Long post alert. Ratebeer’s lack of promotion anywhere has led to concentrated Facebook groups popping up that are so large they are now the go-to place for UK beer drinkers and Ratebeer has no unique selling points to attract anyone over (unless they’re interested in writing ratings - and most aren’t).
The ‘problem’ specifically in the UK is the concentration of where most the beer drinkers hang out. Unlike the US and other countries beer communities which seem to be spread out over Ratebeer, BeerAdvocate, Reddit, and Facebook, UK users are almost entirely on Facebook and have minuscule communities elsewhere.
I appreciate not all of you like to use Facebook, I don’t really like it myself but I go there almost exclusively for beer purposes now. For those who don’t know, there are two major UK beer related groups there, in the UKCBF we have 14k craft beer lovers, while the similarly sized CAMRA group has 15k real ale lovers. That’s almost 30k of us (some overlap I know) who mostly can’t be arsed with RB for one reason or another. I don’t know about the CAMRA group as they, at least on the surface I have to say, seem to be predominantly older men who don’t even use UT much, let alone RB.
But in UKCBF almost everyone uses UT, there are sometimes big threads where new users will share their usernames and add each other, I’ve made a lot of contacts that way, many have made friends through UKCBF and meet up at pubs and festivals, drink and rate together on UT. So the combination of the group itself and UT covers the social aspect for most people in this way.
So why the hell would they bother with RB? Would they come for Places if not to write reviews? Nope. Facebook’s recommendation feature means that for any city someone might travel to other users have already recommended all the great breweries, pubs etc. all handily displayed on a fully functional map. Would they come for beer recommendations? Nope. Every day people are posting photos and reviews of great beers they’ve had, sharing announcements of new beers from breweries all over the country.
Another problem is that UKCBF is massively anti-macro, a viewpoint which I now share, and when news broke of ABInBev’s investment in RB people had even less desire to come here. Nowadays the only time I see RB mentioned there is when someone is travelling some obscure city/country that nobody knows about so we link to the Places page for it, or if someone asks about online shops I’ll link my bottleshop threads and encourage participation but they never do, they just bookmark it and don’t bother actually joining the forums.
One other area that formerly used to be a great promotion tool that @imdownthepub mentioned was the annual RB awards, and indeed those were quite heavily discussed in UKCBF this year but a large part of it were jokes around people’s surprise that ABInBev didn’t choose their own brands to feature there, there was also legitimate confusion from some users who seemed to be under the impression that RB admins choose the winners, and didn’t realise it was actually based on user ratings. So I completely agree that joe did RB a disservice this year by not promoting or communicating them properly, not just on RB but outside of it too. Also, you had massive brewers like Mikkeller with huge social reach making a mockery of the awards by photoshopping in ABI brands as the winners. It’s clear RB is no longer taken that seriously any more when the mockery is coming from not only random people but famous brewers, RB has lost a lot of respect it once commanded.
I don’t know. Joe and the team has an enormous upward struggle to regain trust and actually do some promotion. The lack of development and the lack of communication appear to be the biggest problems. Something, anything, needs to be done. Bugs need to be fixed. Features need to be improved. That all needs to happen before RB can even think about promotion. The future is not looking very bright at all, yet I sincerely hope Joe can turn things around because I don’t want this site to die. I still enjoy rating beers here.