Shills on CT/Vivino

WINE TALK
41

Part of the skill set of living in the year 2016 is developing a nose for when reviews are honest or not, shills or not, and relevant to you or not. Of course, you don’t figure it out correctly 100% of the time, but I think we all try to become relatively adept at taking this kind of crowd feedback and making it useful to us in our decisions.

I would say, for myself, that I don’t observe any significant shill factor on CT, and I’m not surprised to hear Eric say that there are few incidences of it reported and observed on there. Mostly, I don’t think CT, and particularly the adding of a few TNs into CT, really moves wine sales enough. And in what small subset of wines it might do so (wine geek type wines), I don’t think most users are gullible enough to see some unknown person with no other tasting notes on CT or collection of wine inventoried on CT say “back up the truck 96 points.”

I do use CT in my purchasing decisions, though the funny thing is that the overwhelming majority of the time with current release wines, the role of CT is to dissuade me from buying something. You see a wine you’ve heard is good, gets high scores, looks enticing to you, or whatever, then you look on CT and people give it low marks and then it’s easy to pass. [When shopping for older wines, it’s closer to 50-50 whether CT encourages me to buy or not to buy.]

42

This.

If you regularly check CT and don’t notice shilling notes, you either lack a NS filter, or the they are rare.

I’m not saying zero “referral marketing” get’s by us wine intelligentsia, but whatever does is more likely to be in between clearly out of bounds shilling behavior and the pure as the driven snow examples we all think we and/or our favorite niche critics are.

I hadn’t thought of checking for actual wine inventory–but we now know Eric and his people are–which is reassuring. Either way there are probably some paid notes that I’d think to be legit reviews on merely I’ve read, but I usually need to see multiple reviews from the same handle for a lot of attention – like the professionals, but on a different scale.

If you put a lot of stock random notes or the average of 3 scores, I’m not sure that’s wise but the least of your problems is the few guys and gals in PJs that get paid content by both wine nerds and CT’s computer nerds.

43

Even with all that Dennis you’d only be able to provide facts to prove what are most likely legitimate user interactions. If someone was motivated and skilled enough they could leverage a VPN, open proxy, or even Tor to obfuscate their real IP address, physical location, and identity. Given this reality and the relative lack of it being leveraged I suspect that a) wine nerds and network security wonks aren’t one and the same in most cases and b) Eric is doing a better job at keeping CT clean from bogus reviews and accounts than we give him credit for.

And IF LE is actively looking to punish people who leave bogus reviews (what law does that break btw?) you can guarantee more people will be leveraging anonymising tools online. It’s the nature of the beast. To a certain extent things like this are nothing more than a game of whack-a-mole.

44

Someone using TOR and making an effort to anonymize will end up getting hammered by our anti-scraping vendor.

Of course there are shill reviews on CT, but they tend to stand out if you look at a user’s overall activity. So again, if you see something fishy, please let us know. It is not hard for us to see patterns and also connections between multiple accounts that go beyond simple IP addresses. The key of course is having someone tell us that something looks funny.

I would like to point out that it has been a day, and no one has actually reported a single suspicious note. Given some of the sweeping statements on this thread, I am surprised and disappointed.

And David, it sounds like you were hanging out with the one importer (now a retailer) whose reviews I hammered a number of years back. He tried to be subtle, and he denied it when I contacted him. I linked to him above for anyone paying attention…

45

If you find issues with stuff uploaded into CT, just report it. Doesn’t matter what it is. Eric and his team are super responsive to issues brought up. Pretty simple.

46

+1 Eric & his team are great.

As to “ghost” writers that are typing whatever they want…that’s one way to do business. Deceit & treachery. It all washes out in the end and people catch on. If I’m going to add an author to my favorites it’s either someone I know or it’s someone that has enough similar thoughts on wines that I’ve also consumed.

47

Bogus negative reviews are the first target, particularly from disgruntled ex-employees and the competition. Either way, new legislation is in the works because it’s actually very common.

48

I’m 71 points on this thread.

49

Was a new scoring system implemented and I missed the memo? [scratch.gif]

50

Everybody who drinks wine uses Cellartracker. [whistle.gif]

51

50 points just for being a thread…

52

Lol. 71 is code for ’ we have run out of strawmen’

53

Mike, David isn’t stupid. He’s the Hate Smurf.
HateSmurf.png
Why would anyone want to pummel a Smurf? [snort.gif]

ps - while I like David’s avatar, there’s a place where I have interwebforum superpowers and I’d DEFINITELY have replaced his avatar with the Hate Smurf if he were a member there. Probably given him an apropos avatar message underneath to accompany it as well. [cheers.gif]

54

I was riding the D train one day and a homeless guy sees me carrying my blue wine bag to a dinner. He proceeds to tell me that the wine I have in my bag can in no way compete with Ripple. He said Ripple is AWESOME. Maybe that’s worthy a discussion too, huh Dave?

55

Check your Ticketmaster account. There may be free tickets for Shill vs. Pussy Boy if they ripped you off on fees for Hirsch/Battaglia.

56

I’m not surprised that people ITB are trying to game CT, but I hadn’t ever thought of it, so I’m glad David flagged this issue. It’s a valuable thread.

57

aaaaaaannndddd we have a winner!

[winner.gif]

58

John, maybe. But really, is that news? Do you or your buddy think we all crawled out from under some rock? There is nefarious in every aspect of life. Go with that belief and you will never be dissapointed. Live with a cynical eye not by choice but by need.

59

So don’t talk about these things?

I’m well aware of the BS on Yelp, but hadn’t thought about it with CT. I mainly go there for references on older wines, but this is VERY useful to know when checking current releases. So I don’t buy the “If it’s not good news, we don’t want to hear it” approach.

1 Like
60

The CT Forum topic titled “Tasting Notes to Note” has a recent post showing a list of various Pinot Noirs all highly scored on the same day by the same person. The only comment provided in each of the tasting notes is the color of the wine.
This looks a bit like it could be a distributor pumping scores but…
I guess it could be someone who was at a wine tasting.