San Francisco-based Munchee, a popular food review mobile app, has announced MuncheePlatform, a new blockchain-based social platform that incentivizes users and restaurants using the Munchee token (MUN), to be released by the company in an upcoming public token sale.
The platform looks to disrupt traditional restaurant review sites such as Yelp, FourSquare, Google Places, and Zagat, by introducing an immutable and verifiable blockchain-based user review process that is based around a crypto-token to incentivize ecosystem participants.
The Munchee mobile app was first launched earlier this year for iOS and soon to be released for Android is a social-networking application for food lovers that focus’ on reviews and recommendations of individual restaurant dishes via photos and videos. The app is also a marketing channel for restaurants to highlight their favorite dishes to nearby hungry foodies.
The Problem: False Reviews and Little Incentive
According to Munchee and to many others, the long-time sites noted above all share a number of problems, but the most notable are false reviews. False reviews run counter to the stated purpose of a crowdsourced review site and generally lead to low-quality listings.
A study by Harvard professor Michael Luca revealed that fake reviews of establishments in Boston rose from 6% in 2006 to 20% in 2014.
With the closed and centralized platforms operated by Yelp and these other sites, it is impossible to prove there is truth in the review and rating system.
Furthermore, it is believed the reviews listed on our these websites are skewed to the negative due to the lack of incentive for the standard end-user. In short, end-users who have a neutral or positive experience are far less likely to post a review than an end-user who had a negative experience.
As has been noted by Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, “losing money, being abandoned by friends, and receiving criticism will have a greater impact than winning money, making friends, or receiving praise. Put another way, you are more upset about losing $50 than you are happy about gaining $50. … Bad events wear off more slowly than good ones.” The same is true when it comes to restaurant reviews, and when paired with no incentive to participate following a neutral or positive experience, the reviews of our general competition should be placed into question.
The Solution: Immutable Blockchain Review and Rewards Platform
Munchee proposes a better solution with their new, decentralized, blockchain-based MuncheePlatform, which aims to be an immutable and verifiable review platform that rewards users and restaurants for participation in the community.
Munchee’s Peer Review system will be implemented to ensure that only quality reviews are accepted in the Munchee ecosystem. Every new submission first goes through the peer review by other Munchee users, which makes the Munchee platform truly social and transparent. Munchee uses Machine Learning to mine user preferences to suggest suitable reviewers for peer review based on criteria, such as location, language, food category, food preference, etc. Everyone in the Munchee ecosystem participates in improving the quality of the platform through active participation – instead of being just a passive user of the content provided by others. This fosters valuable content and a collaborative community. Such a platform attracts many first-time users to the platform since they can’t just only access trusted content but also earn MUN tokens by actively participating in improving the validity and quality of the content.
Definition of Munchee token
1. a Munchee token (MUN) is a method of exchange inside of the Munchee ecosystem, built to facilitate meaningful advertising and promotion for restaurant owners while building a quality base of content by rewarding content creators for their activity.
The platform will generate a unique economy around the Munchee mobile app by rewarding users with MUN tokens for content creation and also incentivize restaurants to offer rewards and promotions to Muchee users.
Roadmap
The company will be rolling out their blockchain platform in 2018. They also intend to incorporate a wallet for users to redeem rewards and a special wallet for restaurants to purchase advertising and create special offers using MUN tokens.
To learn more visit the Munchee token website and read the company whitepaper.
