5 comments

Shill Empowerment Acts

May 28, 2019, 8:55 AM

I have appreciated many of the changes on this site and am ever grateful to founder for taking the time and effort. But two changes over the past year are still problematic for me, more so now than ever.

First was the removal of club and review counts from where they used to be, which was next to the name of the person posting. This is valuable information and having to dig for it is very cumbersome, especially when I am researching several reviews for multiple clubs. Knowing that they are VIP and/or verified is far less important than their review street cred.

Second was the change in the club rating system. In some areas, the shill accounts have now fully taken over this function and the ratings are even more meaningless than they were beforehand. Worse, the same shills that are pumping up the clubs they work at can also much more easily trash the ratings of competitors. This really sucks because, like it or not, a lot of people factor those ratings into their research. Also, once upon a time, those ratings were actually not a bad comparative tool in many cities.

So in a nutshell, now we can't easily skim by the shills in the club reviews and now we can't rely upon the ratings even a little because anyone with the time and motivation can control the ratings for a club by creating lots of accounts.

Idk, but all of this has dramatically reduced my motivation to post reviews over the last 4 months. If I don't need the VIP credit (which I won't for over 5 more years), then why bother, especially for clubs with heavy shill activity?

comments (5)

MackTruck6 years ago

I would agree with at least the first part. I think having all the contributions lumped Into one thing is cumbersome. I would rather see them as they were before. The. We can see how many reviews, how many comments etc.

rickdugan6 years ago

I'm not sure why the second is so hard to understand. 20 shill accounts that have equal weighting to 5 real accounts are going to have an out-sized influence. It is already happening in markets like Dallas.

Ricci6 years ago

I'd also add in the loss of the national top 100 ranking page. This was a great way to keep an eye on where the best clubs and regions were to be found. Why did they remove it?

minnow6 years ago

T100 was an imperfect system with several inherent flaws exacerbated by input by many biased people. One flaw being the minimum number of reviews threshold. (I seem to recall that it was 40 reviews.) So a club in isolated area with 40 high grade reviews authored by 10 inexperienced local only reviewers could be #100 on list while other clubs with 100's of reviews, many by more seasoned reviewers (been to many clubs in different locales) would not make the cut.

Also, people have different biases/priorities. Someone who simply likes to unwind, have a few drinks surrounded by great eye candy would rate a club like Cheetahs- Atlanta very highly, while avid extras seekers would steer well clear of club.

Personally if I were making a trip somewhere, I'd want some attractive non clubbing activities to be available. Then I might look at overall scores, picking clubs with the top 2 to 6 scores (depending on size of city), and then delving into reviews to read between the line for more focused info.

rickdugan6 years ago

^ No system is perfect for sure. But now we're just handing the ratings and comment sections back to the shills and the trolls. I guess the great experiments to make this site better for non-trolls and for dancers has been officially deemed a failure, so instead it's being re-set back to a default designed to increase clicks.

But, with all my bitching aside, at least the site is still here. At the end of the day i suppose founder needs to do what he feels is necessary to support its continued existence.