Rb is a dinosaur

I had hoped 12-18 month ago we could luft ourselves but sadly all i see is the person saying i used to be big back in the day

It’s still better for some places thanks to the efforts of some people.

It’s far worse for probably more places now.

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If any of you hints again at my age, I will remove your accounts!

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To be honest screen shot made no sense to me.

Untappd is OK for identifying new beers if you don’t mind no ABV being listed, etc. Or find reviews such as, “Nice gold,” and, “had 4,” helpful.

I think RB’s big issue is that you have to put a bit of effort in.

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Its Great for Id’ing beers in that Its often got 30 beers before RB has even 1

These are people i know who turn to RB trying to find info, but end up on Untappd as RB just isnt there any more

RB is still winning in some areas like @marko says. Placed etc has still some benifits , but with maps goign down on my trip in October its dicey at best

Im a long time Lover and have tweeted.blogged and praised RB many times over the Years.
Hell i stopped drinking at home for months years back when RB was down. But ive lost faith.
I see no No POSITIVE response to concerns of Long time Users, Ive met so many Long time users over last 18 months who have all Given up to one degree or another.

I Still belive Untappd haesnt been the bigest problem for RB, its been FB and Twitter thats taken the community off in many directions. But what that left RB with isnt enough to compete with untappd and the wilful disregard of its current user base has destroyed what little it had going for it

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I don’t consider Untappd to be a competitor.
There are 30x worthless ticks on UT from people that in average are less discerning, so that isn’t interesting.

As Joe pointed out once, the world is changing, new beers are released at a pace that was unthinkable a few years ago.
I just created a thread for showing that…

Ratebeer should find its own playfield (and maybe Joe had, already).
Ratebeer has 3 challenges:

  • make sure that all beers are added to the database, and more quickly
  • find a way to highlight best and rising beers even with very few ratings
  • and of course, increase the number of raters, but mostly attract the ones that know what they are talking about.
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If you like it or not Untappd is a competitor today.

You make the point youself:
All beers are added:
This will never happen as the active user base is not high enough to enter all new beers that are brewed today. Untappd has a higher user base and therefore has a higher number of new beers entered ( problem, dirty db with duplicates, errors and homebrew ) Today Untappd may have hundreds of checqs before someone enter it on RB.
RB db will slowly degrade as it is missing information on new beers and places.

Find best and rising beers are fine, but those will today often be local or one off specials and then difficult for most to obtain. Compared to 10 years ago when it may have been difficult to get good brew where you lived, Today much easier to get good local brew.

It does not help to increase the number of raters in the bottom ( new raters with few ratings ) if those in the top leaves for some reason. You are not going to attract a huge new userbase today because new young users today will go to untappd because of: Friends using it, ease of use, simplicity

Today only new members to RB are those that are really interested in beers and rating them will be staying here for the long haul.

it is talked about the high trafic on this site, but it is not talked about actual ratings being entered.
It would be interesting to know which year most ratings were entered from all users here.

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I just added this to the UT vs RB thread, but it seems relevant here to, so sorry for repeating:

I did recently start an Untapped account, just so I could see the full beer list at my local beer shop.

I then experimented with adding a few ratings to see what all the fuss was about

I hated it.

The Untapped stats are crap compared to Ratebeer (badges for every other beer don’t do it for me; I much prefer colouring in maps, multiple league tables, and more statistical analysis than you can shake a nonic at).

The Ratebeer forums are great. I couldn’t see anything comparable on Untappd.

The accuracy on Untappd is lamentably bad. The number of times I’ve seen a rare US beer listed at a UK Wetherspoons, just because the beer name shared one word with a UK mass-market beer…

The colour scheme on Untappd is 'orrible.

So I’ll be sticking with Ratebeer until the end (unless the owners dumb it down to a UT clone). Although I will continue to back up my ratings on a spreadsheet just in case… and I’ll continue to withhold my RB premium membership until I get some evidence that the site owners are listening to feedback from long-term users, and responding to legitimate queries/concerns/ideas.

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Honestly, the only thing that annoys me about RateBeer are the forum posts about how UnTaPpEd HaS wOn tHe WaR :roll_eyes:

There are things that RateBeer is great for. There are also things that Untappd is great for. The two are not directly comparable in the way that RateBeer is with BeerAdvocate. I use both RateBeer and Untappd simultaneously instead of complaining that one is different from the other; the two complement one another quite well at this point.

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Precisely. Agreed 100%.

Especially prefaced with “face it” and such phrases. :joy:

Some things RB can learn from them. The problem is - it would appear that the new team, especially initially, took just about everything that sucks @UT and wanted to emulate it, putting what’s far superior on RB in the background / wanting to remove/change it. Oh well. Lessons were learned I assume / hope.

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It’s worth pointing out that none of this prevents me from pointing out problems or (repeatedly) asking for (the same) features here :sunglasses: I won’t stop until every single country is broken down into regions!

I make the same suggestions and feature requests repeatedly because I, for the most part, love using RateBeer, and I want it to be even better.

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Trying to think of few and frankly nothing comes to my mind. Is it decent or good at certain things? Yes, but great? I don’t know. Also can’t think of a single aspect which improved over the last few years.

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Just this. Do you have any chance of bad mouthing the untappd owners/admins to their face? Or in other words, do they even care whether you agree with the direction they are taking at all? At least @joet takes time (occasionally, at least) to respond to criticism, etc.

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RB

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UT

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Amen amen amen

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You pointed out exactly their biggest challenge.

The new Add Beer page is finally working pretty well IMO, the fields might not be in the order I would prefer but it’s working pretty fast now.

But RB is still lacking the number of users necessary to keep up with the number of new releases…

The only way they could achieve that in 2019 would be first with a fully working App (with a working, sortable brewer’s listing with search option and an Add Beer shortcut from there)

And the most important thing, by finding a way to make all Ratings (75+ characters Reviews, less than 75 Short Ratings and pure Ticks) public by default (with an option to toggle the rating to Private Rating like an Offline Rating works) so every user that is contributing to the site would at least be recognized and their activity known to the others as well as their score contributing to the brewers in the process. I’ve been working in shadows for almost 3 years now because I chose to tick now instead of going for longer reviews like before…nobody can see my ratings (well they can if they use my ID in the search, or if they see my tick when it quickly passes in their feed) and none of my 4000 ticks contribute to any brewery…but luckily for the website, I’m the most active Beer Entering user in my area for my region…I entered more than 2000 beers in the last year only, I’d easily say more than 50% of all that comes out locally since we are down to around 10-20 active users.

RB just need to find a way to strongly highlight longer reviews over smaller ones and ticks, but all the scores must contribute the brewer and all users activity must be made public, unless kept private by choice, not the other way around…

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Now I may not be familiar with finesse of English language, but I’d prefer the term honest feedback over bad mouthing. Over the last couple of years I started to feel part of this community, I put my share of free time to enter ratings, new places and beers, report errors and from time to time give suggestions and constructive feedback. So when I give feedback and opinions on the state of RB I don’t do it for sake of bitching, it’s because I care about this site and this community. When discussing RB with other people I try to defend it and talk people into using it, however I have less and less arguments for that.

To answer your questions in short. Yes, I have given feedback via twitter to untappd and Greg Avola and got response to my suggestions and concerns. Not that I can influence the direction they’re taking any more than here.

Now you mentioned it and when I think about it I don’t feel the need to give Untappd my suggestions. For one there is no sense of community there. Second, they seem to be doing quite well, constantly making improvements and giving feedback when things go bad. And amount of time I spend contributing to untappd is way less than I spend on RB. So that may be a factor as well.

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I think I have said this before but any database that relies on user generated content can never by definition be “up to date” as someone is always going to be first.

I use RateBeer and Untapped but use them differently. It’s feels harder to add new beers to Untappd. But it’s harder to make amends to rate beer. Untapped is better for live beer lists. Rate Beer has better stats.

I think the simplest thing RB could do is allow users to directly add photos to beers that don’t have one. Probably the same with description.

In the last two months I must have emailed about 100 photo through.

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