HN Explorer

Ask HN: Has this been done yet?

3 points by jawns ↗ HN
A site where people can report a restaurant where they suspect they got food poisoning ... and if enough people report the same place in a given time frame, they all get notified, so they can pursue a claim against the place as a group. (Site could make money by, say, offering lawyer referrals.)

6 comments

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rick888
It might work. However, you will have to worry about false alarms/people not telling the truth. In addition to this, we always don't know where we got food poisoning.

This could lead to a situation where you, the site owner, are sued. This is probably why most people don't start a site like this.

raquo
You could extend that concept to patents http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792087 and a lot of other areas. I'm not sure how common is restaurant poisoning (never experienced it), you may want try to fit this idea in other industries.
kmort
Perhaps this is something that may be mined from the Twitter firehose (which may be easier than marketing a new site).

Let's be generous and say:

  Two mentions in the firehose would be sufficient for a correlation
  8% of people twitter
  25% of twitterers would tweet that they were food poisoned AND name the restaurant
  25% of the patrons got food poisioning
Any restaurant with at least (2 / 0.08 / 0.25 / 0.25) 400 patrons for the given time period would trip the alarm.

Those are pretty generous numbers though, with the figure jumping quite significantly as they're tweaked. A 25% poisoning rate for a reasonably-sized restaurant would probably hit the news beyond Twitter anyway.

kingofspain
In my experience, restaurants do not have a sense of humour about this kind of thing. One site I ran had several legal threats over user reviews even vaguely implying they fell ill. Other threats came over reviews they felt inaccurate.

A health scare can easily destroy a business like this so I'd be very very wary!

mryan
How would you prevent a restaurant from reporting all of their competitors?

What happens when a restaurant subpoenas you for the personal details of someone who posted a derogatory report?

I find kmort's suggestion interesting - using Twitter (i.e., data that is already public) could be a smart move, as you would then be simply displaying the data rather than compiling/publishing it yourself - this could reduce your legal liability when (not if!) a restaurant wishes to defend themselves against a report.