Four Reasons Why We Need Cool Cousin

in #originalworks6 years ago (edited)

Four Reasons Why We Need Cool Cousin

You got your bags set and plane tickets ready to go. The flight to London leaves in an hour and you got some time to kill. So you start researching the city and looking on google maps and find a cool looking restaurant. Then you check the reviews. Start with 1 stars then 5 stars and compare them.

Then it hits you.

How much can you trust a review? The upvotes? The hype around it? The photos?

What if all those qualifiers were just B.S.?

Well. Guess what? They are. Here’s five reasons why, and how Cool Cousin, an upcoming cryptocurrency-backed travel company can fix it.

  1. Heard of The Shed At Dulwich? No? It reached the top of tripadvisor’s restaurants in London. Everyone wanted to get a seat at the restaurant but it was always full. That denial, in turn creating more hype and desire to actually get a seat, mixed with viral marketing and instagram made it the most sought after seat in London. The problem was it was a completely fake restaurant, made up by a journalist. His goal was to get the fake restaurant to the top of tripadvisor in London. He did. Without having a single real customer. Check out the documentary. It’s fascinating.

  2. Tripadvisor's response to The Shed was this “As there is no incentive for anyone in the real world to create a fake restaurant, it is not a problem we experience with our regular community—therefore this ‘test’ is not a real-world example.” Source Their response was laughable. The question isn’t an incentive to make a fake restaurant, but the incentive to boost the ratings on real ones. The fact is that if a journalist and his friends wanted to make it to number one, then what’s stopping serious corporations with serious funding to pay people to leave reviews on Tripadvisor or Yelp? Of wait. That’s exactly what happens. A Harvard studies says 16% of reviews on Yelp are fake.

  3. Let’s talk about YELP. What’s it good for? War. Negativity speaks loudest. Always remember that. And that’s essentially what Yelp is. It’s almost like the creators decided, “Hey!. Let’s empower the worst people in the world to financially harm legitimate businesses! Let’s amplify the voices of elitists and philistines!” Or, in moments of anger, harm a business and force them to beg for a higher review.. The reviews run the risk of harming the business instead of helping people find a decent place to eat. The reviews run the risk of just giving loud, mundane people the opportunity to cry about slightly burnt chicken instead of giving travellers proper guidance on where to go.

  4. YELP and Tripadvisor, like Uber, outsource the labor and the costs of the business while deriving all the profit. These services rely on user-generated content (reviews, suggestions, tips, commentary) in order to ‘sell’ their website. What they actually sell is eyesight. Like Facebook, the value of the content is dependent on the expectation that people will look at it. Thus, these websites can sell that speculative value to advertisements. They’re in the eye business: they sell eyesight. Do any of the people who actually do the work get a cut for that? Nope.

This is where Cool Cousin comes in.

Cool Cousin eliminates the potential for false locations and false reviews by keeping the content organic. That is, local people create, curate and offer their guide services to travelers. Travellers offer their own experiences. Not hotel chains or corporate giants offering their ‘deluxe super package for $XYZ’. Avoid the Disneyland offered at every corner by astroturf tourism companies.

Cool Cousin rewards you for your knowledge, your experiences and your recommendations/reviews by utilizing blockchain technology. People are able to derive cryptocurrency for their reviews, recommendations, guides, suggestions of activities and more.

Fake restaurants? Not possible because people would have to actually go there. The reviews are by locals who have been to those restaurants. Essentially, their list of favorite local places.

Fake reviews? Nope. It’s all generated by the people using the service. And the ‘Cousins’ are locals, not corporate PR agents.

Best of all, the services empower the people using them with cryptocurrency. Your insight to your city is valuable for a traveller. As such, you should be rewarded for helping people on their vacation. Cool Cousin ensures this happens by rewarding its users with crypto. No longer will companies generate their entire content from users, for free.

So when you got time to kill before your flight, check out Cool Cousin. And remember, The Shed At Dulwich has an excellent lasagna.


This article is a submission to the original works contest this week.

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