Foodie blogs and blackmail

ThisIsCanberra / Online reviewers a new Mafia?:

"Recently, a relatively harmless and unassuming looking man walked up to the counter of a very popular Canberra restaurant and attempted an act of blackmail. The man was not after money, but chicken wings. And the threat was not one of life and death, but rather, a bad review on ‘every food site on the web’.

The restaurant manager was understandably taken aback, but managed to keep her cool enough to ask why he was demanding this particular ransom. He answered that he had eaten there a few weeks back, and come away a little unhappy. He figured that the free chicken wings–24 of them to be precise–were fair compensation. When pressed further about the details of his previous experience, he failed to come up with a cohesive answer.
The manager, trying to make the best of a bad situation, agreed to his demand on the proviso that the man supplies her with identification and contact details. The man, not willing to come out from under the cloak of anonymity that his status as online reviewer was affording him, refused and went away empty handed.

The establishment in question was Smoque. We know that because they were kind enough to share their story.

The man was anybody. The management at Smoque can only assume that he is furiously banging away on some anonymous keyboard at this very moment, preparing to unleash some user-generated fire and brimstone, and shedding a secret tear at the prospect–now that he has exposed his face to them at least–of never being able to taste the spicy goodness of the very loot he had hoped to appropriate with his extortion.

I suspect that the creators of sites such as Trip Advisor, Yelp and Urban Spoon did not necessarily have this type of behavior in mind when they imagined their respective online enterprises; and perhaps our man is an extreme example, but sadly this shitty attitude is a growing phenomenon in the online world. Not only is it leaving a bad taste in the mouths of hard working business owners who are mostly trying to deliver decent service to their clientele, it is giving scabs with a sense of entitlement and a fallacious impression of their own influence an opportunity to make unreasonable and sometimes rude demands, and basically behave like petulant spoilt brats."



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