I Get The Sweetest Feeling

Thucydides of course anticipated the dynamics of social media.* On the one hand, there is the democratisation of opinion, with every Athenian citizen having not just a right but a duty to contribute to deliberation in the assembly, with the idea that collective disagreement would produce better results than a few self-appointed experts on the traditional oligarchic model later beloved of Plato. On the other hand, there is how this worked in practice, with his depiction of debates as dominated by a few especially loud individuals whose opinions are scarcely challenged (Pericles) or, more regularly, whose competitions for prominence lead to polarisation of debate and the resultant failure to think through all the aspects (Kleon – the original session – v Diodotus, Nicias v Alcibiades). As seen especially in the Sicilian debate, everyone else becomes at best a spectator of the rhetorical set-to, and at worst entirely sucked into the conflict, falling prey to all the different kinds of cognitive traps – group-think, over-estimation of own knowledge, poor grasp of probability etc. The result is a state of opinion that’s not actually of much use of anyone.

I feel that this becomes especially obvious in the case of Tripadvisor reviews. In theory, if everyone just gives an honest account of their experience at a particular restaurant or hotel, the outliers (people with absurd expectations or preferences, friends of the proprietor, impact of one-off exceptional circumstances) will be filtered out by the majority view to give a sense both of overall quality but also key attributes. In practice? There seem to be a disproportionate number of people with absurd expectations or preferences – Plato’s views on democracy certainly seem to apply to Tripadvisor – but also many reviewers apparently approach the task as an opportunity for performance or venting, and opinions tend increasingly towards the extremes – and this then escalates, as in the absence of a graphe paranomon later reviewers become irate about being misled by previous reviews and start arguing with them as much as with the establishment itself.

This is especially prompted by a visit to Krinos, a bakery on the edge of the Athens Central Market that’s famous for its loukoumades, fried yeast-raised doughnuts served with honey (and nuts and cinnamon, if you’re not my wife). We didn’t know it was famous, we just thought it looked interesting and were ready for a break. The cafe area inside is utterly unpretentious; counter rather than table service, where you get your tin plate of freshly-cooked loukoumades and your tea in a metal teapot. A great, albeit slightly sticky experience.

And if we’d read Tripadvisor, we might well not have gone; reasonable average score, but many of the recent comments – which of course are displayed most prominently – complain vehemently that it’s not what it was when they went there as students, that the loukoumades were cold, that the service was impersonal, that it could be so much better if they modernised the decor and smartened things up a bit. Half of them seem to be driven by a nostalgic vision of how the loukoumades used to taste before all this modernity, the other half by a desire for a trendy café with artisan espresso; neither perspective has much relevance for an enterprise that, if it was the sort of place to start doing marketing in the first place, would want a slogan like ‘We started making loukoumades in 1923. We still make loukoumades. We’ve got quite good at it’, or simply ‘It is what it is’. One gets a powerful sense that the reviews are only partly about Krinos at all, and mostly about the reviewer – which doesn’t lead to productive deliberate.

*I am on holiday; detailed justification of sweeping claims can wait until I’m back on the clock. But obviously Thucydides plausibly anticipated pretty well any political or social issue you can think of.