Suck me dry, oh great platform capitalist

Stephan van Duin
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

You may well have an issue with the way companies like Uber and AirBNB make money, because they leech off of the value created by others (often at a large risk to the owner — their only house) by offering a small service in return (with a minimal risk for the investors — a widely used, non-tangible app). But this blog is not about that sneaky way in which these companies make capital trickle up.

This blog is about something much more invasive.

Being on the road for a while I realized another way in which these big guys use me: they suck me dry with their reviews. On any given day, I get prompted to review anywhere between 5 and 10 other people or services. This goes from Uber drivers to AirBNB hosts, to restaurants, to shops — Tripadvisor, Yelp, the whole bunch.

I mean, I bought one of the most ubiquitous shoes in the world (Nike AirMax90 ftw!), but even having sold a gazillion is not enough for Footlocker to stop feeling insecure about selling them. And so they ask me not once, not twice, but three times for a review. As if it’s not the size of the sales chart that counts, but what you do with it.

And now Facebook has started as well. It knows where I’ve been, and asks me to review the most mundane of things. ‘Hey, you were at that snackbar or corner shop in the outskirts of Lisbon yesterday. Care to review? As if you didn’t feel self-conscious enough about the fact that you had snackbar-lunch as it is. (And also it feels like your dirty uncle asking you to describe something that is random to you but that will get HIM off in a second.)

Facebook, Tripadvisor, AirBNB and the like are parasites. They use MY brain, MY willpower, MY intellect, MY computing power, MY mental bandwidth to increase their own value. This is not to be taken lightly; my ability to choose and decide gets drained by these prompts, which may lead to me being less able to function at work or in my social environment. You can say you won’t notice, but pay some attention to it for a while and you will— and this prompting is not likely to decrease either, since it’s obviously a great business model to just suck the value out of people’s head and property, as long as they let them.

With regard to the reviews; it’s not like I can just fuck them up, because most of the time I’m judging the livelihood of another person. So I want to be fair!

And what do I get in return? More reviews to look at? So what?

It’s not as if they are very useful; a recommendation for a restaurant will make you like that restaurant regardless of the quality because after getting the rec, you WANT it to be good. And so it will be. It’s simple consumer psychology. A pair of shoes gets sold because there’s fashion, and don’t get me started on how that is deprived of any shred of reason. And even on Amazon, where reviews for products you’re looking for could actually come in handy, there’s the issue of them being increasingly biased by the algorithms.

Sure, a review on Airbnb is useful for me too because it actually helps me decide, but most restaurants, shops and Uber drivers really only need to get a label when they’re awful or make me sick. And even then:

Arguably the best experiences in life are those that aren’t good or comfortable. Making mistakes is what makes life and travel interesting.

If you love to write reviews, please do so for your own pleasure. I won’t read them. And please, Facebook, just let me enjoy my last-resort lunch option without asking what I really thought of it. I just don’t know.

Me making questionnable attempts to blend in.

Black Mirror had an episode about this review overdose in season 3, a few months after I wrote the first draft of this blog. It’s a great sneak peek into a future with too many reviews…

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