User-Generated Discontent

Much has been made of "The Wisdom of Crowds," the counterintuitive thesis and book that says the masses aren't necessarily asses after all. I'm sure you're already familiar with the work and with James Surowiecki's column in the New Yorker, so I won't drill down, but here's an interesting factoid from Bookmarks magazine's review, off Amazon: "The TV studio audience of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' guesses correctly 91 percent of the time, compared with 'experts' who guess only 65 percent correctly." Other than in game shows, mmk, I understand from Amazon's Publishers Weekly blurb that such wisdom comes also comes into play "driving in traffic, maximizing stock-market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google."

Ah, the Internet, this vessel of compulsion, productivity and desire. I blog and comment and this site and a few others in bursts of all three to share, get up to speed, connect. A foodie forum such as this one involves a crowd -- a small, self-selected group of adorable semi-obsessives -- and I am here to give and take. Wise crowds, PW synthesizes, "need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions." Isn't this essentially what the Web delivers? Is Surowiecki rehashing some geek's thesis about the power of the Net? That's so 1995!

The last 10-12 years have seen an explosion of online services, and a whole era devoted to funny fundamentals and paradigm shifts that justified not only a lot of content for the crowd, but also a lot more writers, editors, designers, engineers, business developers (still figuring that one out) and executives. (At the time, this was good for me. I got to work with interesting people, get paid and make something I found valuable. It was even better for the execs, who were in the exalted position of having little or no idea what they were doing, while understanding nevertheless that they would make out no matter what.) All of us were slated to develop content and put it out there for people. One of my favorite online destinations called itself Slate, its founder explaining that the Web was this blank thing they were going to pour stuff into or something like that.

But the crowd was not to be held back. Why pay frustrated college graduates to do digests in between sneaker shopping and snacking? People are so eager to talk about the things they're thinking and doing. The business plans basically wrote themselves; I'm just not sure about the bottom line.

Throwing your hat in with the crowd is weird when you already have more than 100 reviews, as one writer remarks (scroll to March 5 entry), for a place that's only been open four months. Even more unsettling is absence of irony or self-criticism in the dozens and dozens of comments for every venue for hospitality, even if visited but once. Yes, this is America, where we're assured of being good consumers by virtue of spending good money dining and drinking and carrying on. Then we run home, spark up our computers and profess the following: "So nasty," or maybe "It’s tasty."

Whether the shallot vinaigrette, chili dog or piece of shit can be differently nasty or tasty seems to be beside the point. The primary motivation is to be a critic, to put your particular perspective into the mix with countless other takes. Even if we grant that more than 100 reviews (Perbacco, my first Google alert) in total contain everything a person would want to know about a place, it’s 100% irrelevant to someone who personally appreciates what it is and what it does. Less than 10 user reviews is too small a sample, and the signal to noise ratio starts to get muddy at more than 40. So much for diversity of opinion. (One more work-related rant. I once had to copy edit thousands of blurbs on East Bay and wine-country eateries, as well as on food and wine pairings. After about 100, I had no appetite for anything at all. It became a blur of spurious suggestions: "Try the curry chicken, skip the chicken curry.")

What's the crowd raving about? The impulses to share and connect that I've copped to above could be symptomatic of something else. (A way to have your cake after eating it?) Besides, with half of the meals eaten away from home, I don’t think people have a case for puffing themselves up just for making the big decision to sit down somewhere. In fact, it’s a little naïve.

Restaurateur Danny Meyer, who’s gone from gathering recipes to writing a business book, doesn’t tell his staff to put the customer first; the customer is sometimes wrong, even in America. He advises his people to put each other first.

Think about the regulars at several places and what happens when they pop in, whether it's Zuni or Yo-Yo's. These folks don't hit the Yahoo boards or Yelp to get the poop; they know. The staff knows them, says hi and shares a little cheer. (It’s one of the ways the 80/20 rule manifests itself, where 20% of the clientele is more or less 80% of the business.) One-timers will be tended to right after. It's the difference between walking the busy sidewalk and wandering into the busy sidewalk cafe.