[aphextron]

>Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.

Agreed, the individual reviews are usually useless. But their aggregate star rating is great. A 4.5 star place with hundreds of reviews is guaranteed to be amazing without fail. 4 star is always decent. But anything 3.5 and less is guaranteed to be mediocre or bad. I eat out almost every day in SF/east bay and this has yet to fail me.

[azinman2]

Disagree. Take El Faro on 1st [1], it’s actually pretty good (their taco dorado al pastor is really good), yet it has a 2.5 rating. It’s also been in business for years, so clearly something else is keeping them alive than their yelp rating. And if you look at individual reviews, there are a bunch of 4 and 5 stars, yet they disappear when scrolling a search list.

I’ve also found many 4+ star restaurants entirely overrated and quite mediocre.

It’s all about the category and how it fits into the local milieux, which might place emphasis on things you don’t care about or expect (the ambiance sucks at el faro, for example, but it’s a lunchtime tacqueria I could care less). People take away stars from it because it’s cash only. Sorry, but what exactly is it that we’re rating here?

That lack of common consensus and the wide disparity between expectations means yelp aggregates aren’t always so useful. I wish they did a better job of showing me the reviews and stars of the things that matter to me, not to the shapeless aggregate. Or at least give me a sense of the distribution to know if there’s more/less contention than normal.

[1] https://m.yelp.com/biz/el-faro-san-francisco-3