The Combined Talents of Sherlock Holmes & Sigmund Freud Are Needed to Trust UGC Sites

My current vacation in a seaside neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico, has given me plenty of time to ponder the task of reading one of those popular user-generated websites for finding a hotel. I am prompted to do so by the comments I receive from readers whenever I attack those sites as being unusable.

In a tone of world-weary resignation, the persons responding to my outlandish attitudes are usually anxious to set me on a path of wisdom. In comments that usually run around five lengthy paragraphs, they tirelessly set forth the formula for doing so.

In a typical example, they deal with the instances in which 138 persons have rated a particular hotel resort -- with 49 persons claiming it is "wonderful" and 37 persons claiming it is "terrible." The first thing you do, say the commentators, is eliminate all the enthusiastic recommendations -- all 49 of them. These are probably fakes, they point out, submitted by employees, friends and relatives of the hotel in question. Then you also eliminate all the harshly critical pans -- these are apparently sent in either by competitors of the hotel or by irascible people responding to some momentary slight they have suffered at the hotel.

This leaves you with the "balanced" comments, the middle-range in which some good points are found, to be weighed against some negatives. But some of these are also fakes, they point out, composed by smart hotel executives who know how to write a seemingly balanced comment that looks honest but isn’t. To determine whether this is the case, you look for "telltale" words -- some telltale words are evidence of deceit. But the telltale words cited by some authors of comments are different from those cited by others, and I have a hard time remembering which are the telltale words for each.

Anyway, after scanning the hotel comments that are half and half in nature -- half positive, half not so -- and eliminating those with telltale words, and after studying the entrails of a sheep in the approved ancient manner, spending half-an-hour at the task, you finally get to the essence, and shrewdly determine whether the hotel is a decent one or a horror. And this approach is better, they claim, than relying on the opinion of a newspaper travel editor or prestigious magazine critic.

In other words, you approach the user-generated sites as Sherlock Holmes would have done (using insights from Sigmund Freud). But I simply won’t (or can’t) transform myself into either of those gentlemen.

Have I exaggerated? Turn to the comments appended to my past blogs on the subject, and tell me whether I have mis-described the advice that some people offer to the readers of user-generated websites. And the next time you turn to such a site, and encounter 138 wildly-differing opinions, then reach your own decision as to whether the opinions of experts -- well-known travel journalists, heavily-followed restaurant critics -- are to be preferred over the wisdom of amateurs.