Todays Poll, What do you think will make RB gain Market share

  • An Acurate Beer Data Base
  • A Bigger Beer Data Base
  • Up to date Beer availability
  • An Acurate Places Data Base
  • A Bigger Places Data Base
  • An Active Community (via forums etc)
  • Ratebeer Events
  • Safer Beer Trading
  • More Beer Trading
  • Better Beer/Place Statistics
  • Other (please Reply with what)

0 voters

2 Likes

My ā€œotherā€ is ease of rating. The advantage of RB ratings over ticks/ UnTappd is that you know what you experienced and why you liked it (and others can see that too). Make one way of doing that a more elaborate version of the current ā€œselect these words to put in your reviewā€ (or wherever it is: as is the case more often than not these days, I canā€™t actually load the site, grrrrr) and sell RB as ā€œas quick as a tick but youā€™ll remember why you like itā€.

5 Likes

I voted community and stats.

Community: RB has a huge advantage over UT (no forums) and BA (extremely US-centric) in that it has loads of users all across the world so we can get way more balanced and objective discussions going. This also lends itself to international trading.

Stats: main reason I joined RB was the stats for all the beers I was rating personally, I love to look at both my own stats and the top stats of beer styles, places, regional stuff etc. Itā€™s interesting and gives motivation to try more of other styles or from a particular region for example.

Improved accuracy would be nice too but I suspect more admins need to be brought on board to help with this. By the sounds of it thereā€™s a huge amount to keep on top of, especially in the bigger regions.

1 Like

Another interesting insite into users minds, SO thanks for taking part. Ive found results really interesting

Bigger database. For most of new beers i find no other information but Untappedā€¦
But for a bigger database i think we need more usersā€¦

2 Likes

Does RB even have a forum dedicated to welcoming new members?

They got a No rating / No database policyā€¦ I used to keep track and enter every new beers from my local brewers but I was told not to do so unless I rated themā€¦

More badges

1 Like

Wait, seriously? Who told you not to enter new beers?

On RateBeer? This isnā€™t the case at all. I often add beers I donā€™t have in my possession yet and they can be there for days or even weeks before being rated, in fact thereā€™s a couple I added months ago still without ratings. No oneā€™s ever discouraged me from adding beers if I havenā€™t got a rating to add.

I think a long time ago this used to be the case, as lots of one off festivals would be added before the festival, and no one would ever rate them and then they would never be seen again. But times are chnaged and lot of Beer that exist all year round dont get added, and we want a database that reflects whats out there

1 Like

Ah ok that makes sense. The ones I add are always bottle/can releases usually from well known brewers or from local brewers that are at least distributed locally or planned to be at some point.

Howā€™s the app doing? Seems thatā€™s key.

Basic functionality.

Social elements other than forum posts.

my other is a nice enough overall experience that we brag to our friends about being on ratebeer, instead of telling our friends that we are on the myspace of beer sites.

now we have everyone over it would be nice to see some more votes

My Other is: ā€¦define ā€œMarket shareā€ā€¦

I see features listed I would enjoy, but Iā€™m already a user. What market are you trying to conquer? Beer nerds will have accounts in different places/services. Casually interested people will temporary use Untappd till they are bored. Make up your mind about who you want to attract and try to pin that down before you take steps to achieve that.

2 Likes

Thats a tricky one and there no one answer.

Really i meant see rate beer grow, thrive suceed.

I think RB is less relevant now than it was 10 yeras ago, Due to combo of Untappd and social media growth

I see lots of Bars promote Untappd but see none mention RB etc

2 Likes

Massive post incoming, which no one will readā€¦

Hit the nail on the head, and I canā€™t see this ever changing now. To be fair to Untappd though they have pretty decent tools for bars to dynamically display their taplists and manage their venue in the app/website which users like. And, love them or hate them, some venues/breweries work with Untappd to do special badges which attracts people. Untappd also has photos, friend tagging etcā€¦ so they have that whole ā€œfun/socialā€ aspect nailed down that RB (and BA too) will never have unless they literally copied them (which would be very stupid and drive most of us away I expect).
Thereā€™s also a more casual vibe around it, detailed tasting notes and scoring arenā€™t a thing there (which I kinda hate), itā€™s just a simple rating and move on. Ratebeer is much more niche in that it caters to those of us who care more about ratings and less about social. Thereā€™s some crossover of course (I use RB and UT equally) but I imagine a majority of us are in one of the two camps, for varying reasons. And I donā€™t think this is a problem, itā€™s fine and both sites can and do co-exist and donā€™t necessarily ā€œcompeteā€ with one another.

Promoting RB scores doesnā€™t really work in real life anyway. I never understood why RB highlights the percentile scores more than the weighted average. I never pay any attention to it, yet itā€™s the most visible rating on a beerā€™s page. A majority of great beers have a score of 97-100 or something like that. If youā€™re running a bar/bottleshop and only stocking such beers then everything will have such a similar score making it meaningless to customers. Literally everywhere else on RB uses the weighted average, but hardly anyone who isnā€™t a RB user knows this exists. Which of these is easier to understand for normal people: ā€œthis beer has an avg rating of 4 stars on Untappdā€ or ā€œthis beerā€™s average score sits within the 97th percentile of beers sharing the same styleā€

Then constantly improving the website and app in every single aspect like the ones you mentioned in the poll. All of it. @joet just needs to prioritise the most important stuff first. There are a few ongoing issues in several areas of the website that I see complaints about a lot.

Places needs an overhaul. The directory style listing is an inefficient way of finding places, mapping/filtering should be improved and made more prominent and the primary way to find places, and more flexible so non-US addresses donā€™t sometimes bug out and point to the middle of the ocean. This sort of issue was being discussed just yesterday in the UK forum.

Accented letters in beers and places and style names is still problematic.

And hereā€™s a possibly contentious one - more admins should be brought on board, with varying permissions and/or regional restrictions if trust is an issue. It can sometimes take weeks for some corrections to take place and in many countries this is considered acceptable, yet if weā€™re striving for a more accurate and up to date database then I disagree. It should not take several weeks to verify an edit, which is sometimes as small as a typo. Yes, accuracy/quality is more important than quantity of edits, but if the queue of edits to verify is really that big that the current teams canā€™t keep up with them then it seems reasonable to me to look for more admins to assist where needed - there are plenty of us willing and able.

Forums/community/activity - this one is in progress obviously. I donā€™t know about others but these new forums certainly feel more active to me, regardless of the love/hate people have for it at the moment. Time will tell if weā€™ll get more new members posting and rating beers though.

Stats - joet seems to be working on this. But yeah, we need MORE stats. All kinds of stuff. Many of the current stats tables are still stuck in the ancient website layout with broken links and such, these needs to be brought up to date. They need to be expanded to top 50 or 100. They need to show a userā€™s own position if he is outside of the top, so he knows how far behind he is. The ā€œCommunityā€ page on the RB site needs updating with links to ALL the stats tables, some of them are currently quite hard to find.

An example of something that would be complicated to change now but would be nice to see eventually is a better way of handling collaborative beers. The current naming method using slashes is fine (though I would prefer the standard ā€˜xā€™ notation), but it would be nice to properly add collaborative brewers in a method similar to how we currently show contract/brewed for/by information, so that those collaborating would be clickable links on the beerā€™s page. This would also have the benefit of us being able to see beers that brewery collaborated on but did not brew themselves when looking at their brewer page.

Iā€™m sure I had thoughts on other stuff but thatā€™s all for now. Apologies for the stupidly long post but if anyone agrees/disagrees with stuff Iā€™ve said Iā€™d love to here othersā€™ thoughts.

7 Likes

I read it @LazyPyro! And I agree very much with the first part. The second part I donā€™t really have an oppinion, other than the part about the stats and top 50 - for example: So many beers show as ā€œTop 50ā€ in their respective style, but the score is some .0X points below the acutal top 50 score. What is up with that?

2 Likes

Thanks for reading :slight_smile:

Yeah itā€™s an odd bug Iā€™ve noticed myself plenty of times when rating a beer, I see that little blue Top 50 badge next to it and Iā€™m like ā€œoooh Iā€™ll check the Top 50 after rating this to see how many Iā€™ve hadā€ only to find itā€™s no longer there. I have a feeling that if a beer enters the top 50 and gets the little blue badge, itā€™s then not removed if it falls out of the top 50. Not sure if intentional or a bug? If intentional then I think it needs to say ā€œformer top 50ā€ or something so itā€™s clear that it used to be top but has since fallen out of favour with raters.