Have been wondering since a long time if there are still any real reviews on the internet, that weren't paid for by someone, something that could be trusted. I really can't remember when was the last review that turned out to be true.
But while I do believe that there is a real hole in the market there, I am not sure how big that market is, if there is really a demand for real reviews - both products and services (and whatever else can be reviewed)
tbf i live in a city in the UK, so YMMV, but after exhausting personal contacts I find asking in the subreddit for that city has only produced stellar results so far
> They also removed dislike buttons from YouTube a while ago.
The dislike button is still there. What was changed was the dislike button no longer shows an aggregate count of dislikes. Youtube did remove the dislike button from youtube shorts like 2 months ago, probably to mirror the experience on TikTok. I think a like button is a more powerful signal for a short form content algo anyways - swiping away from a video before it's finished is equivalent to a dislike for that purpose.
(this may have changed at some point recently i dont use youtube that much) oddly as well though, dislikes were still exposed through the API, so third party apps still had it
So you think it's okay for someone to fall sick eating bad food that the person could've learned about and avoided via reviews? Will you pay their hospital bill? A child or old person could even die from it. It is not nothing.
If the review was “this restaurant is ok” I don’t think they got sick from eating bad food so your example is irrelevant. Also typically getting sick from restaurant food is a complaint for the health department, not yelp
You've no idea what a review is going to be about. It is not this one review that concerns people - the concern is the broad policy and the pattern.
Also, have you actually seen health departments around the world? Have you actually tried complaining to them? They often are corrupt and do nothing! Even where they're not corrupt, they still don't take sufficient punitive action. And do you think someone actually needs to fall sick in the first place if it can be avoided via reviews? What you're smoking, you only know.
The poster is lucky he didn't have it any worse. After a trip abroad where I posted reviews, Google deleted all my Maps reviews, mostly those in the US, going back ten years, and permanently prohibited me from posting further reviews altogether.
Daydream: Sites display 5.0 star ratings for everything in Germany - doesn't matter if it a junk yard, morgue, or sewage treatment plant. With no further details at all, except "Due to current German law, our attorneys have instructed us to say that everything in Germany is absolutely perfect."
Maybe apply the same policy to North Korea, in the spirit of PDR Solidarity.
> NetzDG (2017/2018): Germany passed the NetzDG legislation in June 2017, which officially took effect in January 2018. Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.
> Strict Liability Precedent: Even before NetzDG, German courts have traditionally set a low threshold for companies to challenge reviews. If a business simply claims a reviewer has no record of a transaction, platforms will often temporarily remove the review and force the user to provide proof of their visit.
> Fully 99.97% of Google Maps reviews taken down for “defamation” across the entire 27-country European Union are for businesses based in Germany, official European data shows.
Germany manages free speech and democracy as well as it does producing software. I really want to know where the cultural difference originates from. Why are CAD drawing engineers respected while programmers are walked allover. Why is eastern europe exempted from this cultural curse?
Culturally east europe is hugely different from west europe. No expert, but you can certainly hold a lot to it from the soviet bloc and how industrialisation happened in a given country.
Lets take the average machine building company, i promise you the engineers drawing the machines sit in quiet climatized rooms. Meanwhile the "software" sits in bustling cattlefarm like largescale offices. There is no money for startups but there is money for playing startup and the various wirecards. Wha are theset the fuck is wrong with that culture, that it stopped innovating and tried to life from rent-seeking on ic vehicles? A d when pressed for answers- all it has is these lame passive aggressive rhetorical questions?
> Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.
To clarify, this is not content that a court or even just the police has determined to be illegal - this is merely content alleged to be illegal by any random complainant. So a company can remove content and suffer no consequences, even if it was perfectly legal, or it can risk an up to 5M Euro fine if it keeps the content up but gets it wrong.
Every free speech and human rights organization under the sun warned them this would result in unchecked privatized censorship, yet they did it anyway. The result was not unintended, but 100% deliberate, and the politicians that voted for it are not stupid, but simply malicious.
Have been wondering since a long time if there are still any real reviews on the internet, that weren't paid for by someone, something that could be trusted. I really can't remember when was the last review that turned out to be true.
But while I do believe that there is a real hole in the market there, I am not sure how big that market is, if there is really a demand for real reviews - both products and services (and whatever else can be reviewed)
tbf i live in a city in the UK, so YMMV, but after exhausting personal contacts I find asking in the subreddit for that city has only produced stellar results so far
Someone please vibe code a site where you pay to leave bad reviews. The more is paid the worse it is.
An the Gestapo is a US company named Google in this case.
More like the EU and Germany’s version of the Digital Services Act. Google is just adhering to German law.
All visible reactions should be positive. They also removed dislike buttons from YouTube a while ago.
> They also removed dislike buttons from YouTube a while ago.
The dislike button is still there. What was changed was the dislike button no longer shows an aggregate count of dislikes. Youtube did remove the dislike button from youtube shorts like 2 months ago, probably to mirror the experience on TikTok. I think a like button is a more powerful signal for a short form content algo anyways - swiping away from a video before it's finished is equivalent to a dislike for that purpose.
(this may have changed at some point recently i dont use youtube that much) oddly as well though, dislikes were still exposed through the API, so third party apps still had it
Not being allowed to post bad review ~= being dragged out of your house and beaten with nightsticks, then deported to a camp.
So you think it's okay for someone to fall sick eating bad food that the person could've learned about and avoided via reviews? Will you pay their hospital bill? A child or old person could even die from it. It is not nothing.
If the review was “this restaurant is ok” I don’t think they got sick from eating bad food so your example is irrelevant. Also typically getting sick from restaurant food is a complaint for the health department, not yelp
You've no idea what a review is going to be about. It is not this one review that concerns people - the concern is the broad policy and the pattern.
Also, have you actually seen health departments around the world? Have you actually tried complaining to them? They often are corrupt and do nothing! Even where they're not corrupt, they still don't take sufficient punitive action. And do you think someone actually needs to fall sick in the first place if it can be avoided via reviews? What you're smoking, you only know.
The poster is lucky he didn't have it any worse. After a trip abroad where I posted reviews, Google deleted all my Maps reviews, mostly those in the US, going back ten years, and permanently prohibited me from posting further reviews altogether.
Daydream: Sites display 5.0 star ratings for everything in Germany - doesn't matter if it a junk yard, morgue, or sewage treatment plant. With no further details at all, except "Due to current German law, our attorneys have instructed us to say that everything in Germany is absolutely perfect."
Maybe apply the same policy to North Korea, in the spirit of PDR Solidarity.
this post has been flagged.
Ironic
"The Gästeführer would like a word with you..."
Even more fun: if you say the title of this post in Germany, that's illegal. Because all comparisons with Nazis are.
[flagged]
Additional context:
> NetzDG (2017/2018): Germany passed the NetzDG legislation in June 2017, which officially took effect in January 2018. Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.
> Strict Liability Precedent: Even before NetzDG, German courts have traditionally set a low threshold for companies to challenge reviews. If a business simply claims a reviewer has no record of a transaction, platforms will often temporarily remove the review and force the user to provide proof of their visit.
> Fully 99.97% of Google Maps reviews taken down for “defamation” across the entire 27-country European Union are for businesses based in Germany, official European data shows.
I'll take unintended consequences for $500
https://www.fastcompany.com/91420303/google-review-germany-t...
Germany manages free speech and democracy as well as it does producing software. I really want to know where the cultural difference originates from. Why are CAD drawing engineers respected while programmers are walked allover. Why is eastern europe exempted from this cultural curse?
Culturally east europe is hugely different from west europe. No expert, but you can certainly hold a lot to it from the soviet bloc and how industrialisation happened in a given country.
> Germany manages free speech and democracy as well as it does producing software.
That sentence works suprising well for the US too: enshitified and completely controlled by a cartel of trillion dollar corporations.
What are you talking about?
Lets take the average machine building company, i promise you the engineers drawing the machines sit in quiet climatized rooms. Meanwhile the "software" sits in bustling cattlefarm like largescale offices. There is no money for startups but there is money for playing startup and the various wirecards. Wha are theset the fuck is wrong with that culture, that it stopped innovating and tried to life from rent-seeking on ic vehicles? A d when pressed for answers- all it has is these lame passive aggressive rhetorical questions?
> Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.
To clarify, this is not content that a court or even just the police has determined to be illegal - this is merely content alleged to be illegal by any random complainant. So a company can remove content and suffer no consequences, even if it was perfectly legal, or it can risk an up to 5M Euro fine if it keeps the content up but gets it wrong.
Every free speech and human rights organization under the sun warned them this would result in unchecked privatized censorship, yet they did it anyway. The result was not unintended, but 100% deliberate, and the politicians that voted for it are not stupid, but simply malicious.
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