[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.