[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.)

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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