Yeah, but do they really want to run people off the site and the positions that ensure data quality? Can they be so daft and cocky as to believe that data will sort itself out by itself and that they (potentially) have the people who can easily replace people who have more than a decade of experience, market connections and in-depth knowledge of markets whose coverage is the sole thing that sets RB apart from the rest? People whose work, capabilities and in some cases mere presence lends what little credibility RB has left to the site?
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and then there is me
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yeah but that’s all down to about 20 people on this site? Right? Mainly Scandinavians! :-)
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Considering that they only really need bigger brands with larger batch beers I don’t see any need for our knowledge etc. One can easily find information about such beers.
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now wanting to run you off the site would be like wanting to club a baby seal. DO YOU WANT TO CLUB BABY SEALS AB INBEV?!?!?!?!
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I don’t have any stats to wheel out but when I travel to places that don’t have much of a RB presence, it feels to me that a higher proportion of the beers I have are not on the site or have just one or two ratings.
Of course, that’s not necessarily inconsistent with more beers being added AND more ratings in total being entered. There are far more new beers these days so a consistent rate of beer additions would mean a much higher proportion & number of beers not finding their way onto the site. And, because it’s just not possible to even scratch the surface of all the new beers these days, I suspect the ratings are being concentrated into the good, the high profile and (where we have active hardcore users) the local. Other obscure beers probably fall through the cracks more than they did. The old days of having to scour beer festivals and obscure retailers to keep the new ticks coming are long gone.
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Left unattended, sites like this quickly become “overgrown with weeds”, and mess just piles up fast to huge numbers. Credibility then falters and flops, even for big brands and shit - which is already down due to the ownership, as the site’s openly mocked for its ever increasing flaws. Etc. All the while hate grows for letting that happen. “Bad press”, unnecessary “bad press” and bad blood. May be countered by expensive marketing and pushes, which may and may not succeed and is essentially unnecessary costs to cover for being destructive, spiteful douchebags. In the end, they will have gotten rid of a prominent beer site where one could see low ratings for their beers, and be known to have gotten rid of a prominent beer site because of that, carry that stigma. If fucks would be given by them is unknown - like not because megacorp - but they would most definitely establish themselves as the “enemy” to many more.
Or they can actually gain some goodwill from this. Have an example to show that “see, not all megacorp does is bad”.
Fun times.
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Yeah there is just so much out there. But id say thats been the case for 2-3 years
So i dint go back further, (but maybe i should)
But i was interesting so see if the last 12 months looked much different to previous 2 years.
And i bet if we looked at hoe long it took untappd to add 10000 (if its even possible) it would be considerably less time even accounting for vinages and homebrew
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Ratings amongst the once-keenest members has definitely dropped off a cliff. It’s been 75 days since I last posted an update to the ‘million ratings’ thread, and we’re still only 92% of the way through the band. Next time I update that thread, I’ll re-do the charts too.
So, as you say, AB wants to get rid of the old guard, and they’re succeeding. How on earth you can paint that in a positive light, I simply cannot understand. What you’re saying is effectively “AB don’t want RB”.
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Thing is, for a site centred on number crunching, reaching a critical mass of ratings for each beer is crucial. Due to the weighting regime, good and highly scored beers that don’t have many ratings are at a big disadvantage - they simply won’t rise above the mediocre in the rankings. So the site’s usefulness for steering consumers towards beers worth trying or seeking out is, to my mind, on the wane for beers that are not widely available. As Ed says, that might suit Ab-InBev just fine. Unless things have changed, you can’t even see the unweighted average any more and you can’t sort the beers on a brewery page by score (or anything else) right now.
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I dont think many would disagree that were not getting the numbers we really need. I wonder if 5-6 years ago or even 3 years ago if we would be getting the numbers needed per beer if the avability of now was available then.
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Right. This happened about a year ago, when AB Inbev was already in the boat… There was much complaints from users, but no reaction at all from RB, as far as i could see.
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I’m pretty sure it was much longer ago than that that the unweighted average disappeared. - well before the part sale, but after joet decided he could update the site himself.
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Almost certainly not. However, there were probably few enough up & coming breweries for users to keep up to speed and a sufficient number of hardcore raters seeking out the good but relatively obscure beers to push a higher proportion - or at least those that warranted it - towards that critical mass of ratings.
I always think my annual January trip to Manchester gives me quite a good feel for this sort of thing. There are a lot of decent “modern” brewers there but few (any?) active raters. Apart from Cloudwater, and maybe one or two others, none of those brewers get a lot of attention. Just take a look at how few beers from good brewers such as Pomona Island, Wander Beyond, Track, Squawk etc can muster more than a handful of ratings.
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No, the real average is only gone on the new site, on the old site it is still there. I don’t have the link at hand right now for the old site, but you can still direct to it if you enter the right URL.
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Ah, like the link to the stats page is gone, but mostly you can find it by editing the URL.
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Found it:
https://www.ratebeer.com/Ratings/Beer/Beer-Ratings.asp?BeerID=486340
There’s the “mean” score. If you change the BeerID (same as on the new site) you can direct to any beer.
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ZX have not delivered quality changes to this website and I can’t see what is going to change. What voice will we have to steer RB in the direction we want to go in? Not that we have had much voice lately.
Don’t fancy untappd much, truncated ratings is my most serious misgiving, less so the fact there is very little serious assessment of beer. Posting a photo of a beer in a glass and saying delicious is the bottom of the barrel in terms of social media bollocks to me. I could possibly live with the latter if it wasn’t for the former.
Happy to back a crowdfunding - kickstarter for a new beer website. Only proviso from me is that I want to be able to upload my ratings without any fannying about. No Untappd truncation!
I don’t believe the IT would be that hard, I can’t see the database being that complicated. Places and maps I appreciate would be harder, but that could come in time. Far more difficult would be ownership and on-going funding and maintenance. Would be a brave soul that takes this on.
So I think I will soldier on here until I can’t and then return to private record taking which is how I started before I joined this formally great website.
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As I see it, yes
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