Hi all - not to overcomplicate everything, but I see this as part of a class of problems, and I wonder if it’s helpful to think of the wider class when designing.
I’ve been thinking of a collection of review apps that all share a couple of traits:
- They’re, uh, reviews (usually; they might just be logs, of reading or eating or whatever)
- They review objective things in the world (i.e., thinks you could have an objective list of, vs, say, experiences or activities which are essentially infinite)
- There are apps for most/all of these, but they are problematic in multiple ways (in particular, users don’t own their data, and the list of objects is private and proprietary)
Examples are:
- Restaurants (the big one, IMO, in terms of user base and utility)
- Books (also very big)
- Whiskey/Wine/Beer/etc
The data you need to store about a book is quite different from the data you need to store about wine. But both need a method for building a publicly maintained list that will increase in depth and quality over time and provides objective reference capabilities. And both seem simple but actually have a lot of complexity (editions for books, as discussed above, and things like year, vineyard, and grape mix for wine).
I wouldn’t want someone to slow down building in order to solve everything at once. But as people build, it’s worth considering whether lessons from these other areas can inform designs. I’m also interested in what a meta-review app might look like; e.g., I only drink wine once in a while, so I’m not interested in installing a wine app. But I’d like the ability to record a review when i happen across a notable one. It’d be nice to have a restaurant and book review app installed (because I care a lot about those), but not a wine review app, and be able to see and manage them all in that one app, or go into the focused app for the details the meta app doesn’t or can’t care about.
In particular, the concerns around authenticating an author resonate very strongly with restaurants: I am flummoxed that every restaurant in the world doesn’t at least have a basic web site with a menu, hours, and contact info, but… they don’t. Thus, we can’t really expect them to be able to authenticate themselves as an owner.