[kerkeslager]

I agree with you that Yelp for restaurants is generally a waste of the electricity used to run it.

However, I think the problem isn't stars or a lack of nuance, it's that you get what you pay for. If you don't pay for reviews, you mostly get two kinds of reviews, which are at the extremes:

1. I'm angry enough that I went online and wrote a review.

2. I own the business or I'm a true believer in the business.

Neither case is actually what you want from a review. But people don't post middle-star reviews because they don't feel strongly enough about it to feel an incentive to do that.

The nuance comes when you pay someone to write an opinion they don't feel strongly about, which is the only time they can maintain anything resembling an objective opinion. I've found very good products by paying for Consumer Reports, for example.

"But it doesn't scale!" says HN. Sure. Lots of working solutions don't scale, and lots of scalable ideas don't solve any real problem. Bad things happen to good people.