[tb303]

I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.

[kjs3]

Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.

[jrockway]

For me, the shady business practices are not the reason I don't use Yelp. The big problem is that people are bad at reviewing restaurants. Everyone has different assumptions and standards, so the rating is generally meaningless. I see things like "1 Star. Server gave me a dirty look after I didn't tip them, because I don't believe in tipping." In cases like that, the problem is you, not the restaurant! For things as subjective as whether or not the food was worth the price, you have to provide supporting evidence ("show, don't tell"), and while professional reviewers do this, amateur reviewers never do. There is no way to use the data to make a good decision, and it seems even less possible to use the data to decide "which restaurant should I go to right now".

To some extent, all reviews are like this. I cringe when tech reviewers measure WiFi routers and tell me about throughput (that comes at the cost of latency), or Amazon reviewers bought the completely wrong product and obviously didn't like it.

I hate to say it, but I don't think reviews are "a thing". They make people feel good and probably drive more sales ("it had 5 stars, so I bought it"), but I don't feel like reviews have ever saved me time. I wish I could stop seeing them. (Maybe I should write a Chrome extension to remove them.)

[_wp3r]

This was a solved problem. Professional restaurant reviewing guides generally had reputable practices for decades. Those came to exist because "your" dumb uncle always recommended the worst restaurants. So the internet comes along and tells everyone's uncle and their uncles terrible friends that their review is super special. Voila we have yelp and google maps which are generally a combination of super fans or just terrible people with the 100 normal people that visit a restaurant each day completely absent. Hooray outliers!!!!!!

[kjs3]

Yeah...this is pretty much spot on. I know at least a half dozen people, who I have been to multiple restaurants with, who I personally don't think have actual taste buds who are quite proud of having hundreds if not thousands of reviews on Yelp. The 'game' aspect becomes the point, not the review itself.

[lozaning]

And if that isn't enough of a reason to not use them, surely their gimping of their website on mobile should be. I DONT WANT TO DOWNLOAD YOUR APP!

[kjs3]

This. This is an immediate disqualification for me using a site. Maybe I'll use your app, at some point, if I find it provides some wildly more useful experience for me. But if all you are doing is hammering me to download your app on first encounter so you can 'monetize' or 'capture' me or whatever slimy marketing euphemism is in vouge this week for 'invasion of privacy', I will expend extra effort to find any alternative to your site.

[asdff]

It's only worthy of seeing pictures of food to gauge portion sizes imo. Sometimes I want to know if the restaurant is one to leave me hungry after spending $14 or feed me lunch twice.

[Diederich]

What do you use, if you don't mind sharing?

My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is.

While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.

[kjs3]

90% of the time, I ask someone. A real person. Apps are probably never going to be the answer unless something drastic changes, because the app developers have proven over and over they're more interested in maximizing revenue at all cost, not delivering me a good experience. And the "social media"/gamification of the user community is full of perverse incentives resulting in nothing you can trust.

[mrguyorama]

Try it? Go spend 20$ some time at a place that looks good. If it meets your expectations then great, otherwise go somewhere else next time.

You'll either run out of places to try, meet your novelty needs by never running out if you live in a giant city, or get enough regular places to not care anymore

[_wp3r]

I always wished Zagat had some better ground game. Their reviews are generally pretty spot on, I do wish they had better coverage.

[kjs3]

Zagat does have much better quality, but I can't imagine how they could scale it to cover more than a tiny fraction of most major cities (much less smaller communities) since it relies very much on very high quality, selected reviewers. One can dream, though.

[pomian]

TripAdvisor. Although it seems to be overloading with other functions, as time goes on.

[abfan1127]

I too would like to know what you use. I hate using Yelp for the obvious reasons, but I don't have an alternative.

[kjs3]

Another generally good place is if you have an alt weekly newspaper (paper or on-line), such as Creative Loafing. I've had a lot of luck with their reviews. I'll check these if I'm going to a city I don't have local contacts.

[Tijdreiziger]

I use Google Maps.

[hnick]

Same. Haven't heard anything bad about this in particular, though the scores seem quite inflated so you want to see at least a 4.x around here to bother reading the review text in most cases.

[nunez]

I still use Foursquare for reviews and ratings along with Google.

[rchaud]

I believe it's the wider SV business model of 'platformization' that eventually gives rise to these types of mafia tactics as you say.

It was never going to be enough for Yelp's investors for them to simply replace the physical Yellow Pages. To monetize (sell ads), they had to be the start and end point for every customer in their search for a local business. That's why they started harassing you to download the app or set up an account if you opened a page on your phone; to build a base of users who'd open the app first, and not a search engine or something to look up a location.

Now that the restaurant and personal services industry is dependent on having a positive Yelp presence, Yelp appears to be pressing their advantage further by becoming a middleman, taking a cut of every deal made on 'their' platform.

[aledalgrande]

Be curious to see Yelp's "culture" booklet

[pavel_lishin]

It's probably as relevant to the decisions driving Yelp's frankly criminal activity, as a handbook handed out to ants is to the anthill itself.

[syshum]

I am honestly surprised people still us Yelp, I have yet to find them useful at all