Dianping is the monopoly rating platform in China. They have huge market. With great power comes great responsibility. Dianping is going to be in so much trouble (antitrust and regulations :)) if they don’t take active actions to harness and make good use of their power.
Here’s an interesting Chinese article from the pov of restaurants: 困在评分系统里的餐饮人 驳静 (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ACtVi3hphs3ml5euBcKDlQ)
Some translated snippets
In big cities these days, people are used to being bribed [by restaurants] with freebies in exchange for a five-star review [on Dianping]. Two decades after its founding, Dianping’s rating mechanism quietly rewritten the ground rules of the restaurant business.
…
While users may download and use Dianping’s ratings for free. Restaurants pay a lot of entry fee (6000-10000RMB ) to be eligible to edit their profiles, upload photos, menus and contacts on the platform.
…
In Shanghai’s dining scene, restaurants with a Dianping rating above 4.5 are a dime a dozen. The unspoken rule is: if a place scores below 4.3, it’s probably not worth your time. Thanks to this rampant “ratings inflation,” there was even a brief rebellion at the start of 2024, when young people organized a tongue-in-cheek campaign to flood 3.5-star restaurants, as a form of protest. It was spirited—but nowhere near enough to change the reality that high ratings still mean higher traffic.
…
Encouraging customers to leave positive reviews is now routine in restaurants, but technically violates Dianping’s rules. A Shanghai shaved ice shop, “Pupu,” offered free ice cream for reviews while stressing honesty over flattery—yet was still penalized for “disrupting review order,” with its rating hidden for a week. For small businesses, such penalties are devastating, leading owners like “Pupu’s” to now gently ask loyal customers to rate no higher than 4.5 stars to avoid suspicion. Many small shop owners share similar frustrations: despite real service improvements, some find their scores falling, not rising.
Opting out of Dianping isn’t simple either. A coffee shop owner in Ningbo learned this firsthand after a customer, claiming without proof that coffee triggered heart palpitations, posted a 0.5-star review. Because the customer was a high-tier user, the single rating dragged the shop’s score down sharply. Appeals to Dianping failed, and with the reviewer disabling comments, the shop couldn’t even publicly respond. Businesses are thus trapped in a system where one bad review—fair or not—can cause lasting damage.
Throughout these process, restaurants felt “completely powerless,” with no room even to defend themselves.
…
Facing mounting frustrations, more restaurants are now considering moving away from Dianping, turning instead to platforms like Xiaohongshu or Douyin to build a more stable consumer base. But leaving one platform may simply mean entering another invisible system. Traffic and algorithms have already swallowed up the traditional logic of running a restaurant. The old model—open a place, build a loyal customer base over time—is largely dead. These days, a new restaurant might have just a three-month window to succeed or fail.
To survive, some restaurants are advised to create “traffic bait” dishes—think matcha lava cakes, Longjing soy milk, or honeycomb rice wine—often visually stunning but mediocre in taste, and sometimes out of sync with the restaurant’s actual style. Everything from how dishes are photographed to how menus and even dish names are designed now follows the rules of algorithmic visibility.
If a platform could maintain a more open, consultative relationship with merchants—rather than dictating the rules and the market—restaurants might avoid blindly chasing popularity and exposure, which only leads to a flood of samey dishes and, ultimately, to good food being overlooked.