This is why AB Inbev bought RateBeer 
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You forgot to add ⌠and global distribution
Huge congrats to PivovarskĂ˝ DĹŻm for winning the âUnknown / Will Be Reclassifiedâ category!!!
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^ The saddest but best way to sum up the state of RB right now.
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And itâs not like it wasnât pointed out.
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This particular debacle has the stench of Agile about it.
On the other end, the best Kellerbier is one which received only two ratings in 2019: Seinsheimer Sasemer Danzbier Hell
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People, we have suggested a revision of algorithm that would give more value to more recent reviews over older ones - but it apparently couldnât be done this year. Letâs hope that best of 2020 will have that. It will bring other problems, but at least ratings from 2004 wonât push forward places and beers that are less relevant nowadays. The town I live in has one blatant example of that - a place that was a top 2 place in town and maaaaybe the country in 2009 when I went there last has won an award this year as well, and, though I still have a soft spot for it, I wouldnât put it in top 20 in Prague, let alone Czechia as such.
What can you do? Keep on keeping on. I am the first one to struggle at that, and thereâs still a fairly big chance I give up after 10000, but there you go. âNot rating beers because bad ones wonâ is, sorry, just about the most counterproductive thing to do if youâre the least bit interested in good beers, worthy of being in the spotlight, winning. Promote your local greats by giving them the ratings they deserve and which count!
Get people who complain to do at least 75 character reviews if they care that much. Get people who use Places (or complain about them) to rate Places - which is something that can help EVERYONE. Pester admins when you see something fucked up on the boards. If your hometown or a place youâre traveling to looks fucked up on Places, message me and Iâll fix it ASAP, maybe your local admin will. We can do that and hope that the people who work on the technical side of the site will follow suit and act more professionally about what they are working on, learn from their mistakes and not make us not be able to do what we came to this site to do, like so frequently happened these last two yearsâŚ
We can give this one more shot and then, either GTFO and leave this to die with all those huge numbers of invisible users who are so much more relevant than us keeping on doing nothing or have an alternative to a highly popular dumbed-down (but still highly useful) site thatâs worth using, and is not a place that has to be built from scratch again.
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Wow. This list is incredibly sad.
Outdated, stale, incomplete, and void of any pulse on the the scene.
Itâs frustrating to see Ratebeer become obsolete, as I used to see it as the guiding source in the community.
This is embarrassing.
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Not just Leicestershire. Mount St Bernard was voted the best new brewer in the world. I think this is because they only do one beer, which got enough rates to push it above the mean, unlike most beers from new brewers. How many rates does the average beer from Round Corner have?
The strange one for me was Courage RIS being voted the best beer in England. Iâm sure they donât make this anymore, I havenât seen it for at least five years. However it got ten rates this year, looks like mainly aged bottles from last decade.
I would agree that RB doesnât have enough raters to hold awards (or for those awards to hold much prestige). I disagree that itâs all doom and gloom. Itâs fuckin annoying, yes, and sad that we are owned by the worst brewer in the world and doubly sad that we are no longer respected in the industry. But I think that RB still has a lot to offer, provided we know our place in the pecking order.
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I stead of RB focusing on awards and other nonsense foe which it looks like it loses cache, it should focus on its strengths, like easily accessible stats and a database with styles that roughly correspond to the actual style intended by the brewer (hint hint send us style corrections on the forum page). The RB awards are rubbish, and we all know it.
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Hereâs a kind of scary thought: how long until ABInBev shuts RateBeer down? Now that it is a wholly owned subsidiary, itâs not an unrealistic scenario. If the company finds that RB is not returning enough value for its cost, and/or damaging its brand (and, considering how laughable the site and the app are right now, thatâs potentially true), they could pull the plug very quickly. They certainly wouldnât be able to find a buyer.
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With BeerAdvocate providing a far superior message board, and Untappd providing more rating samplesâŚwho would buy RateBeer at this point? Seems AB-InBev accomplished their goal of neutralizing at least one craft beer rating community.
So why havenât they? Everything you stated has been going on for a while now, no? Tax right off, keeps a relative employed, stupidity? Iâm serious, why is RB still on the face of the planet?
Continued street cred among their High End portfolio?
oh boy.
I mean, they arenât going to close a business within a year of buying it, unless they bought it to shut it down (which clearly they did not).
At the same time, they bought a business, and invested some decent money into it up front, but it appears that money has been yanked. We went from having a âteamâ (which looked to be 3-4 people plus Joe), to down to that one guy, and to now what I would guess is one part-time guy. Updates are coming less and less frequently. The app obviously has not panned out, as itâs still sitting somewhere between 50-100k downloads on Android (Untappd is at 1m+), and a dismal 3.3 score. To give a better perspective: this app âBeerTasting | Ratings, Guide & Communityâ which I bet no one here has ever even heard of (but comes up when you search Ratebeer) is also between 50-100k downloads, has 3x the review quantity of RB and has a 4.5
We only know of two initiatives so far behind the purchase of RB: a flashy new app (built on top of an existing database and usership), and this Australia retail thing. Weâve determined the app to be a failure, and as someone that works in this space, I donât personally see a path forward for something that has still failed to reach an audience in itâs 1.5 years on the store and is competing against a very established competitor. That leaves RB Australia, which I guess someone asked a few months ago how it was going and the guy said he saw Ratebeer around once in a while?
If I had to hazard a guess, I bet they continue running things as-is until July (the two year anniversary of the app), remove further resources, move to maintenance mode, then shutter the site in 2022. And I bet Joe is moved off before the end of the year as well. I canât see a sensible business reason to keep running this site. It was great as a passion project, but paying 1-3 people to work on this? Youâll never make that money back.
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So, in light of this, what are everyoneâs plans if (when) RB isnât there one day? Happy to take private messages
Well, gonna hope Brewver will be there and worth fully migrating to. Many great people from here are on there - will likely at some point move to keeping parallel databases, but Iâm not looking forward to the immense work Iâll have to do.
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