Yelp Now Has Court Permission to Change Business Ratings for Money. Don't Forget It. To me, I couldn't give less of a shit. I mean really, I can't say that I've ever looked up a review online before trying out a restaurant or some service. Apparently, though, some people do. FOCUS: Do you use Yelp or other online reviews to sway your decisions? If so, why? Ever been the target of the Yelp Extortion? ALT-FOCUS: What's your thought on online reviews? Which ones do you trust? Which ones don't you trust?
I'll look at Yelp to get ideas for a new place to try. In that regard if it only has one or two stars, I'm less inclined to give it a try over a place with three or more. I do use Amazon's reviews quite a lot, but I tend to discount one and five star reviews. More often than not one star reviews have an axe to grind and five stars are split between people who really love the product, or written by someone who has a vested interest in the product
I generally assume that only people who had a shitty experience take the time to write up a review. The five-stars are mostly shills and the one-stars are mostly idiots. The only thing I care about is if the negative reviews have a common theme. If dozens of people had the same sort of bad experience and they don't look like copy/paste shills, I'm probably going to pass.
You can't really trust Yelp. When someone gets pissed at a restaurant or bar, they get butthurt and go on a review rampage, telling people on Twitter things like the place has a racist staff and they should all give it scathing reviews.
I've never gone to Yelp but I do utilize reviews on sites if they're available. Particularly clothing as it helps me to know if something runs big or small or if it's flimsy, etc. I'll occasionally even post a review about a book, mostly if it's shitty and I see it getting a bunch of 5 stars so I can go in and be all "are you serious?" For some reason there's this one book in particular I absolutely hated and a lot of people were giving it five stars. Liars, all of them. I've never used them for restaurants. I tend to rely on word of mouth for that from my friends. Same for electricians, plumbers and the like.
I have to say that the only online reviews that I really pay attention to and give any credence to are those at Cabela's. Over the years, I've found that they seem to have the most grounded, realistic reviews of their products. They moderate them, but allow reasonable/realistic criticism to enter the fray and weed out the astro-turfing. As to EBay or Amazon, I tend to take everything with a grain of salt. Everything else I'm incredibly pessimistic and dismissive of.
So my brother and I ended up at this place called Los Mariachi's in Morgantown. From the outside I knew it'd be bad, but my brother said the Yelp reviews were good so we went. It ended up being probably the worst meal of my life. Check out this review, apparently Kate G made this comment, which makes sense because a white college would say "white college girls love this place."
Like Amazon, Yelp is best when a service or product is so fundamentally shitty it goes viral. Amy's Baking Company, 3 Wolf Shirt, Union Street Guesthouse which charged people for bad reviews retroactively. Great for comedy. For giggles, checked out the reviews for start-up Saltwater Brewery down here. People are docking stars because a beer bar (not advertised as a brewpub) with no kitchen, doesn't offer a food truck option. A couple are pissy because the parking sucks. You can't take most of this shit seriously. If I owned that bar, though, I'd be fuming at my rating sliding because of these fartcakes. What did people do before food trucks?
I use restaurant reviews on Yelp as a guide for new places I'm thinking I'm trying out. Obviously you take them with a grain of salt, but its interesting to get perspective on. I also check to see where the reviewers are from. Sometimes you will get people from out of town who are just super excited to be at a "cool" restaurant in a big city. So you balance that with the bitchy girl who had to wait 30 seconds too long to get her second glass of Pinot Grigio and you can start to get a better feel. Product reviews I will lean on if they are a paragraph long talking about use. Those are actually informed and grounded in some product experience, good or bad. 8 words about it with exclamation points and smilies are disregarded post haste.
There are a few really good local places in Charlotte that I have tried out that I have since went back and looked at Yelp reviews, over they good good scores but people really tend to shit on places for anything other than the food/service. Giving a place a one star review because they didn't carry the artisanal bottle water you like is just bullshit.
I use Yelp all the time, but barely ever for the reviews. It's just the easiest way for me to find places to go in general if I want one kind of thing in a particular neighborhood, or if I'm trying to figure out what my options are for more niche places throughout the city, or if I'm already out and unfamiliar with the area and looking for something nearby. I do tend to throw out any results that are less than 3 stars and have a decent number of reviews, though. If there are enough options, I'd probably throw out the 3 star ones too. I know a lot of negative reviews are just from grumpy assholes who'd have bad customer service anywhere, but if there's enough people agreeing it's shitty then I tend to believe them. That being said, if this really does become part of Yelp's plan (or if it has been all along, whether or not they're saying it hasn't) then that's pretty outrageous. It collapses the whole point. If I read the reviews for the 4 and 5 star ones at all, it's to get a general feel for the place without the marketing veneer and exactly because I'm trying not to be advertised to, for once. I know this would be difficult to prove, exactly, but I also feel like Yelp and the popularity of other review sites/outlets have forced businesses to be accountable for a higher standard of service. Positive and negative word-of-mouth travels faster and good, smaller businesses probably have an easier time succeeding and crappy businesses probably can't get away with as much shit for as long. So, even if I'm not really using them for reviews, I still end up feeling like I'm benefiting from it.
I will use Reddit for reviews, or more likely suggestions for what I need. I will not use Amazon reviews or Yelp, because I feel like it's too easily manipulated. Surprisingly, you fuckers are helpful with suggesting things.
Usually the places that are really highly-rated deserve it and the really low-rated places deserve it. In the middle it becomes iffy.
My past two jobs have been heavily dependent on Yelp reviews. Love it or hate it, it's the new 'word of mouth' - but with a much bigger mouth. This whole changing ratings for money thing is bullshit, though. In general, reviews are a good thing. I look up reviews on almost anything of significance that I buy, or if I'm going to an expensive dinner, I'll look up the restaurant on line to check out reviews. If there's some bad reviews? I'll try it anyway. If all the reviews are bad, or there is a similarity between all the bad ones? Probably not - until a person I know goes there and personally tells me it was pretty good. Also, Yelp does allow owners to respond, so I think that's a pretty good feature. I trust Consumer Reports. I also largely trust Yelp. It is also a function of number of reviews. If there's 2 reviews of a place? Ok, not a great sample size. If there's 30? There's probably some accuracy.
I do the same thing - look for multiple reviews along the same theme. I use tripadvisor a lot when looking for hotels and restaurants when traveling. I look at the pictures provided. I think about what is literal and what might be just perspective. I.e., "I saw bugs on the windowsill" vs. "the decor was dated." I get frustrated with Amazon reviews where it is hard to get a read - half may be positive and say it works like a charm and the other half said it didn't work at all - and hard to discern why there's such a split. Recipe reviews tend to be the most hilarious. "I substituted three ingredients and it tasted awful. Won't use this recipe again!" I will sometimes sort by user rating if I am looking for something well-liked quickly, but most of the time I don't even notice the number of stars. I just read the reviews. So hopefully Yelp won't be inserting fake reviews for $$
Ive used Yelp a few times, not much. I did create a account to bitch about the LA Fitness I work out at. All of negative reviews were spot on. I don't know how much the reviews really shape my judgement I'll usually have some sort of notion of how I feel about a place before I read them anyway and then just find the most realistic one that fits my notion. You can tell when someone put some real thought into a review and weren't just writing it to dog the place. Im friends with this Indian Restaurant owner on Facebook. Ive taken cooking classes he's offered. He started posting endlessly once about a negative review that went up on some sight. Someone didn't like the fact he didn't offer the same exact type of Indian meal they had been used to. Typical lame negative review. The owner was losing his shit online. I posted a few times to ignore stupid review like that. He did not.
I had a (shitty) English teacher in college who was obsessed with his score on RateMyProfessor. He ranted about the students attacking him when they were just lazy and incompetent. He then all but outright told us that we needed to review him and that our grade on the final term paper would reflect the "quality" of our review.
I have never used online reviews to base my eating decisions. When it comes to food there is one hard rule that I live by. If I do not see any people of the same nationality as the food I am eating, I do not eat there. If I don't see Mexicans eating at a Mexican place, I don't eat there. If I don't see Asian's at a pho place, I don't dine there. If I don't see Africans at the Ethiopian place, I don't eat there. I do however use the rating systems for large places like Amazon because I've been they haven't steered me wrong in the past. I also do the same thing when I was actively searching for apartments.
Of course the shuffling and prioritizing of reviews has been heavily rumored to have been taking pace for some time, so in my mind, this only confirms the suspicions. That said, I think the Yelp app is slick and allows me to pull phone numbers, operating times and a rundown on what's being served. Say you're walking or driving past a restaurant titled Bob's Food Palace. Yelp lets me cut the middle man out and see what they're offing. Of course the reviews are suspect, but at least it manages my expectations better than going in cold. Same deal for sites like Glassdoor and RateMyProfessor. No, they shouldn't be considered gospel, but if everyone is bitching about weak mimosas and a dirty shitter, you don't have much of a leg to stand on walking out post brunch. Restaurants who attribute their failure to online reviews normally have something else going on though. ...oh, and hi. I've been a lurker for Jeebus knows how long. Nice place you have here.