms (or fake AI reviews in the future), but through appetite.