Yeah, I wonder what kind of shelf tag do they put for i.e. Wildflower beers since only 2 of them have 10+ rates. I’ve stopped consulting RB years ago for shopping purposes because it’s not keeping up with changes and new beers.
Not to mention the fact that reviewers (“seeders”) are needed to provide content that non-rating users (“leechers”) will consult. And they are driving those away with every new update and pile of bugs. Basically taking material away from the foundation and the ground floor to expand the top floors.
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Info about Ratebeer parties were posted on public forums but not on the Ratebeer forums??
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Asana. Or any one of dozens of other task managers out there. While accepting responsibility is a good thing, nobody cares why it happened. Just focus on the empathy part of the messaging when doing damage control.
Seriously. I don’t think “small team” and “moving parts” are valid excuses in an era of SaaS project and task management tools. I’ve seen very small teams execute massive events on short runways without so much as a blip. I feel that someone with a foundation in the community could have contributed insight about community relations, had anybody from the community been consulted.
Two of the biggest gripes that longtime RB people have since ZX are the lack of leadership and lack of detail orientation. Given that we used to have an entire team of detail-oriented leaders volunteering here, that’s really an indictment of ZX’s commitment to professionalism to allow that resource to be eroded so quickly.
Surely ZX can spare $110K + OT to find someone capable of putting all the pieces together and restoring Ratebeer to greatness.
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I wonder what these public forums even are, I’ve failed to find any. Not even reddit. All I could find was this fairly rage-inducing article. “We wanted to be sure that we were not just a US site," says Joe T. I guess let’s just ignore all of the contributions from Scandanavian, English, and other European raters and admins that make up an enormous portion of the activity and accuracy of the site? The whole interview is just bizarro world.
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“RateBeer Business Lead Douglas Mitchell, told Brews News that since the purchase, RateBeer has invested two million dollars in technology”
Just… wow.
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“This investment has already helped improve the user experience"
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Here in Vancouver only 1-2 stores use RB tags, and they can barely tag a handful of beers from the US or Europe; we have an exploding local beer scene, but there are no tags available because these beers get 5 ratings only.
In the article it makes you feel that the number of admins is just a commodity that is being used for the sales pitch.
I was thinking the same thing. That is an absolutely absurd amount of money. The sentence is worded ambiguously enough that it’s hard to tell if that’s solely on tech or if it included employee salaries as well. If tech then someone should probably be fired because that’s in an insane amount of money to spend on something with which we’ve seen no measurable improvement.
And yes, @beergirltif please be transparent and tell us which public forums you’re announcing things on. The lack of transparency around the entire event is weird.
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@lazypro The events were posted on RateBeer social media channels as well as local beer news sites and shared by the venues and brewers involved.
Thanks all for your feedback regarding the events - I’m new to the role and I will take into account sharing future events in the forums here.
Please feel free to contact me via direct message any time you have any ideas around these things. Cheers!
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If you’d have consulted the forums you would have known to extend an invitation to Chris Franklin. I’m sure he’d have stopped in for a little piss.
This actually might be the biggest misstep.
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I know that my point of view won’t change anything. No one will consult RB if beers are not listed here and/or have barely any reviews. The festival beer of a local beer festival got 352 unique ratings on Untappd, I had to enter it on RB and it got 4 ratings on RB. This is absolutely standard these days, I added this beer after the festival ended. Anyone interested about this beer would have gotten zero info on RB and hundreds of ratings on Untappd which were largely live. No one would use Tripadvisor if they didn’t have ratings or reviews. Saying that we are not trying to mimic Untappd looking at some of the new options like adding location and serving format.
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Honestly, I really doubt they’d even want us there. The forums are the old grouches of Ratebeer that Joe would drop in a heartbeat if he knew he could get away with it. The target audience for Ratebeer is 90% pure consumers, 10% lightweight, low volume reviewers that don’t feel much attachment to the platform and who generate volume purely through their wide lateral presence.
Oh, and 50 or so thankless, nameless admins who keep the platform running purely due to their inability or fear of dropping rating beer or migrating elsewhere, as it’s made up such a significant portion of their lives for the past 10-15 years. Not an insult, just a reality check at this point: admins are the cogs of Joe’s $2 million investment, nothing more.
This platform was built as a labor of love of a few thousand very dedicated individuals, including admins, raters, and long-time community members. And we’ve all been thrown under the bus in the name of expansion without so much as a “thanks”. You know: “Thanks for everything you guys have done to build Ratebeer into what it is today. The site is moving in a new direction that is focusing on the average users rather than the power users, but know that we will always support you guys and hope to have your continued participation in this new era.” Nah, just a bunch of middle-fingers and a whole lot of “you’re all wrong.” I, obviously, stopped rating a long time ago and pretty much only participate anymore as a shit-head, but I don’t know how any long-term member can read that interview and put a single further review or edit into this site.
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Niice writeup Andy
I have all my ratings in a personal database.
Anybody can download their ratings too (if the functionality still works).
The problem is that I’m not aware of a platform that would satisfy my needs.
I tried to use Untappd for a year or so and it’s pointless. BA? I haven’t checked there for years…
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This is where I am too.
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Was it a beer brewed by InBev or one of their breweries though?
But all kidding aside, it seems obvious to me that ratebeer is moving more towards bigger beers that can be sold in webshops (Saveur Biere) and sales boosted with ratings. The little fish will hardly bring any sales, so they don’t really matter much.
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This is my biggest take away as well.
The regular users here think it’s a problem that the one-off batches from local breweries aren’t being added because our active user base is so small. But from a revenue perspective, no one really cares if they’re added. A large and accurate database doesn’t make money.
The site can make money if someone googles “Alesmith IPA” and Ratebeer can link them directly to an online retailer where they can buy that beer.
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Any idea where you download your ratings these days?
My Account > My Beer Ratings
Then somewhere on the right side, way down, Compile My Ratings
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