I see lots of ads on TV lately for Angie’s List, which I am led to believe will provide me with more reliable recommended choices of contractors, dentists, dog groomers, etc. than I would presumably find on something like Yelp for free. There are similar types of pay services in other industries as well to which this model applies, where I am presumably supposed to pay a fee to get better access than I get for free, but I have no guarantee of the quality even after paying. Since this is GQ, I will ask two specific questions specific to Angie’s List:
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How do you prevent the service providers from supplying fake testimonials for themselves about how great they are? “Bob’s Rip-Off Palace totally won’t rip you off and gave me great service!” (written by Bob’s wife). Even if it costs money to join Angie’s List to leave reviews, if enough people join it and it has a real effect on his business, presumably it is worth it for Bob to get his wife an account so she can pimp his business. If he does bad work and gets called on it, he just defends himself and says it was an unreasonable customer and points back to the great testimonials from all his other (fake) satisfied customers.
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Much like any sites that does reviews, like Amazon, don’t all the reviews even on Angie’s List ultimately turn into a combination of ‘A’ and ‘F’ ratings over time? That is, if you do a service for me and just do an o.k. ‘B’ level job, I can’t imagine I’m going to write a review for you. I might not do it even if it is an ‘A’ level job. Generally the type of people who take the time to write reviews either love something or hate it, hence my question.