Ask HN: Google Maps alternatives that uses OSM and has a review feature
7 comments
How could a review service without an associated company/service be built? As in through some decentralised mechanism?
That seems like properly hard problem - reviews aren't objective facts like OSM data & verification/spam would be tricky.
That seems like properly hard problem - reviews aren't objective facts like OSM data & verification/spam would be tricky.
There's http://openplacereviews.org/map?q=4/39.97712/-34.98047 and it's integrated with OsmAnd.
I have tried Open Place Reviews, but I am not sure on how to use it. Maybe the review is not the same as Google Map's review?
This is an interesting question. In my experience, Tripadvisor used to be 'the review' place. It seemed impossible to overtake them, since a review aggregator needs some critical mass of reviews to even get started. However, in the last few years, I have found Google Maps more useful for reviews - looks like the critical mass has shifted. They were able to take advantage of the fact that it is easy and natural to check out the reviews of a place while looking it up on the map.
Now, however, I worry that Google will try to monetize the maps more and more in ways that are hostile to the user. They have already started showing ad-sponsored restaurants/locations on the maps, last I checked. Reviews are so critical to many businesses (particularly restaurants), it seems important for maps and reviews to be run by a user-friendly entity, ideally something like OSM.
Providing such a service is expensive, however. The fact that OSM does not have a decent Android app even is telling (Osmand is laggy and barely usable; Organic maps is nice, but is not a replacement for Google maps).
So we are stuck in the situation we are in, and I am not sure what a good solution would be.
Now, however, I worry that Google will try to monetize the maps more and more in ways that are hostile to the user. They have already started showing ad-sponsored restaurants/locations on the maps, last I checked. Reviews are so critical to many businesses (particularly restaurants), it seems important for maps and reviews to be run by a user-friendly entity, ideally something like OSM.
Providing such a service is expensive, however. The fact that OSM does not have a decent Android app even is telling (Osmand is laggy and barely usable; Organic maps is nice, but is not a replacement for Google maps).
So we are stuck in the situation we are in, and I am not sure what a good solution would be.
Google reviews are really easy to spam unfortunately. An even if you present evidence that you are being reviewed by your competitor and their family they don't care.
It's a new project and a review feature is most likely not on the short-term or even mid-term horizon (as implementing it in a decentralized manner is nontrivial) but it could be nice if you fleshed out a more detailed feature request over at https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/ - it checks your other boxes.
One way to do decentralised relatively spam-resistant reviews:
* Allow anyone to review.
* When viewing other people's reviews, you rank them by how similarly they review places you and they have both been to. Ie. Do you agree with them? If you agree with them, then weight that users reviews higher. If they rank places highly that you think got 1 star, then rank them negatively.
* This approach can be done on the complete review graph, so you don't need to have reviewed the same places someone else ranked.
* The downside is you can't see any meaningful reviews till you write a few yourself.
* Allow anyone to review.
* When viewing other people's reviews, you rank them by how similarly they review places you and they have both been to. Ie. Do you agree with them? If you agree with them, then weight that users reviews higher. If they rank places highly that you think got 1 star, then rank them negatively.
* This approach can be done on the complete review graph, so you don't need to have reviewed the same places someone else ranked.
* The downside is you can't see any meaningful reviews till you write a few yourself.
Another approach:
Have each reviewable location publish a key on a sign in their establishment. Make reviewers scan a QR code and sign their comment with that key.
That ensures that while the key doesn't leak every review must be written by someone who has physically visited.
Obviously you need to trust every physical visitor to not publish the sign, but I suspect that might be sufficient to stop spam nonetheless.
Have each reviewable location publish a key on a sign in their establishment. Make reviewers scan a QR code and sign their comment with that key.
That ensures that while the key doesn't leak every review must be written by someone who has physically visited.
Obviously you need to trust every physical visitor to not publish the sign, but I suspect that might be sufficient to stop spam nonetheless.
So an army of bots can create fake reviews for my business and it will look legit so long as they also give consensus reviews for a bunch of well known places?
Yep. But as soon as a few real users find your place and rank it highly, then the bot army will only impact scores for users who haven't yet come across such bot scores.
Obviously any such scheme is helped by there being not-too-many bot accounts. It's hard to limit bot account creation in a decentralized opensource design.
One potentially workable approach is to have users leave a trail of data in some immutable form (eg. a series of reviews left, with scores, timestamps, and text comments), which you later apply some heuristic over (eg. 'all comments containing a web link to a url shortener are probably spam'). All data that is older than the publication of the heuristic is then fairly trustworthy, since bot account owners can't retrospectively edit their spam to make it not match the heuristic.
Obviously any such scheme is helped by there being not-too-many bot accounts. It's hard to limit bot account creation in a decentralized opensource design.
One potentially workable approach is to have users leave a trail of data in some immutable form (eg. a series of reviews left, with scores, timestamps, and text comments), which you later apply some heuristic over (eg. 'all comments containing a web link to a url shortener are probably spam'). All data that is older than the publication of the heuristic is then fairly trustworthy, since bot account owners can't retrospectively edit their spam to make it not match the heuristic.
I also wanted to start using Openplacereviews a few days ago, but according to a discussion in an OSM/Osmand Matrix channel its development seems to have mostly come to a standstill.
A recommended alternative is Mangrove [1] which allows anonymous cryptographically verified reviews, but I have neither had a closer look yet nor given it a try so far.
[1] https://mangrove.reviews/
A recommended alternative is Mangrove [1] which allows anonymous cryptographically verified reviews, but I have neither had a closer look yet nor given it a try so far.
[1] https://mangrove.reviews/
https://organicmaps.app/ I use this, no reviews though
- is based on OSM
- has a review feature like Google Maps
- is not tied to a company
- is open source (optional)