cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50778217

🗺️ While visiting Pride Berlin, I learned how utterly pointless Google Maps Reviews in Germany are.

⭐ Any place can simply report negative reviews for defamation or claim the person was never there and have it removed.

Users can then appeal & risk a lawsuit.

When a review is removed the removed count on Google Maps goes up (🖼️ 1)

However that count is reset after 365 days and also only goes to 250! (🖼️ 2)

Therefore companies can simply mass report negative reviews to improve their rating.

https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/16997273

So many vulnerable people are relying on Google Maps reviews & ratings to tell them where it is save to go.

Some places have only 1000-2000 reviews but >250 reviews removed in the past 365 days!

Like how bad must the situation there be?!

Absolute shame.

  • Entertainmeonly (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    26·
    4 days ago

    They have always been misleading from the inception. They claim it’s a 5 star system but with no possibility of a zero star it’s actually a four star system with five star math. Giving every single rating an automatic percentage that gets added with no possibility of removing. A three star review is a 50% grade but they add it as 60% because, fuck you. Anyone with more than a third grade math skill can see this blatant lie.

      • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
        17·
        4 days ago

        We’re getting there. Kinda.

        It seems to be a matter of days before CoMaps adds support for displaying user reviews in their Android app, as the first user-oriented open source map app to do so. I’m pretty excited about that. The code just needs to be reviewed at this point.

        The reviews will be sourced from Mangrove.reviews, who have been in the business of open data reviews for a while. It seems like a decent project, run by @mangroveReviews@mas.to, though their current website is very difficult to use. I don’t really know how moderation works on the platform so I can’t really claim to understand it, but it seems to be a pretty flexible standard for reviews attempting to be a bit of a one size fits all solution.

        Currently the best way to write reviews to mangrove.reviews is using an app called MapComplete. It takes effort.

        An alternative open review platform based on ATproto is cartes.app, but I don’t think it’s used by any map apps yet. The project website is however much more usable than Mangrove.

        My personal preference would be for a federated review service using ActivityPub, but that’s just a dream I’m having.

        For now, keep an eye on @CoMaps@floss.social. Hopefully them implementing Mangrove support will motivate people to start writing reviews there.

          • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
            3·
            4 days ago

            I have seen this gitlab issue before, and I’m very happy you are committed to it!

            As I have not yet managed to get a good grasp of how Mangrove works, I haven’t been fully able to wrap my head around what ActivityPub integration would mean for the platform, and how the two standards could potentially coexist in a fruitful way.

            My biggest worry about Mangrove is moderation. It seems to me the job of identifying bad content currently falls squarely on Mangrove centrally, and that it a) presumes a “one size fits all” approach to moderation, and b) assumes it is up for the task at a scale. If Mangrove becomes huge the incentive and potential for abuse will both be huge, posing a gigantic moderation challenge. Unlike the Fediverse there does not seem to be an obvious solution for moderation on scale in place - attracting more reviewers would not automatically attract more or better moderators. Mangrove also seems very vulnerable to LLM spam which can be difficult to spot, but that the fediverse so far has been relatively good at avoiding.

            Well-moderated fediverse instances seem to be uniquely good at keeping things human and blocking trolls, and we can choose instances with moderation criteria (and federation criteria) that fit our preferences. In effect my Mastodon account feels a bit like a protected bubble, showing me the parts of the Internet that I actually want to interact with. If I could choose to only see reviews by users not blocked by my instance that would be incredible.

            I realize there are a bunch of challenges to this approach. Software displaying reviews would have to somehow connect to a federated instance to choose their moderation policy. All users would have to be federated, and if it falls behind on moderation the @mangrove.reviews instance itself might be defederated by other instances. And of course it could make the platform less open to non-federated users, which is obviously most of the internet.

            Of course there are already a few review platforms on the Fediverse - Bookwyrm and NeoDB - but there’s not yet any option to review locations. Still, any federated review platform should probably strive to be as close to those as possible on the technical level.

            I’m sorry that this is very long and winding without any real point! I’m sure you’ve been thinking about these things as well.

            And thank you so much for paving the way for all of this - I can’t wait to start seeing Mangrove reviews appearing in Comaps! @mangroveReviews@mas.to

  • Pantherina (he)@feddit.org
    9·
    4 days ago

    Sadly OpenPlaceReviews never took off and I never got it to work. OSMand and CoMaps dont have a shared preconfigured database where reviews can be left.

    And of course the apps are not preinstalled on any mainstream OS

    OpenStreetMap does not allow subjective content and doesnt even have an image host where you can easily upload pictures. There is still no general or German Panoramax instance that is not the one hosted by the creators.

  • Ardor von Heersburg@discuss.tchncs.de
    6·
    4 days ago

    I personally think that with this message it at least got better again. Simply do not go to any place with more than 0 removed reviews, regardless how good the other ones are.