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How do you go about evaluating the competence of someone in a field that you yourself don't know?
One thing I've noticed about my city is that all of the best Asian restaurants have reviews more in the 4.2-4.6 range on Google. Every Asian restaurant that I've been to in the 4.7-4.9 range has been consistently mediocre. This still holds true even accounting for higher variance with lower total number of reviews. This is likely because the majority of reviewers have preferences near the median American palate, which means that Americanized Asian food is often rated higher. Most Americans would find actual Japanese food a bit bland, actual Sichuan food too spicy, etc. I've seen people give negative reviews to hotpot restaurants because they thought the natural numbing sensation of mala flavor was giving them an allergic reaction. I've seen a Vietnamese restaurant with multiple non-Vietnamese confidently exhorting the "authenticity" while several reviewer with a Vietnamese name commented how the food was "barely Vietnamese". (I'd be interested to know if this trend holds in the reverse, but I've never gone to European/American restaurants in Asia because I'm mainly US based, so why would I waste money and satiety like that)
Anyways, returning to the main point: Most reviewers don't know anything and don't realize they don't know anything. But with restaurants, I can just go there and try it for myself. At worst I'm out 30 dollars and I know to go elsewhere next time. How do I know my mechanic/doctor/accountant/dentist/etc. aren't making basic mistakes or misses? If I can't trust public reviews, is there even anything I can do?
I generally prefer social media review systems to be simple like/dislike for that reason, either you like something or you don't. 5 star systems lead to too much confusion over what different ratings mean. Then ideally people are allowed to sort the results of a search by any metric they like, such as best like:dislike ratio, most total likes, best like:views ratio, etc. based on whether they want a guaranteed good experience or if they want to try to find a more niche product that they'd personally love or whatever else they're looking for. And if something does well along every metric you can be very confident it'll be excellent.
My only reservation with a binary system would be that it fails to capture things that resonate strongly with a small subset of the population (like cult classic movies).
I forgot about the method I like for that. For that, I prefer a system like reddit gold. Let people spend money(or some other form of limited rating) on their favourite works. I really miss the days of reddit silver, gold, platinum, it was great for spotting under rated works on /r/anime and /r/manga that only got a few upvotes but managed to impress someone so much it they'd spend money on the thread.
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