VICE
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2018–2021
18:21 · 8.9M views · Jan 22, 2018
VICE's Oobah Butler spends eight months using fake reviews to push a nonexistent restaurant, The Shed at Dulwich, to number one on TripAdvisor in London. The short documentary shows how easily review systems can be gamed.
Cited as the canonical example of fake reviews and gamed rating platforms.
5 comments from Hacker News
The tenor in this discussion so far seems to be a bit on the condescending side. Frankly, I'll pick it up for this guy. What an incredible job – and a great reminder that marketing your service is often times more important than the service itself. Maybe it's the prankster in me, but I don't feel like this is the end of the world – and it's not an indicator that the world is coming to an end. Fundamentally, people follow the rules and trust structure. That's probably why society can exist. For the many people who don't have their glasses on, this was a brief glimpse at reality. I'd recommend watching the Vice video I found in another comment: this video
Unrelated to Deliveroo, but "How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant" (2018) was very telling as well: this video From the video description: > The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor.
> The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? It kind of happens by default if your goal is "growth at any cost". The video you mention is likely this one, and it's actually even more extreme: this video The fake restaurant in their garden shed, which never took customers or delivered any food , climbed up to #1 best restaurant in London (!) in TripAdvisor's rankings, purely on the strength of fake reviews and fake photos (artfully arranged closeups of bleach tablets etc). For kicks and video gold, they did open for their last night, serving 1-pound microwave meals from the supermarket.
>IIRC there's also video reportage about it to be found... The VICE piece is here: How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor. this video
With a few people and some decent preparation you could probably fake most of this without too much effort. In fact, I wonder what the smallest amount of people and effort you'd need to get past this: if you can get away without having face-to-face you might be able to pull and do it with 1 person, a bunch of emails and some AI generated faces (inspiration courtesy of this video )