Every dish is beautiful

In the last month, Coffee Week took place in Londrina. This is an event witch, for a limited time, different cafés offer an exclusive dish for the same price. It gives people an reason to explore new places and try more premium stuff.

The website of the event showcased photos of the dishes. Obviously, since they were made by the restaurants, every dish looked delicious. Interestingly, photos taken by users on social media also made the food look delicious, even if, the reality was different.

Then it hit me: if the post included a description saying that the food was bad, well, the post would be wasted.

On social media, we want to show interesting things, cool experiences. So, if we ate somewhere fancy and different, but the food was not good; why not just highlight the fancy and different part?

This results in a system where retrieving knowledge is trickier.

For example, I was researching places to eat in Liberdade, a famous negiherhood of São Paulo. Since it’s far from my home, I was dependent of social media posts to get information.

Well, I found ton of different/interesting places. Are they actually good? I don’t know. The system was not designed to tell the truth.