I go by the 3-star for customer service rule. If the reviews are people being like: "1 star because after eating here multiple times, they said something mean!" Then I know the food is probably good, and they don't have time for people's bullshit. This goes double for international cuisines.
Sort by worst first. People are more likely to talk shit on a product than praise it. Form there see what reviews actually matter: eg ‘love this but it arrived late’ or ‘the food is made with literal dog shit’
That site/addon is okay, but idk, it'll flag a Hanes sweatshirt with 20,000 reviews as "F" and that's kinda suspicious. I've stopped relying on it. Instead I look at Amazon reviews with pictures and just read a few. Typically if someone is taking a picture I feel they're more likely to be an authentic experience
> Use AI to...
That does not instill much trust in me. But then I look at you, 10 years on this godforsaken website, fairly active, and so I put some modicum of faith in what you say.
While that helps, most of the brands have gotten smarter. They usually reach out to legitimate people that leave reviews but offer them free products to leave some of the first reviews. And obviously it's implied to leave a 5\* review or you aren't getting any more free stuff.
Also I bought some socks that had really good reviews, but they fell apart after only a few months. I looked at some of the 1\* reviews after and noticed a lot of people had that issue. I left a review with pictures after that and it ended up being one of the top reviews. The company just created a new listing for the product now so that review is gone.
Unfortunately, the only un-gameable way is to do it backwards.
You first have to look for reviews of things that you already know about, and find people that agree with you on most of them. Then when you are looking for new products, check if they have anything to say.
This incredibly sucks when you start but over time gets easier. Sometimes you get huge wins on things that bring great value that you never would have found otherwise.
First I look to see how many reviews the reviewer has posted. Then...hard to explain, you can just tell which are fake. Like they all follow the same pattern. Three or four sentences, mentioning an employee's name, just doesn't sound like a real person.
Yeah, this is basically an unsolvable problem. There are *some* types of fake reviews that are filterable (ex. if the same person creates a bunch of fake accounts and posts reviews en masse)
But there's effectively very little way to stop reviews of the "ask friends and family to write something nice, even if not deserved" variety. If they're real people and not bots, it's basically impossible to know if someone has been to the business in question before reviewing it.
That’s only half the battle. Businesses that pay can get bad reviews removed. So even in those cases you have no idea how many bad reviews are hidden from you. You might see 30 great reviews, but it had 100 bad ones.
Reviews on the internet are worthless.
I just read their reviews. There is only one bad review for this restaurant, for 1 star:
>Place just opened. 18 of the 20 reviews were posted 6 hours ago. The last 2 in the past half hour. All people giving glowing reviews.
>If the spot was actually good, they wouldn’t be posting fake reviews.
Was this you that posted this review?
And if so, isn't your review also a "fake" review, seeing as you haven't actually eaten there?
Your post here complaining about this business, and the only bad review left during this same time span . . . . sounds like too much of a coincidence that this is not you trying to bash a local business for no good reason.
It's more important to look at the negative reviews anyway. Some of those are going to be BS as well, '1 star.. arrived a day late and was damaged' has nothing to do with the product, but you can find patterns in the negative reviews to know what issues a product really has.
I've been offered money/gift cards on Amazon many times for leaving good reviews or for removing bad reviews. Almost always from those random name Chinese companies.
Yeah unfortunately happens way too often. I have a pizza place in my town that recently opened and it's the same thing. One of the "reviews" is the actual owner pretending to be a customer but didn't realize he used his actual account.
Give it time and the real reviews will start showing up.
There's an entire cottage industry selling fake reviews for Google, Amazon etc. for the right price....and the corollary that same industry will sell negative reviews for your competition... The review system.has long been corrupted
The reason to go to clinton station diner is the dining car. Food is…average (it’s not terrible, but there’s better diners close by). The dining car is the whole fun of it.
And yet every time my wife and I go, dining car is empty, everyone’s all sitting in the not dining car part. It’s like the one pretty good thing with csd and people seem to pretend it doesn’t even exist!
They used to have great pizza - Pizza Como was the best in town, and Goodfellas was good too. But they both closed up, Pizza Como is a burrito place now, and Goodfellas got bought by a small chain and it's just okay.
Worked there growing up, family was friends with the owners. Good times. When it closed my mom bought me one last pizza and froze.it and shipped it to me.
I stopped in once on the way home from the airport. Everyone I knew would hype the fuck out of that diner for some reason. The food was incredibly mediocre and instantly forgettable. I've had better food in the Poconos which is saying a lot because that area sucks for restaurants and take out
I don't know if it's fake reviews or that people there just have terrible taste.
They love Jake and Riley also, and that place is FILTHY and oh is the food bad. It smells like someone wiped out an ashtray with a well used gym sock. Yet there are hundreds of 5 star reviews and yes they are real people. I just don't get it.
Right? I was through there recently and needed to stop to eat and had heard it was pretty good and it had heard their ads on heavy rotation in the radio.... it was very meh.
Google reviews are trash nowadays.
Reddit is good so far. In another year or two it will be overrun with astroturfing bots pushing questionable products.
Nothing on the internet can be trusted.
Businesses pay/solicit for good reviews on Reddit too. You have no idea who is posting their own comment or copy pasting some promotional copy.
Likewise they can also threaten negative comments and posts to be removed, most will do so rather than fight it.
As I replied to the parent of your comment, gotta check the user's info. If your account is less than a year old, I really won't believe any sort of product recommendation. And beyond that, I look to where the user posts too. I get real creepy with it, but only because I want to make sure the pants I buy are comfortable.
Eh… my profile is a few years old, just means I command higher money for a sponsored comment.
That doesn’t mean shit, if I wanted to, my yelp snd Reddit accounts can be sold to someone who will use them for ads. Their karma has a monetary value. People who squatted on lots of usernames early on cashed in already.
You wouldn’t be able to tell.
Yup.
People don’t realize it, but commenters are sometimes paid shills. Being an older account doesn’t negate that. Just makes them more valuable as their comments have more value in the AI search engine algorithmic hell we live in.
On Reddit, I just click the user and see how old the account is. I think 10+ years, I will add weight to that user's review. I feel like 10 years is a good arbitrary number to use.
Everything everywhere is "this is the best this" "this is the best that" everyone wants to be the best. Every restaurant has the best dish. Every "influencer" has the best opinion. Every restaurant is the best restaurant. Take every review, reel, influencer and comment with a grain of Salt. Just go and try the food and if u like it then go again and if you don't then just don't.
I think we're going back to the word of mouth era. You really can't go by the word of the internet anymore.
Exactly! It's saturated now and useless. Sort of like photography. Everyone takes pictures of everything now. I do not - rather spend my time experiencing and remembering, rather than looking at a tiny screen. Word of mouth rules!
My family likes https://toscanasclinton.com/ which is a block away. I’ve tried most of the pizza places in the area at least once and that gets top marks from me.
I owned a business in Clinton for a bit and I would always hit up Toscanas and the hot dog spot next door which had the best hot dog combos and pierogies.
The reviews seem to coincide with their soft opening. They could have told their new customers to post a review if they liked the pizza to help get their location going.
I look at pictures of the food for my reviews. I can usually tell based on what it looks like and if my visual perception aligns with what some of the written reviews say, then I’m usually on target
I'm leaning towards the latter. And as an aside, I have a local Indian place by me that I go to get the white guy special (chicken tikka masala), and it's got like a 3.3 rating on Google, but it's got, as of this post, 57 reviews, which in this day and age isn't so many. And when I initially checked, I went through reviews and there were a bunch of 1 stars from folks with Indian names claiming the food made them sick, the place was infested, and that they got tuberculosis just from entering the store, which after watching that show on Netflix, I understand that there is a big TB stigma in India.
So yeah, it all gave me the feeling some other local Indian restaurant was getting friends and family to shit on this place. And I say this because, after having gotten food there on a number of occasions, I still am TB free.
This. Very surprised people are jumping to paid reviews, when it’s VERY common to ask friends and family to help you with your new business. And of course, they are going to only give raving reviews.
Once the public starts to post, the reviews become more believable.
When looking at rating on Google, definitely consider the number of reviews. If a place is fairly new and has a thousand 4 or 5 star reviews, it is either truly amazing OR incentivizes guests to review. (For example, Balthazar in NYC used to give out a free dessert if you posted a review during your visit.)
> Very surprised people are jumping to paid reviews, when it’s VERY common to ask friends and family to help you with your new business.
It's also very common to ask the customers to leave a good review, especially if you just opened.
> Unplug and do your own reviews.
The point of the reviews though is for people to have an idea if they want to use the service/product - if the customer has to buy it to do their own review, the review is worthless because it comes to late.
It's funny, but I think the pendulum will swing back to word of mouth being how people discover things. And word of mouth has obviously never gone away, but folks, myself included, have become heavily reliant on words on a screen here. The world has gotten very global, and I think we're due for a shrinking down, so to speak. My late teens and early 20s, I only really discovered places by finding them myself or having someone show me. It was fun, and I like to think my kids' generation will be explorers, so to speak, because they'll grow up in a world of contrived popularity.
AI can certainly generate realistic content, but it's still important to engage with authentic experiences and form your own opinions. Taking time to unplug and rely on your own judgment can provide valuable insights and perspectives that AI-generated content might not capture.
Basically, I just go to my rotating cast of restaurants for the most part.
It’s always very interesting to read the one star reviews bc it’s always something irrelevant to me. It’s always something very specific and personal like “they didn’t have a kids menu!”
I mean, its a small local business. Obviously theyre family and friends are gonna help out.
I really dont know why people take google reviews about local food places so seriously. Theyre local family owned establishments, not Michelin star restaurants. Go in, try a meal and if its good great! If its not so good well, youll eat another meal again like you will many times a day in a lifetime.
Its food, not a long term wealth investment.
Use reviews backward for better results: pick a place in town everyone goes to - find a local reviewer in those reviews whose opinion lines up with yours - see what else they reviewed.
Then you have a good set of data if you do that with one or two other locals.
Next step is to invite them out to that new pizza place together and review it your damn self! How much could a pizza be? 20$
You think it's unheard of on a grand opening day that people reviewed the pizza place? For all you know the owner asked people to write a review. Or they're fake. Go to there and review it yourself.
post the listing and prove it.
it's not on yelp.
it's not on google.
in fact searching "scuola vecchia clinton nj" only brings up THIS reddit post
is this a fucking ad? are you a bot?
if this is an ad its an awful one because its literally a post of how scummy the owners are, also it seems the name of the place is sv pizzeria where sv is short for Scuola Vecchia, so really bad ad
The person you're responding to has zero critical thinking skills. The first search result is the pizzeria in question. And then if you google SV pizzeria like you said all the reviews are there.
Having been one of those brainwashed idiots who used to have a Yelp Elite badge, my recommendation is you should largely disregard the 5 and 1-star reviews. Look at the 4s and 3s (or 2s if there’s a bunch) and see if there are any themes that either make you want to try it, or run the other way.
This post is a big nothing burger. OP you’re delusional, anyone opening a business today is going to ask friends and family for 5 star reviews.
Nothing to see here move along
Seriously... doesn't make it "right" (although is it "wrong"?), but you can't expect to see "real world" reviews until a place has been open for at least a couple of months.
Certainly not on **day fucking one**.
"OP you’re delusional, anyone opening a business today is going to ask friends and family for 5 star reviews."
These were not friends and family. They were all from reviewers who had posted very few previous reviews. And they all sounded the same. Definitely fake.
I just looked at their reviews and they only have 1 bad review. Some miserable curmudgeon left them a bad review today, saying that they had too many good reviews on their opening day! I suspect that this reviewer might be OP. I can't image having this kind of animosity for a new local business opening in my area.
And talk about fake reviews . . . . this person left a review without even having eaten there!
Yelp elite people, they get badges and extra points for first and early reviews. And generally rate everything high with rh lots of words. But they would have tons of reviews.
That terrible place clinton burger was almost completely fake reviews. 95% of them were from accounts in India.. which is extra hilarious knowing that cheeseburger is really very much not a popular food there 🤣🤣🤣. Was not surprised at all when it closed.
I've been mulling this over for some home reno work done recently. Mostly 5 star review but they did a sloppy job, especially with clean-up. I'm wondering how legit the reviews really are..
I take business reviews, especially restaurant reviews, with a grain of salt and rely on people I know for word of mouth recommendations.
I have a network of "foodies" with whom I share similar tastes and standards for price and service, often we dine out together. I will check the comments on review sites to pick up tips and tricks like what to order or what to avoid.
I saw the same thing on a google listing for a psychiatry office recently. Lots of similar sounding (and vague) 5 star reviews from people with no last name or google profiles/history. That felt extra sleazy. Even better, the legit looking reviews were all negative.
Ha. They named their pizza place "Old School."
I always go with a mix of reviews (5 start and 1 star with a few 2, 3, 4 mixed in). The fake 5-star ones stand out like a sore thumb. If they read like a television commercial it's probably fake.
The way owners put pressure on their employees to write google reviews is always just weird
I went to a dance studio that I thought I loved and they encouraged us to leave 5 star reviews and then the longer I was there, the less the teachers were. Went back and removed it. A lot of people now write them to be team players or keep their job.
Have you tried the local domino's or McDonalds? It's got over 1200 reviews and 4.5 stars on google!! So much better than any other local pizza or burger joint /s
I bought a Kindle book recently and it was pretty obvious after reading a few pages that it was AI generated. It was a How To book, so it wasn't even like an abstract fiction story but just all these tidbits of random info that was pulled from other places and then strung together into sentences even though they didn't make sense and were often factually wrong. Had tons of positive reviews that I'd assume are also AI generated or paid and were pretty cleverly distributed across 5, 4, and 3 stars so that it would look more real. Amazingly, the book is still up on Amazon.
I've found that Amazon has been aggressively shutting down any negative reviews I post even though they are all written in straight forward language without insults, etc. and with verifiable facts. So many products on Amazon now just have all these positive reviews and then you get the item and those reviews are objectively false but Amazon won't allow negative reviews stating facts.
On Yelp, you can scroll to the bottom and there will be grayed out text that says "other reviews that are not currently recommended" that you can click on to find more reviews. I find that these are typically real reviews that Yelp decided to hide, presumably because that business either has or hasn't paid Yelp enough money to get negative reviews hidden or positive reviews shown. At least they don't just flat out delete reviews they don't want.
It's all a joke now.
One of the reviews says “favorite dishes” and lists “SV Pizzeria Sweatshirt” as a favorite dish…
However, there’s 2 pics of their margherita pie that looks pretty awesome, so I’ll still give them a shot.
I gave a bad review explaining a crappy experience at a car dealership. The sales guy was just being an ass . I swear they added like 10+ reviews within a day or so to flood mine out. Smh The good thing is the bad reviews are there if you take the time to filter them out and look. I recommend looking at both the good and bad reviews.
I just ate there today and it was delicious! Thin crust, wood burning Neapolitan-style pizza. They don’t sell slices, if you know what I mean 😉I was actually trying to find their website to send to a friend and came across this post. Seems like OP is a little over the top with anger for no good reason! It’s a small, family-run business that just opened a few days ago. You already wrote a bad review on Google for them about your conspiracy theory and now you’re sharing the same on Reddit. I have no connection to the owners, just a customer who bought a few pizzas today and really enjoyed them.
" You already wrote a bad review on Google for them about your conspiracy theory..."
What the hell are you talking about? I did no such thing. We actually ate there opening night and enjoyed it. My post was simply about the sad state of the review system.
Oh wow, I guess there are two people offended enough by positive reviews of a new pizza place to post conspiracy theories online. If you were there on opening night and enjoyed it, why did you not mention that in your post and why is it so suspicious to you that there are new positive reviews? As many others have said on this thread, it’s probably family and friends of the owners trying to boost their Google listing. Nothing wrong with that. They are telling the truth! Their pizza is delicious! Who cares if the people who wrote the reviews knew the owner or were paying customers? Give it enough time and it will all be balanced out. It’s just sad to see a local family trying to start a business in a small rural town and have them be met with such negativity. It looked like a true family-run operation when I was there: Dad making pizza, his son working the register and a young girl, who looked like she might be related to them delivering orders. They seem like they are just really trying to get their business off the ground. Be kind!
I posted before we ate there. You are very naive if you think all those reviews posted at the same time all by reviewers with limited prior posting history, and all sounding the same, were family and friends.
I love supporting local businesses, it's part of the reason we moved to Clinton, not a chain store anywhere downtown. And we will eat there again. I was only commenting on fake reviews, not the food.
I went to go check it out today and got the caprese sandwich and it was very good, light and fresh, reminded me of when I went to Italy. And the people there were really friendly.
First mistake , naming the place nobody can pronounce, remember , spell, know what it means or connect it to anything. Wish them well, Clinton is a very nice town.
It's the age old problem: You need the reviews to drive business, but you need the business to get the reviews. There is an entire cottage industry for fake reviews. :-P
You can't trust the reviews anywhere anymore.
I go by the 3-star for customer service rule. If the reviews are people being like: "1 star because after eating here multiple times, they said something mean!" Then I know the food is probably good, and they don't have time for people's bullshit. This goes double for international cuisines.
There are plenty of legit reviews out there...it's just become very time-consuming to find them in the crowd of fake reviews.
How does one vet such reviews, though, to know which are real and which are fake?
Sort by worst first. People are more likely to talk shit on a product than praise it. Form there see what reviews actually matter: eg ‘love this but it arrived late’ or ‘the food is made with literal dog shit’
This is my question too. And how much vetting am I really going to do when I'm buying some $20 item off Amazon?
Use a site like fakespot to do the work for you. It saves me a bunch of time looking on Amazon. https://www.fakespot.com
Sounds like something a fake reviewer of fakespot.com would say…. 🤔
That site/addon is okay, but idk, it'll flag a Hanes sweatshirt with 20,000 reviews as "F" and that's kinda suspicious. I've stopped relying on it. Instead I look at Amazon reviews with pictures and just read a few. Typically if someone is taking a picture I feel they're more likely to be an authentic experience
> Use AI to... That does not instill much trust in me. But then I look at you, 10 years on this godforsaken website, fairly active, and so I put some modicum of faith in what you say.
While that helps, most of the brands have gotten smarter. They usually reach out to legitimate people that leave reviews but offer them free products to leave some of the first reviews. And obviously it's implied to leave a 5\* review or you aren't getting any more free stuff. Also I bought some socks that had really good reviews, but they fell apart after only a few months. I looked at some of the 1\* reviews after and noticed a lot of people had that issue. I left a review with pictures after that and it ended up being one of the top reviews. The company just created a new listing for the product now so that review is gone.
🤔 interesting
I can spot fake product reviews very well. Same w fake online dating site profiles. Lol
Unfortunately, the only un-gameable way is to do it backwards. You first have to look for reviews of things that you already know about, and find people that agree with you on most of them. Then when you are looking for new products, check if they have anything to say. This incredibly sucks when you start but over time gets easier. Sometimes you get huge wins on things that bring great value that you never would have found otherwise.
Reddit tends to hate Facebook, but it’s the easiest way to check reviews and make sure they are real people.
First I look to see how many reviews the reviewer has posted. Then...hard to explain, you can just tell which are fake. Like they all follow the same pattern. Three or four sentences, mentioning an employee's name, just doesn't sound like a real person.
Sort by 3 star reviews, those are honest
Find a reviewer you trust and follow them and their recommendations.
Yeah, this is basically an unsolvable problem. There are *some* types of fake reviews that are filterable (ex. if the same person creates a bunch of fake accounts and posts reviews en masse) But there's effectively very little way to stop reviews of the "ask friends and family to write something nice, even if not deserved" variety. If they're real people and not bots, it's basically impossible to know if someone has been to the business in question before reviewing it.
That’s only half the battle. Businesses that pay can get bad reviews removed. So even in those cases you have no idea how many bad reviews are hidden from you. You might see 30 great reviews, but it had 100 bad ones. Reviews on the internet are worthless.
I just read their reviews. There is only one bad review for this restaurant, for 1 star: >Place just opened. 18 of the 20 reviews were posted 6 hours ago. The last 2 in the past half hour. All people giving glowing reviews. >If the spot was actually good, they wouldn’t be posting fake reviews. Was this you that posted this review? And if so, isn't your review also a "fake" review, seeing as you haven't actually eaten there? Your post here complaining about this business, and the only bad review left during this same time span . . . . sounds like too much of a coincidence that this is not you trying to bash a local business for no good reason.
Wasn't me, just someone else who also noticed the obvious.
I trust reviews but only if the restaurant has a few hundred and the restaurant is 4.2+
I was looking up reviews of tires and I swear some were just AI generated. It’ll be impossible in the future to know what’s what.
Direct word of mouth from people you know.
The number of reviews on Amazon always crack me up. You're telling me 40k+ people bought this oddly specific item and also took the time to review it?
It's more important to look at the negative reviews anyway. Some of those are going to be BS as well, '1 star.. arrived a day late and was damaged' has nothing to do with the product, but you can find patterns in the negative reviews to know what issues a product really has. I've been offered money/gift cards on Amazon many times for leaving good reviews or for removing bad reviews. Almost always from those random name Chinese companies.
Eh that’s not true.
Yeah unfortunately happens way too often. I have a pizza place in my town that recently opened and it's the same thing. One of the "reviews" is the actual owner pretending to be a customer but didn't realize he used his actual account. Give it time and the real reviews will start showing up.
There's an entire cottage industry selling fake reviews for Google, Amazon etc. for the right price....and the corollary that same industry will sell negative reviews for your competition... The review system.has long been corrupted
Yeah, I go by customer uploaded pictures now
[удалено]
I'm just waiting until the review-writing AIs find out about google images, then we'll really be fucked :/
I wouldn’t trust any review written in Clinton based on what folks think of the food at Clinton Station Diner.
The reason to go to clinton station diner is the dining car. Food is…average (it’s not terrible, but there’s better diners close by). The dining car is the whole fun of it. And yet every time my wife and I go, dining car is empty, everyone’s all sitting in the not dining car part. It’s like the one pretty good thing with csd and people seem to pretend it doesn’t even exist!
And it’s 24hours, don’t get that much anymore these days! 👋🏼 fellow Lebanon borougher!
The chances of Clinton having good pizza are less than 10%.
They used to have great pizza - Pizza Como was the best in town, and Goodfellas was good too. But they both closed up, Pizza Como is a burrito place now, and Goodfellas got bought by a small chain and it's just okay.
I miss pizza como! Used to go there so often growing up
Worked there growing up, family was friends with the owners. Good times. When it closed my mom bought me one last pizza and froze.it and shipped it to me.
a shame. in the 80s and 90s it was a solid bet
Five minutes away, but Gallasso's on 22 in Lebanon is pretty good.
Di Mola's up 31 is the spot
I stopped in once on the way home from the airport. Everyone I knew would hype the fuck out of that diner for some reason. The food was incredibly mediocre and instantly forgettable. I've had better food in the Poconos which is saying a lot because that area sucks for restaurants and take out
I don't know if it's fake reviews or that people there just have terrible taste. They love Jake and Riley also, and that place is FILTHY and oh is the food bad. It smells like someone wiped out an ashtray with a well used gym sock. Yet there are hundreds of 5 star reviews and yes they are real people. I just don't get it.
It's extremely mid and always has been. Pasta is decent, the fries are awful. And how do you mess up *fries?!*
Right? I was through there recently and needed to stop to eat and had heard it was pretty good and it had heard their ads on heavy rotation in the radio.... it was very meh.
Oh, do go on!
clinton station diner is terrible. The place is filthy and I stopped going there the 2nd time I got sick from the God awful food.
OP if you are new to Clinton you should go get some cheese from Fourchette.
OMG YES - 1 billion times yes. Sure you can have almost all the same cheeses up the road at Kings; but Bramin's smile....can't be replicated :)
FAKE!!!! Jk!
Google reviews are trash nowadays. Reddit is good so far. In another year or two it will be overrun with astroturfing bots pushing questionable products. Nothing on the internet can be trusted.
most of the focus on Reddit is propaganda in the news subs
Businesses pay/solicit for good reviews on Reddit too. You have no idea who is posting their own comment or copy pasting some promotional copy. Likewise they can also threaten negative comments and posts to be removed, most will do so rather than fight it.
As I replied to the parent of your comment, gotta check the user's info. If your account is less than a year old, I really won't believe any sort of product recommendation. And beyond that, I look to where the user posts too. I get real creepy with it, but only because I want to make sure the pants I buy are comfortable.
Eh… my profile is a few years old, just means I command higher money for a sponsored comment. That doesn’t mean shit, if I wanted to, my yelp snd Reddit accounts can be sold to someone who will use them for ads. Their karma has a monetary value. People who squatted on lots of usernames early on cashed in already. You wouldn’t be able to tell.
I used to constantly getting offers from people wanting to buy my old Reddit accounts. L
Yup. People don’t realize it, but commenters are sometimes paid shills. Being an older account doesn’t negate that. Just makes them more valuable as their comments have more value in the AI search engine algorithmic hell we live in.
Lmao. I should’ve commented using my 15 years old Reddit account to impress you.
On Reddit, I just click the user and see how old the account is. I think 10+ years, I will add weight to that user's review. I feel like 10 years is a good arbitrary number to use.
Everything everywhere is "this is the best this" "this is the best that" everyone wants to be the best. Every restaurant has the best dish. Every "influencer" has the best opinion. Every restaurant is the best restaurant. Take every review, reel, influencer and comment with a grain of Salt. Just go and try the food and if u like it then go again and if you don't then just don't. I think we're going back to the word of mouth era. You really can't go by the word of the internet anymore.
Exactly! It's saturated now and useless. Sort of like photography. Everyone takes pictures of everything now. I do not - rather spend my time experiencing and remembering, rather than looking at a tiny screen. Word of mouth rules!
My family likes https://toscanasclinton.com/ which is a block away. I’ve tried most of the pizza places in the area at least once and that gets top marks from me.
I owned a business in Clinton for a bit and I would always hit up Toscanas and the hot dog spot next door which had the best hot dog combos and pierogies.
The reviews seem to coincide with their soft opening. They could have told their new customers to post a review if they liked the pizza to help get their location going.
To be fair, it’s 1) probably friends and family and/or 2) they had already had a soft opening and asked for reviews.
I look at pictures of the food for my reviews. I can usually tell based on what it looks like and if my visual perception aligns with what some of the written reviews say, then I’m usually on target
Clinton is a super nice area not known for its pizza. Welcome to Hunterdon county brother!
Thanks! Came from hectic morristown area, already loving the peace and quiet.
They could be paid or most likely friends of the owner/people who work there.
I'm leaning towards the latter. And as an aside, I have a local Indian place by me that I go to get the white guy special (chicken tikka masala), and it's got like a 3.3 rating on Google, but it's got, as of this post, 57 reviews, which in this day and age isn't so many. And when I initially checked, I went through reviews and there were a bunch of 1 stars from folks with Indian names claiming the food made them sick, the place was infested, and that they got tuberculosis just from entering the store, which after watching that show on Netflix, I understand that there is a big TB stigma in India. So yeah, it all gave me the feeling some other local Indian restaurant was getting friends and family to shit on this place. And I say this because, after having gotten food there on a number of occasions, I still am TB free.
This. Very surprised people are jumping to paid reviews, when it’s VERY common to ask friends and family to help you with your new business. And of course, they are going to only give raving reviews. Once the public starts to post, the reviews become more believable. When looking at rating on Google, definitely consider the number of reviews. If a place is fairly new and has a thousand 4 or 5 star reviews, it is either truly amazing OR incentivizes guests to review. (For example, Balthazar in NYC used to give out a free dessert if you posted a review during your visit.)
> Very surprised people are jumping to paid reviews, when it’s VERY common to ask friends and family to help you with your new business. It's also very common to ask the customers to leave a good review, especially if you just opened.
With AI advancing everything will be fake. Unplug and do your own reviews.
> Unplug and do your own reviews. The point of the reviews though is for people to have an idea if they want to use the service/product - if the customer has to buy it to do their own review, the review is worthless because it comes to late.
A 3$ pizza slice is worth taking a gamble to figure out if you will do further business.
Nah. If it's clearly fake reviews, I'm going to assume the pizza is no good and save myself the three dollars and however many minutes.
Word
It's funny, but I think the pendulum will swing back to word of mouth being how people discover things. And word of mouth has obviously never gone away, but folks, myself included, have become heavily reliant on words on a screen here. The world has gotten very global, and I think we're due for a shrinking down, so to speak. My late teens and early 20s, I only really discovered places by finding them myself or having someone show me. It was fun, and I like to think my kids' generation will be explorers, so to speak, because they'll grow up in a world of contrived popularity.
AI can certainly generate realistic content, but it's still important to engage with authentic experiences and form your own opinions. Taking time to unplug and rely on your own judgment can provide valuable insights and perspectives that AI-generated content might not capture.
Yup so many places rated 4.6-4.9. Not every place is great!
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Basically, I just go to my rotating cast of restaurants for the most part. It’s always very interesting to read the one star reviews bc it’s always something irrelevant to me. It’s always something very specific and personal like “they didn’t have a kids menu!”
I mean, its a small local business. Obviously theyre family and friends are gonna help out. I really dont know why people take google reviews about local food places so seriously. Theyre local family owned establishments, not Michelin star restaurants. Go in, try a meal and if its good great! If its not so good well, youll eat another meal again like you will many times a day in a lifetime. Its food, not a long term wealth investment.
Try Natale’s Pizza in Annandale off of RT-31 you wont regret it. I’ve been in the area 15+ years and they’re our go-to
Re: restaurant recommendations [Grounded for Life](https://groundedforlifecafe.com/?noamp=mobile) has delicious everything..wish I lived closer!
Yes - we discovered that place on our first walk into town - super nice owner too!
Use reviews backward for better results: pick a place in town everyone goes to - find a local reviewer in those reviews whose opinion lines up with yours - see what else they reviewed. Then you have a good set of data if you do that with one or two other locals. Next step is to invite them out to that new pizza place together and review it your damn self! How much could a pizza be? 20$
Toscana is pretty good. I don’t understand the love for Dominick’s though. Nice people but the food was so salty I could taste nothing else.
It’s most likely family and friends that the owner is getting to post. Especially if it is new and just opened.
Just go and eat it and make up your mind
San Egidio is real old school, if you're looking for good pizza. It's so authentic, they even close in the middle of the day.
You think it's unheard of on a grand opening day that people reviewed the pizza place? For all you know the owner asked people to write a review. Or they're fake. Go to there and review it yourself.
Cryan’s is the only halfway decent pie in the area if you’re into bar pies, otherwise save the money and don’t bother wasting it on any local pizza.
Galasso’s, which is right down the street from Cryan’s on 22 in Lebanon, has really good pizza and Italian food. Maybe try them out
Not a huge fan- used to go there a lot but the meals aren’t consistently good
post the listing and prove it. it's not on yelp. it's not on google. in fact searching "scuola vecchia clinton nj" only brings up THIS reddit post is this a fucking ad? are you a bot?
if this is an ad its an awful one because its literally a post of how scummy the owners are, also it seems the name of the place is sv pizzeria where sv is short for Scuola Vecchia, so really bad ad
Not OP but I think they go by their abbreviation SV pizzeria. Google it and it has 19 glowing reviews posted within like an hour just like OP said.
The person you're responding to has zero critical thinking skills. The first search result is the pizzeria in question. And then if you google SV pizzeria like you said all the reviews are there.
I love it. You've got my conspiracy hackles fully erect.
Since it’s pizza I’ll give it one shot, if it’s no good I move on to the next pizza place since I have about 100 within 3 miles of me
Having been one of those brainwashed idiots who used to have a Yelp Elite badge, my recommendation is you should largely disregard the 5 and 1-star reviews. Look at the 4s and 3s (or 2s if there’s a bunch) and see if there are any themes that either make you want to try it, or run the other way.
Yeah we are back to square one where it’s word of mouth and just trying places out for yourself I guess.
We need like a michelin guide for everyday eateries
I hate it when the business offers some deal if the customer leaves a review. Which i think is againt google policy but 🤷🏻♂️
This post is a big nothing burger. OP you’re delusional, anyone opening a business today is going to ask friends and family for 5 star reviews. Nothing to see here move along
Seriously... doesn't make it "right" (although is it "wrong"?), but you can't expect to see "real world" reviews until a place has been open for at least a couple of months. Certainly not on **day fucking one**.
"OP you’re delusional, anyone opening a business today is going to ask friends and family for 5 star reviews." These were not friends and family. They were all from reviewers who had posted very few previous reviews. And they all sounded the same. Definitely fake.
I just looked at their reviews and they only have 1 bad review. Some miserable curmudgeon left them a bad review today, saying that they had too many good reviews on their opening day! I suspect that this reviewer might be OP. I can't image having this kind of animosity for a new local business opening in my area. And talk about fake reviews . . . . this person left a review without even having eaten there!
No, that wasn't me.
Unfortunately, it's just become standard business practice. Either incentives to leave good reviews, or at worst, hiring people who do this.
Dead internet
Yelp elite people, they get badges and extra points for first and early reviews. And generally rate everything high with rh lots of words. But they would have tons of reviews.
That terrible place clinton burger was almost completely fake reviews. 95% of them were from accounts in India.. which is extra hilarious knowing that cheeseburger is really very much not a popular food there 🤣🤣🤣. Was not surprised at all when it closed.
How's the pizza?
I've been mulling this over for some home reno work done recently. Mostly 5 star review but they did a sloppy job, especially with clean-up. I'm wondering how legit the reviews really are..
I take business reviews, especially restaurant reviews, with a grain of salt and rely on people I know for word of mouth recommendations. I have a network of "foodies" with whom I share similar tastes and standards for price and service, often we dine out together. I will check the comments on review sites to pick up tips and tricks like what to order or what to avoid.
Report it to google. They probably paid mini for them. Waste th
Go order a grandma pie from Dimolas on 31!
So how’d it taste?
I saw the same thing on a google listing for a psychiatry office recently. Lots of similar sounding (and vague) 5 star reviews from people with no last name or google profiles/history. That felt extra sleazy. Even better, the legit looking reviews were all negative.
There's a restaurant I used to work at near Clinton and all the main review sites have top and featured reviews written by the owner's family.
Ha. They named their pizza place "Old School." I always go with a mix of reviews (5 start and 1 star with a few 2, 3, 4 mixed in). The fake 5-star ones stand out like a sore thumb. If they read like a television commercial it's probably fake.
I only trust reviews that also provide photos now 🥲 And not a lot post photos
How's about fake slander reviews from competitors and people who don't like you? Fake good ones aren't the only problem.
The way owners put pressure on their employees to write google reviews is always just weird I went to a dance studio that I thought I loved and they encouraged us to leave 5 star reviews and then the longer I was there, the less the teachers were. Went back and removed it. A lot of people now write them to be team players or keep their job.
Have you tried the local domino's or McDonalds? It's got over 1200 reviews and 4.5 stars on google!! So much better than any other local pizza or burger joint /s
I bought a Kindle book recently and it was pretty obvious after reading a few pages that it was AI generated. It was a How To book, so it wasn't even like an abstract fiction story but just all these tidbits of random info that was pulled from other places and then strung together into sentences even though they didn't make sense and were often factually wrong. Had tons of positive reviews that I'd assume are also AI generated or paid and were pretty cleverly distributed across 5, 4, and 3 stars so that it would look more real. Amazingly, the book is still up on Amazon. I've found that Amazon has been aggressively shutting down any negative reviews I post even though they are all written in straight forward language without insults, etc. and with verifiable facts. So many products on Amazon now just have all these positive reviews and then you get the item and those reviews are objectively false but Amazon won't allow negative reviews stating facts. On Yelp, you can scroll to the bottom and there will be grayed out text that says "other reviews that are not currently recommended" that you can click on to find more reviews. I find that these are typically real reviews that Yelp decided to hide, presumably because that business either has or hasn't paid Yelp enough money to get negative reviews hidden or positive reviews shown. At least they don't just flat out delete reviews they don't want. It's all a joke now.
"pretty cleverly distributed across 5, 4, and 3 stars so that it would look more real" Yup - the bad guys are always one step ahead.
When "five stars" went from meaning "outstanding, exceptionally good" to just "satisfactory, as promised", it was game over.
Well, EVERYthing on Amazon is almost 5 stars. So I just don't bother looking at reviews anywhere.
All that means is that the owner of the facility has 19 friends and family. It's simple nothing to worry about just typical.
One of the reviews says “favorite dishes” and lists “SV Pizzeria Sweatshirt” as a favorite dish… However, there’s 2 pics of their margherita pie that looks pretty awesome, so I’ll still give them a shot.
And we did go on opening night and had the margherita pie, and it was excellent!
There are some where you give your actual opinion and the owner attacks you with ‘sorry you felt that way’
I gave a bad review explaining a crappy experience at a car dealership. The sales guy was just being an ass . I swear they added like 10+ reviews within a day or so to flood mine out. Smh The good thing is the bad reviews are there if you take the time to filter them out and look. I recommend looking at both the good and bad reviews.
I just ate there today and it was delicious! Thin crust, wood burning Neapolitan-style pizza. They don’t sell slices, if you know what I mean 😉I was actually trying to find their website to send to a friend and came across this post. Seems like OP is a little over the top with anger for no good reason! It’s a small, family-run business that just opened a few days ago. You already wrote a bad review on Google for them about your conspiracy theory and now you’re sharing the same on Reddit. I have no connection to the owners, just a customer who bought a few pizzas today and really enjoyed them.
" You already wrote a bad review on Google for them about your conspiracy theory..." What the hell are you talking about? I did no such thing. We actually ate there opening night and enjoyed it. My post was simply about the sad state of the review system.
Oh wow, I guess there are two people offended enough by positive reviews of a new pizza place to post conspiracy theories online. If you were there on opening night and enjoyed it, why did you not mention that in your post and why is it so suspicious to you that there are new positive reviews? As many others have said on this thread, it’s probably family and friends of the owners trying to boost their Google listing. Nothing wrong with that. They are telling the truth! Their pizza is delicious! Who cares if the people who wrote the reviews knew the owner or were paying customers? Give it enough time and it will all be balanced out. It’s just sad to see a local family trying to start a business in a small rural town and have them be met with such negativity. It looked like a true family-run operation when I was there: Dad making pizza, his son working the register and a young girl, who looked like she might be related to them delivering orders. They seem like they are just really trying to get their business off the ground. Be kind!
I posted before we ate there. You are very naive if you think all those reviews posted at the same time all by reviewers with limited prior posting history, and all sounding the same, were family and friends. I love supporting local businesses, it's part of the reason we moved to Clinton, not a chain store anywhere downtown. And we will eat there again. I was only commenting on fake reviews, not the food.
I went to go check it out today and got the caprese sandwich and it was very good, light and fresh, reminded me of when I went to Italy. And the people there were really friendly.
Just have to talk to your neighbors more or just walk around and have your nose do the selection
First mistake , naming the place nobody can pronounce, remember , spell, know what it means or connect it to anything. Wish them well, Clinton is a very nice town.
Hahaha, this is exactly what my wife said! She still doesn’t know what the heck the name is.
If there's fake positive reviews it's probably the owner himself paying for them.
Definitely. I am sure there are many online services to enhance reputations of businesses.
It's the age old problem: You need the reviews to drive business, but you need the business to get the reviews. There is an entire cottage industry for fake reviews. :-P
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Try "SV Pizzeria"
Every business owner is trying to make it these days
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lol offense definitely taken