Note for mods: Feel free to move this thread into other categories if adequate. Since this is not strictly incel-related, I'm posting it in The Lounge.
I've noticed a disturbing trend since 2018. Sites like Google Maps allow you to review institutions (schools, colleges, companies, etc.) on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. I don't know the exact implementation details for these platforms, but I assume they impact SEO, so the better the reviews for a particular institution, the more searchable/relevant that institution is.
This would be completely fine with me if that relevance was accurate to reality. Sometimes reviews mysteriously disappeared, especially if they were negative (i.e. 2- stars), while the positive ones remained. I later found out that companies indirectly delete negative reviews... they can't do it directly, because it's against the ToS, but there are other ways:
They can also inflate the average score using generic positive reviews (they sometimes force their workers/students to do this).
There used to be a workaround for this. If you suspected that some review or comment might get deleted, you could save reviews page on waybackmachine and similar services, which is a much stronger evidence of censorship compared to screenshots. This is because screenshots can be easily manufactured using the HTML inspector in the browser toolbar (every major web browser has this) so you don't even need MS Paint or Photoshop, because those will be more time consuming and less precise due to the introduction of artifacts/oddities. Granted, you can't do this for all types of content, just textual ones (you can't create snapshots of youtube videos or other large binary content), but it's incredibly useful if you ever see a post on ANY website (e.g. twitter was a big one) that might be removed later.
Only one small problem - there is a blocklist, and Google Maps was added to it a few years ago (around 2023/2024 I believe). So attempting to create snapshots of those sites results in this error:
The only negative reviews that survive are from those with monetary/legal power, so you have a case of big fish fighting against other big fish, but the small fish are always fucked. The more things change, the more they stay the same - if you can't state what your opinion is if it's negative, there is no real freedom.
I've noticed a disturbing trend since 2018. Sites like Google Maps allow you to review institutions (schools, colleges, companies, etc.) on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. I don't know the exact implementation details for these platforms, but I assume they impact SEO, so the better the reviews for a particular institution, the more searchable/relevant that institution is.
This would be completely fine with me if that relevance was accurate to reality. Sometimes reviews mysteriously disappeared, especially if they were negative (i.e. 2- stars), while the positive ones remained. I later found out that companies indirectly delete negative reviews... they can't do it directly, because it's against the ToS, but there are other ways:
- They can threaten legal action against the OP, entering an attrition war of sorts, since more often than not, companies have more money (including more money for lawyers/legal team) than one single person.
- They can flag the review as inappropriate. Due to how political correctness is entrenched in our society, anything can be perceived/nudged as inappropriate. This property can be abused to mass-flag reviews.
- For local schools, I've seen a different tactic. They disable reviews altogether if most of them were negative (since the average score was so low anyway). This does two things:
- Delete ALL reviews, both positive and negative
- Prevent new reviews, both positive and negative, from being inserted
They can also inflate the average score using generic positive reviews (they sometimes force their workers/students to do this).
There used to be a workaround for this. If you suspected that some review or comment might get deleted, you could save reviews page on waybackmachine and similar services, which is a much stronger evidence of censorship compared to screenshots. This is because screenshots can be easily manufactured using the HTML inspector in the browser toolbar (every major web browser has this) so you don't even need MS Paint or Photoshop, because those will be more time consuming and less precise due to the introduction of artifacts/oddities. Granted, you can't do this for all types of content, just textual ones (you can't create snapshots of youtube videos or other large binary content), but it's incredibly useful if you ever see a post on ANY website (e.g. twitter was a big one) that might be removed later.
Only one small problem - there is a blocklist, and Google Maps was added to it a few years ago (around 2023/2024 I believe). So attempting to create snapshots of those sites results in this error:
There are other archival services (https://archive.is/ or https://archive.ph/), their blocklists will be different, but I found them to be less comprehensive than waybackmachine.
The only negative reviews that survive are from those with monetary/legal power, so you have a case of big fish fighting against other big fish, but the small fish are always fucked. The more things change, the more they stay the same - if you can't state what your opinion is if it's negative, there is no real freedom.
