In recent years there has been a lot of complaining about the few ratings and entries on RB, particularly in comparisons to UT (which is accurate). I had a firsthand experience with the power of UT recently. Thought it would be worthwhile to share my observations:
A new brewery opened up in my neighborhood in Baltimore. It was an homebrew shop that turned into a brewery. As common for breweries, they anticipated a fall 2018 opening but didn’t open till late January.
I skipped opening weekend and the second weekend but came in on the Tuesday after. Meaning the place was open for 11 days. In those 11 days there were only 6 beers available for purchase.
Since I am currently deciding my role on RB, I have not added the brewery or the beers to RB. Instead, I checked-in on UT.
For the 6 beers, after 11 days , there were ~140 check-ins per beer. Additionally, there are a total of 24 beer entries.
24 Entries??? There are only 6 commercially available beers since the brewery has been open legally. The other entries are likely homebrews from the shop. These would have never been allowed on RB.
~140 check-ins in less than 2 weeks. RB could never meet those numbers. The user base on RB has never been that strong. Even if there was a hot shot, sour, barrel aged, jesus tears new brewery opening up it would never be able to draw such a large crowd. As typical, the vast majority of check-ins did not have words and the numbers were very different from mine. Also, I am not sure the styles were accurate.
This experience has shown me that RB hasn’t really gotten much worse in its db. I do experience less camaraderie, less activity, and see less RBians but I am more convinced that JoeT has been accurate in saying that there are still a lot of people rating (more than ever apparently). However, UT is tapping a very different market of people. People that likely would have never wound up on RB anyway. The RB db was at once probably the best but likely always poor in comparison to all the available beer. UT now has the most complete db (for recent times). The issue, for me, seems that RB has always been RB, which is a small segment for geeky beer drinkers. UT is the exact opposite of that. We used to have some pride in our geekiness b/c we could say we are part of this small and specialized group. But now that beer knowledge (and beer assessment) has become democratized. Which means a lot more people are doing it but at a lesser level on average.
I don’t know, just a bunch of thoughts that no one may find all that interesting.