I don't have any sympathy for a site that purposely cripples the web mobile site to force you to install their app. They lock you out of pictures after around 20 so you have to go to desktop or install their crappy app. Yelp will not be missed.
Mobile browsers should differentiate the style of links with URLs that resolve to apps. I am tired of tapping links expecting to remain in Safari and having useless “open in app?” prompts instead. I’m not IN an app, I’m in a browser; I want to use the browser.
And when cancelling the prompt gets you nothing, it really feels like Yelp is screaming “NO SOUP FOR YOU!”.
After their bizarre cartoon-like remake I feel the best reddit experience is converging on none at all. In particular reading deeply into reply-heavy threads has devolved into rapidly scanning thin columns of text. They've managed to migrate the experience of reading a poorly designed website on mobile to the desktop!
IIRC the official app is from them buying AlienBlue, which used to be the best one on iOS. These days it's Apollo.
Apollo recently moved some push notification features behind a subscription to cover ongoing costs, separate from their "Pro" one time in-app purchase, so I think Reddit is at least taking a cut from API usage by other clients.
Weirdly, most of the features Apollo puts behind the subscription tier are features I think foster unhealthy engagement with Reddit and I'm just as happy to not have hanging over me.
I'd be happy to pay them, but I actually don't WANT push notifications, posting from the app, or any of the other stuff that encourages websites to pull you in deeper.
And the only reason I even use Apollo is because mobile Reddit is a nightmare UX. Literally a case study in how to make a horrid, horrible experience on the mobile web.
I don't use the iOS versions, but IIRC they never really did anything with AlienBlue after the purchase, and the "official" mobile app is a totally separate project.
That’s what use and consider to be the best reddit mobile experience. The regular reddit mobile site doesn’t seem to render on iOS Safari properly most of the time, probably by design.
This reminds me of Tumblr, which I'm sure none of you have heard of or remember :) But seriously it's always like "Open in the Tumblr app for the best experience." I finally gave it a try and it was a serious downgrade in my opinion!
"so the touchbar has a steep learning curve [for you]" - Apple to me on phone asking to switch to none touchbar mbp. Also probably any website app evangelist.
The Reddit mobile app is so shit. It would be less annoying if their app was actually usable but the website is so much easier to use. I'm so tired of them trying to force me to use their bad app, using shady practices to make me accidentally click on links that open the app.
I gave up and used their app after being hit with that 100s of times. Whether it is a viable long term strategy or not they probably are driving ad revenue from it, bit of a sad state of affairs if you have to be hostile to your users to build a sustainable business.
I actually wrote some ad blocking rules to remove all of these Reddit annoyances. I've been meaning to submit them to one of the mobile-focused Adblock lists. Here are the elements that you need to hide. I like 1 BlockerX for this:
They prompt you endlessly on Android as well with a huge "CONTINUE" button to install their app versus a tiny "or go to the mobile site" link to stay in the browser with just the last 2 words being the hyperlink. This annoying choice takes up fully 1/3 of the screen.
Yup, and even when you switch to old mode it frequently reverts when you use the back button. They are intentionally making the web mobile experience horrible because they think that you'll be more engaged if you use the app.
I worked at reddit for almost 4 years, but quit and started a non-profit so I could work on building a site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality content, etc.
It's not incredibly active yet since it's in invite-only alpha, but it gets several hundred posts a day and is coming along well. There's more info in this blog post (including how to request an invite): https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Just send me an email if you're interested and I'll give you an invite. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled for now while we get base features and site culture built up.
Hey, I'd like an invite please. Also I would be interested in discussing your philosophy with you. I run a similar "startup". We have 2 apps in the social recommendations area (currently focused on maps/places). One is a mobile app in private beta atm. You can sign up for an invite once we go public here: BIBIMAPP.COM. The other is a crowd source mapping app. It's very rough atm and we haven't promoted it at all but you can find it here : mapbeet.bibimapp.com. Feel free to reach out to me on the email in my profile.
Happy Tildes user here. I believe Deimorz has some stated plans on how it will pay for itself (non-profit, donations, etc) but here's the thing:
I used to ask myself that question, then I realized it doesn't matter. Communities come and go. Slashdot used to be good. Reddit used to be good. That they're not anymore doesn't matter.
It sucks to up and leave a community once in a while, but it's not like you lose everything you did there. Social apps are intrinsically focused on the short term (past & future). It's okay to change which websites you visit once in a while.
I highly recommend Tildes. I enjoy my time there. It's pretty quiet and has very high signal, very low noise. If one day it has to be shut down because the bills can't be paid, that will suck… but there will be others.
Even at this point, the actual bills are already covered several times over, and the site could probably easily grow to at least 100x its current size without needing any more donations. The only real question is whether I continue working on it full-time, but keeping it running isn't in doubt at all, and I can't imagine that changing. There's no investor/owner pressure that would result in it needing to shut down: https://docs.tildes.net/faq#what-if-you-dont-get-enough-dona...
taking out the cost of the workforce (R&D, sales, associated GnA) working on revenue generation, ie. ads, analytics, etc. i'd suppose the rest of the costs of a typical Web2.0 site (like Twitter, FB, Reddit) comes down to basically hosting only and isn't that high - can probably be easily covered by donations. Or a real example - without meaningful monetization and thus related costs, WhatApp was fine with 55 employees serving $19B worth of user engagement.
Hopefully Tor isn't a problem. In the Age Of Snowden, I use it almost exclusively. Also might I suggest a .onion gateway (and maybe a .i2p gateway too)?
Old Reddit died with the Ellen Pao fracas. New Reddit is doing well; the new web UI is still weird for people with an Old Reddit background, but on mobile you don't confuse it with the website you loved in 2008-11 -- yet it's pretty good at what it does: entertainment for the broader public.
Old reddit died well before Pao. I still get value out of Reddit, but you just have to use it in a different way now, like any community that blows up and goes mainstream.
While I think the redesign is bloated and slower its not unusable and you can opt out of it at present.
Being prompted repeatedly to open in app is certainly annoying but at present most mobile users probably use one of the apps. At least for android where 85% of your global market lives there are 7 different options nearly all of which are better than viewing in mobile firefox/chrome.
In short your experience is valid but since you probably represent a small percentage of the userbase reports of reddits death are still presumably greatly exaggerated.
On the lighter side old reddits code was open source and lives on in voat which at present is infested with a lot of racists and alt right. Maybe we can all move over and "voat" them out of their new home like we kicked them off reddit.
>In short your experience is valid but since you probably represent a small percentage of the userbase reports of reddits death are still presumably greatly exaggerated.
I don't think people are forecasting Reddit's death so much as wishing for it and asking for alternatives they can go to instead.
I don't think Reddit will ever really die. It will persist, as a sort of night-club district from the comparatively well lit streets of Facebook and Twitter. It's not really a red light district anymore, but it's edgy enough for most people.
It does the same on Android asking to open in "Chrome", regardless of whether I am using Brave or Firefox. However, the click always opens in the current browser for me regardless of clicking on chrome.
To be fair, iOS offers no capability to list the browsers a user has installed on their phone. So they have to assume Safari, which is a fair assumption for 90% of users, I imagine.
It's kind of a double joke. The machine is dumb because it doesn't remember what language you chose. The second part is that if his language suddenly changes, it's probably not him. Removing the withdrawal limit allows the person with his stolen credentials to get more money.
If you had a Chase card they could use some proprietary way of saving the language, but for other banks there's no standard way of saving the language (on the card for example), so the only solution is for the ATMs to maintain an online (since you're unlikely to return to the same ATM) mapping of card numbers to languages, and that would bring a huge liability.
Gmail somehow knows. Every time I click a link, it asks to open in Safari or for me to install Chrome. I check the never ask prompt, but it always asks.
It constantly nagged me to re-enable notifications and link redirection out of the app is spotty. Not to mention ads were more frequent. I use the old interface on all devices and I find it superior.
I have literally never had any issues and I have all notifications turned off. I have never had any issue using their link redirection. I'm using an iphone 7 and never update my OS or any of my apps.
Whatever I click on those options doesn't donejaat I want, which is to stay on the page im already on. The site is total garbage if you are not logged in to use the personalised settings and it's all over the day old.reddit.com is turned off
If someone sends you a link in Hangouts on iOS, it asks you if you want to open it in Chrome or Safari. I don't have Chrome installed, and I use Firefox on my iPhone. Deleted Hangouts after that and only use Hangouts in Pidgin on a desktop.
I don't disagree, what I wonder about is how management sees this as a better alternative than serving their customers. I expect it is a "damned if you do damned if you don't" type situation.
They are at a tremendous disadvantage as a 'web' experience because you're getting there through Google, Facebook, or Bing rather than landing directly on their page so they have already paid that platform to put you in front. The App means they have full control over the experience and can charge restaurants directly to move them around in the search results (more revenue).
So at some point I presume the go full "Yellow Pages" and just charge venues a monthly fee to appear at all in their pages. That works if they are generating significant foot traffic into the venue but fails if they can't connect the app/website use with the visit.
All in all I don't see how they can make a business here.
So at some point I presume the go full "Yellow Pages" and just charge venues a monthly fee to appear at all in their pages. That works if they are generating significant foot traffic into the venue but fails if they can't connect the app/website use with the visit.
I think it's useful at this point to ask why various directories had value during their heyday. The "Yellow Pages" had value, simply because there wasn't as comprehensive a localized listing otherwise. Yelp had value at first, because the reviews and ratings combined with the location search were super useful. Unfortunately, too many people realized how valuable this was and the gaming of the system on all sides started, greatly reducing the usefulness of the Yelp directory.
Google might be able to create a such directory based solely on traffic and AI identification of the type of business? Could AI identify long lines outside of restaurants? Maybe Google should buy Yelp, which would solve the "pay Google up front" conundrum. Whatever IP Yelp has which killed the "near" searches on Google would also cease to be an impediment to Google.
> Unfortunately, too many people realized how valuable this was and the gaming of the system on all sides started, greatly reducing the usefulness of the Yelp directory.
I'm not sure if this is exactly it or if you're letting Yelp off the hook. Yelp was perfectly happy to try to profit from the gaming. That didn't just damage its usefulness. It damaged trust; and trust is a lot harder to get back.
I'm not sure if this is exactly it or if you're letting Yelp off the hook.
Not letting them off the hook. Yelp contributed to this through their actions.
It damaged trust; and trust is a lot harder to get back.
That was a part of what I was thinking about. One advantage of the Yellow Pages: less opportunity to lose trust. I think displaying AI interpreted traffic has a key advantage over ratings: It would cost a whole lot more money to get crowds to show up day after day with smartphones, than it would cost to get people to astroturf ratings.
I've seen that part of the Google listing, which is part of the reason why I made the suggestion. Google shouldn't just go by raw traffic, however. Traffic means different things at different times to different kinds of venues. High traffic at the DMV doesn't mean it's an awesome place. A line of 20 people means one thing to a sit down restaurant and something very different to a Boba tea place.
I suspect that AI applied here would be highly useful.
Right but if you're talking about restaurants, where people want to be (rather than the DMV where they have to be), I don't see why busyness isn't essentially the same as looking at lines outside.
A line of 20 outside a sit down restaurant that isn't even open means one thing if it's 30 minutes before it opens, another if it's already open. A line of 10 in front of a Boba tea place means something very different than a line of 10 in front of a sit down restaurant.
Busyness wouldn't just be used as a measure of busyness. It could be used as a proxy for other qualities. Another example: There are restaurants that have ample waiting areas and others that have none. Those in the waiting area wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing to a customer's experience than the same people seated at a table. Likewise for people standing outside vs. waiting inside.
At a very basic level, throughput (Little's Law) should also be taken into account.
My point is there would be value in such proxy measures, if some AI were used for interpretation.
> Google might be able to create a such directory based solely on traffic and AI identification of the type of business? Could AI identify long lines outside of restaurants?
Google already does plenty of stuff like this, and has for years (including historical and live busyness). Hell, I haven't used Yelp in years, because their app is generally less usable, isn't integrated with Maps (for directions etc), and cripples mobile web by not letting you see most of the content. Though it's possible that the data for G Maps is only comparably rich because of my location, and that Yelp has a data advantage in many more markets.
Google already does plenty of stuff like this, and has for years (including historical and live busyness).
I'm well aware. There's a cousin comment about using such data with contextual information and AI to use traffic data as a proxy for attributes like popularity and quality, instead of providing the raw data and letting users make their own inferences. This would enable a more Yelp-like UX, and might be easier for lots of users to consume.
This is related to what you are saying, but I think the main reason is that the app has better user retention (push notifications, icon on your home screen). Also they get location data.
I worked at Yelp 2 years ago and can say that the main reason is definitely because web traffic is not reliable, it changes with Google ranking changes. And Google and Yelp are not good friends. They are super concerned with not dying if they stop showing up in Google.
I couldn't agree more. Hopefully this is a wakeup call to Yelp and other slimy sites that try to extort users into downloading their app.
Also, small pro-tip for anyone unaware. If you are on mobile web and on Yelp, but don't want to download the app, hold down the refresh button, and select 'Request Desktop Site' - this will load the non mobile version of the site that will not force you to download the app. The UI isn't as great as the mobile optimized site, but hey at least you can read reviews without being extorted into downloading an app.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but is Yelp really being slimy by pushing users to download their app? Seems to me it's more that they are being too cheap/lazy to properly maintain both a mobile app and a mobile site. Certainly not behavior that benefits their users, but I feel slimy implies that they are doing something dishonest.
In the top left, there's an "open in app" button. It's not very intrusive, it's just sitting there in the header to remind you that there's an app. The rest of the website looks usable, right? Nope.
Click on "open in app": redirected to app store
Click on user's avatar: redirected to app store
Click on "read more": redirected to app store
Click on one of the reactions: redirected to app store
It's dishonest because the site isn't interactive at all -- there's a huge overlay that prevents any meaningful interaction with the site. It's quite the opposite of lazy, because there's a functional site under there, they just refuse to let people use it.
I don’t understand Why doesn’t google penalize them? They used to be pretty hard on links doing something other than what is expected. Maybe not anymore..
they're using app.adjust.com to force the user to get the app
and track the behavior -- using Firefox and something like uBlock will prevent the behavior and block the redirect attempt
Yelp cares a lot about app installs because web traffic is fragile. When Google ranking changes their traffic immediately changes, which is not desirable for building a stable buisness.
Feels a bit like looking for your keys under the streetlight. App users may be 10x more valuable but it doesn’t mean you can force them. There are lots of services that I will use frequently through a website but would never install an app.
In that case just deep six the app and let everyone use the website. Surely running just a website and a mobile website has to be less work than running a website, a half functioning purposefully neutered mobile website, and and app. They're user hostile, so slimy or not, fuck 'em.
Just to give some balance to the echo chamber here, I would miss Yelp. I never try to use the mobile site, so I've never felt that pain. Most people I know are in the same boat. It's pretty silly to suggest that nobody would miss Yelp.
I just visited a country without Yelp and really missed it. Google reviews were quite active, and I was pretty impressed with automatic translations into English, but Yelp would have been a helpful tool I'm used to as well.
Let's also call out Venmo and Google Pay (nee Google Wallet) in this hall of shame, both of which removed the ability to send and receive funds from their website (both mobile and desktop) in favor of strongarming you into installing the app to do so (get bent if you don't have a smartphone, I guess?). It would seem that "entering a number into a form" is a feature that is too sophisticated for the web platform to properly support (alternatively, perhaps we are meant to believe that such a thing is beyond the abilities of Google engineers?).
> Let's also call out Venmo and Google Pay (nee Google Wallet) in this hall of shame, both of which removed the ability to send and receive funds from their website (both mobile and desktop) in favor of strongarming you into installing the app to do so (get bent if you don't have a smartphone, I guess?).
Er, just checked and the Google Pay Send and Request money feature is accessible from both mobile and desktop site (well, I was lazy and checked both from mobile using “view desktop site” on and off.)
So, let's not call them out for something they absolutely didn't do.
I'm simply citing this email from Google themselves that I received in July, telling me that "To keep sending or requesting money, you’ll need to use the Google Pay app." This was within a month of receiving an email from Venmo telling me that "Venmo is phasing out some of the functionality on the Venmo.com website over the coming months. We are beginning to remove the ability to pay and charge someone on Venmo.com. Over time, you may see less functionality on our website." If Google has reversed course on that plan I'd be quite happy because it's totally baffling, but for all I know they're just taking their time with it like Venmo is. In the meantime, I went back to paying friends with cash and checks.
Was the Wallet to Pay transition anything more than a rename? I confess I don't understand Google's branding strategies. According to news sources, Wallet became Pay around February, and this email was received months later.
> According to news sources, Wallet became Pay around February, and this email was received months later.
I think Pay replaced Wallet when you say as an app upgrade, but not everyone upgrades immediately or automatically; that may have been about decommissioning Wallet after the upgrade was available.
I never had the Wallet app so I'd be confused to receive an email telling me to upgrade, but I'd be happy to be wrong. For as much as I'd rather have banks just natively support digital inter-bank transactions, if I absolutely have to share my bank account details with a third party, at least Google has relatively good security practices.
It's sad but many companies have tunnel vision - probably getting thousands of reports of people complaining of this. Unfortunately they think, for whatever reason, those are all outliers. It takes a good scathing top-rated post on HN to let them see. I'm sure a developer at Yelp that has been complaining to management for years is going to take this thread and show someone that can change it.
Exactly. One of my favourite apps, Quora, also did it some time ago (may be they still do) - forcing you to install the app if you're browsing them on mobile. I remember being shocked - shocked because while this (horrible) practice became a common thing, I'd always though of Quora highly, and assumed they'd never do something silly like that, but no, they'd disappointed.
Can someone in marketing help me make sense of this, please? If I'm accessing a site on the web, what makes them so sure I'd access them more frequently if I had their app?
Personally, if I'm on a web page, I am actually much more likely to never install their app if I have a bad experience.
Because the company can control the experience more than in a browser. No need to worry about AdBlocking. Also, they can nag you to allow push notifications.
Companies like reddit and yelp are not focused on the customer experience. They're trying to boost their KPIs. Perhaps, early on, those were customer-centric, but we now live in an age where a path to revenue is more important than ever.
So we get obnoxious nagware. The only thing is to look elsewhere.
I think they know the experience is poor. But the economics are worth it to annoy x% of users so y% install apps that make them more than the x% through web.
I think one of the most interesting/telling user experience things in the industry today is why people feel so strongly about not installing apps. It seems like it spans most people, from novice users all the way to technology experts.
Personally, I've never understood it, since nearly every mobile website is terrible. I prefer installing the app.
Seems like a key problem for mobile OS vendors to solve.
Because the experience of "installing" a web page by visiting the URL is still orders of magnitude more pleasant than installing an app. No need to clutter your homescreen with an app that you'll use twice and then forget about. Alternatively, no risk of not putting on your home screen and then forgetting about the 600 MB it's silently occupying on your disk until you're midway through your sister's wedding and trying to quickly free up space for more photos. No permissions to grant. No contributing to the endless stream of update notifications. No running in the background eating battery or ferrying your contacts to their servers or listening in on your microphone to use your voice for training their machine learning models.
Mobile websites are easier to install, fine to use for anything that doesn't require specific hardware permissions, and then when the user stops using them they stay gone. Not to mention they work on my Linux machine and my Windows machine and my iPad and my Galaxy. Forget apps.
I'm rarely looking at 1 restaurant at a time, I'm trying to compare 5, or 6 or 10.
The Yelp app has no means of doing that.
Also, I can't easily select some text in the app, like the name of a dish I'm not familiar with, and quickly trigger a web search in another tab to do some quick side reading.
I have the Yelp app installed, but 9 times out of 10 the browser is how I prefer to use search for restaurants.
Because of Yelp's frustrating site restrictions, I find myself often using Google instead, even though I prefer Yelp!!!!!!
How ridiculous is that!!
Browsers also seem to have better low bandwidth performance than most apps. Probably because doing constrained network communications is hard and only browsers have the billions of reps needed to practice getting it right. With most apps I find that network handling in poor network situations (like is all too common when traveling and looking for a restaurant) is inferior to most browsers.
So yeah, Yelp would definitely win me over if they kept their site browser and low-bandwidth friendly.
Problem is, you aren't Yelp's customer, you're their product. Same for all the other sites people are complaining about. Unless that dynamic changes, everyone will only get user experience correct by accident.
I'm sure the interface for advertisers must be pleasant, though.
Because mobile apps make our mobile phones data collection devices. When accessing a service from the browser you have a lot more control on what information it receives about you.
I am not saying most users think like that, providing anecdotal feedback here.
On iOS and now newer versions of Android you are able to individually grant and revoke permissions. What information are you expecting them to extract via the app that you can't block?
My phone uses android 8.1 API. I know about granular permissions but in practice this does not always work. For example the PlayMemories app from Sony - to use with Sony digital cameras - does not open at all (actually it opens to tell you to give the permission and doesn't do anything else) unless you give it location permissions. Why do I need to tell my location to an app whose use is to wirelessly grab the pictures from my camera to my phone?
Because location can be ascertained from BLE and wifi scanning, Android classifies the use of those things as location services.
So it's not exactly that Sony wants or is even asking for your location, it's Google telling you that if you give the sony app the BLE or wifi scanning functionality it wants, it would be possible for them to figure out where you're at.
That warning means they could, and so google is telling you, not that they are.
Well, it's especially annoying with something like Yelp that you often use on the go and sometimes in stressful situations (somebody in your group is hungry and ornery).
Downloading an app can take an unpredictable amount of time and bandwidth, and once you download it you may have to log in, remember or set a password, deal with 2FA, click a verification email, etc.
.
After enough of these experiences I nearly always carry a bunch of fruit bars and such around. Both improves the groups mood, and usually allows to find better food afterwards.
Ugh. Yes, but there are many fewer sites that actually need this than those that deploy it just so they can harvest emails.
The only sites that need this are those where users are adding content and the site is moderated, and then login should only be required for moderated actions.
So Yelp should require a login to leave a review, but not to read one.
> Seems like a key problem for mobile OS vendors to solve.
They're working on it but it's a hard problem because too many app developers, especially at household-name companies, have a history of acting in bad faith. When you're prompted to install an app you're really having to guess whether it'll chew batter or metered data, or attempt to exploit your personal data.
The OS vendors are offering better controls but it takes time to rebuild trust, especially when they're not sure whether the OS vendor quietly makes exceptions for major companies. Remember when Uber was violating Apple's policies and had no punishment for it? People will remember that for years even if they've had strict compliance ever since.
Apps simply often have alot less value to offer. And with a higher price attached. See permissions, tracking, notifications, worse UX sometimes, ad-blocker missing/ad-land.
Some are more affected of the issues, some less.
> Seems like a key problem for mobile OS vendors to solve.
Speaking from the experience of my spouse (fancy iPhone user) and I (low-end Android user) -- both our phones are normally out of memory. We take lots of family photos and videos, which fill up our phones and are tedious to delete or back up. So downloading a new app means first we have to delete something else.
A secondary but lesser reason is notifications. I know that every app will require a minute or two of effort to locate the notification settings and switch them all off.
I don't like installing apps on my phone and having them do whatever in the background. I don't want notifications. I don't want to give an app any kind of access to my phone, period. I don't want more ads in different places. I don't want a different interface than what I'm already used to.
> ... why people feel so strongly about not installing apps
Because it means I'll be prompted for the App Store password, which I probably won't remember (or will get wrong 3 times) and so will need to change it, but the process won't let me change the password to anything I've used in the past 12 months (so I cannot change it to whatever I though the password was). So I need to make up a whole new password, and that means my mail and everything else linked to the account will stop working on all my other devices and I'll need to update the account passwords on those too.
Because I worry apps are invasive and run a bunch of stuff scraping my data that I don't want them know about. At least when I use the website on my mobile phone I can close it when I'm done and that's that. I almost always select to use the desktop version of a site from mobile.
I never really liked mobile websites. I prefer a desktop version and I can zoom in where needed. Navigation and minimization of features on mobile “optimized” experiences is not great. I’ve mostly conceded and got used to it but early years when sites were transitioning was tough for me.
Similar issue with Quora. Pop up blocks the site after a few scrolls, and there's no way to exit. Doesn't matter if you're in the middle of reading a long answer, the site just stops working.
Yeah, I find that really obnoxious. I've stopped reading the Quora email and clicking on links because of this. I actually have the Quora app installed, but I think they must have screwed up the app links in the email, so it doesn't open the Quora app anymore (I'm on iOS, and I use the Spark app for emails.) So it's just a bug that opens the browser instead of the app, then they hide the whole page with a popup and there's no way to continue reading the answer. Really frustrating.
Anyway, I guess they've done a lot of testing for the popup and it's better for their business model. Maybe they can show more ads in the app. But not sure why they can't just show the same ads on the website. The weekly digest email is actually great and it would keep me coming back to Quora, but they've ruined the whole experience.
Why do companies think this is “good”? They basically assault the very subset of people that actually stuck around longer than most, actually showed some interest in their content. Instead of encouraging that to continue, they cut you off.
Imagine if you were in a physical store. Then, after 2 minutes of walking around, someone suddenly pulled you aside, erected a bunch of cardboard walls around you and said “sorry, if you want to keep looking, you need to sign up for a store account!”. You’d mutter some curses and walk straight out the door, obviously; exactly zero people would say “why, sure!”.
If you think that's bad. You only get 3 reviews when querying the API per business. Also, they aggressively fight scraping with traps. (For those who try to pull the business phone numbers, or the ones who try to get the full reviews).
Ever notice how you get a 404 occassionaly when going through the list of businesses? That was a scraping trap.
I haven't installed a new app in like 18 months. I'm done with that song and dance, tired of my device always being the product, especially after I just spent $1000 on a phone.
You better have mobile web figured out properly or you're not getting me as a customer.
I stopped using Yelp exactly because this reason! Google let you read reviews without using the app. I had the same issue with TripAdvisor but I think they don't do it anymore (not sure).
This. I don't install apps as they're usually trojans trying to steal all your info. They might offer functionality but they're usually sneakily stealing your other data.
Can you recommend something to find restaurants with a sufficient number of reviews to be meaningful? Yelp at least had a lot of users, even if many of the reviews were fake. Google reviews tends to inflate everything, so most restaurants have a higher score on Google reviews than they do on Yelp. It would be nice if someone solved the review problem for restaurants.
I am not very happy with some of Yelp UX decisions, but if their service goes down, it will be missed very much by me. I know their ratings are not always reliable, but I haven't found any better alternative. It is somewhat weird that one of the obvious things that people started working at decades ago, still doesn't seem to have a satisfactory solution.
This might not be helpful, but I decided to rely on serendipity. Sometimes I feel like we think too much about finding the best of the 'best' and we rely on expert opinions of the crowd instead of taking a chance ourselves and trying out new things.
When Im traveling out of the country, I just walk around at meal time until I find a spot with locals waiting in line out the door. Hop in line, watch what the people ahead of you order, and then get the same. Every once and a while I'll get something that I don't enjoy, but 8/10 times you end up with super tasty food you may not have otherwise tried.
I typically use the reviews you get from Google. No review site is flawless, they all have fake or bogus comments. I just look for patterns. For example, I was recently debating on going to a recently opened Asian restaurant so I looked at the google reviews. A majority of the negative reviews pointed out the same flaws, that to go orders were often wrong, dine in food often came out cold/nasty, and the sole manager that handles day to day operations generally refused to help anyone that had an issue. It wasn't just "The manager sucks", it was detailed accounts of how horrible of a person this manager was and how she routinely screwed over customers. I decided not to go. There were some good reviews too, but knowing my luck I didn't want to chance having an issue and needing to deal with this manager.
I don't rely on the rankings to find the "best" I just use reviews as a basic litmus test if it is terrible or not. I am basically just looking to avoid getting food poisoning or eating somewhere with terrible service, stuff like that -- I'll try most everything at least once. You have to be pretty consistently terrible to have something like under 3 stars, so that's my cutoff.
You seem like a perfect early user for our new social places recommendation app bibimapp.com . We're trying to create an viable alternative to crowd sourced averages which allows people to discover niche and personally meaningful places and experiences. Google places and yelp are consolidation funnels and it's ruinning how we experience the world.
my personal method when out and about is "ask a stranger," with using my hand computer as a backup. i delight in answering these questions as well, so i'm inclined to believe people generally don't mind.
I travel a lot and talk to a lot of people and I can tell you from my experience that a lot of people don't know the best restaurants in their town. Most people haven't eaten at all of them to make the comparison. The best way to find out is to have some way to ask a bunch of people then compare their collective results and see what everyone's experience adds up to. That quickly starts looking a lot like Yelp.
I travel a lot, and I never ask for the 'best' place to eat. What you ask is very, very important. I always ask what their favorite place to eat is. That is a different result.
What I've noticed is if you ask a random stranger what the 'best' is, you get the same generic, expensive fusion something made into a paste cuisine. If you ask their favorite, you find small, off-the-wall places with terrible selection, but amazing food.
This is really really not true. I did a local comparison any Google map reviews were REALLY REALLY bad whereas Yelp knew what the good restaurants were. Not even close, at least in my area.
How useful yelp is varies enormously if you travel. In the U.K., as an example, Yelp can feel like a wasteland - often little or no reviews, and it has nothing like the mindshare it enjoys in the US. As a result many businesses do little or nothing to keep the information on their Yelp page accurate, it’s barely even on their radar. In the US one can often use Yelp almost as a verb in a conversation (“let me Yelp us somewhere for lunch...”), this is met with blank stares in much of Europe in my experience.
The lack of good data on Yelp in the U.K. has indirectly hurt other players there too, when Apple maps first launched business location information was largely drawn from Yelp, which basically seeded Apple maps with very bad information. Locations were wrong, many businesses that simply didn’t exist anymore would appear. Granted it’s been years since I last checked, but in the first few years of Apple map’s operation it was a pretty significant issue. This methodology worked great in Cupertino I guess...
Seconding this. Yelp reviews have their problems but at least there's always content in the review and I can validate some of the reviewer's reputation if they're being suspiciously positive/negative in their review. Most google ratings I see have very few reviews behind them, and most of them are under a sentence long.
Someone once gave 5 stars to a business project that I had created but never launched (no business, product or service with zero customers) but which had a Google Business listing. I suspect people routinely fake review places to inflate their egos but also because Google offers them real benefits.
Why not? Some cemeteries around here are beautiful, and worth visiting. Plus like any other public service, they can be badly run, and it might be worth warning others who are planning to be buried there about it.
Doesn't hurt to have the option, I guess. If a place doesn't need reviews then it probably doesn't care about bad reviews, and sometimes the reviews are useful nevertheless or at least funny.
While I use google reviews more often than other review sites, I know it is a problem. A big chunk of the issues has to do with the whole "local guide" or whatever its called program. People are incentivized to leave reviews anywhere they can because it makes them seem prestigious, so they spam all the restaurants they've not been to or don't care for with negative reviews. This is also a rampant issue for tourist destinations, entertainment locations, local businesses, etc.
Google maps does not show all entries. I stopped trying because restaurants would show or not show based on zoom and other factors unknown to me. It’s not rating or ads.
It’s really frustrating as sometimes searching for “Mexican restaurant” won’t include all Mexican restaurants in the map area. And will include random weird stuff. And it won’t show the top items.
Angie's List is less useful than it should be. It seems that the reviews are largely promotion-driven (i.e., vendors that offer coupons get reviews, others get no reviews).
Angie’s List lost me with their user-hostile behavior. For example, cancelling an account required a phone call, also you can’t change your membership location at will, so if you spend any time outside of your local area, they didn’t let you see information for other locales.
Homeadvisor is just not a good source for service providers, especially when compared to Yelp. Angie's list is a little better, but Yelp still beats it. Maybe it's because Angie's List started as a paid service which limits the number of reviewers, even though it slightly improves review authenticity
I forgot about that! I've been using Zagat since back in the day when you filled out a form for some city you were familiar with and they sent you a free restaurant guidebook for that city in exchange. I still think they're the best guide (except possibly for the local newspaper site) for people who have a somewhat foodie orientation. But they only cover a relatively small number of US cities.
I find TripAdvisor extremely inflated and I somehow always end up at tourist traps using it when I'm countries where yelp isn't available. It's more useful for finding out about sights but I avoid it for food and services.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but here goes:
It's not 2011 anymore, back when the mobile web was trash because companies maintained both a desktop site and a severly gimped "m.desktop.com" site. Back then you pretty much had to have apps if you wanted to capture the mobile market.
Today, we have mature Add to Home Screen capability, GPS support, push notifications, widespread support for CSS3 hardware acceleration, PWAs, offline capabilities and much more.
You can now make Uber and Lyft trips on the mobile web. That is a use case where I had previously thought I would always need to have the app installed.
So with that in mind, why would I even want to open the dumpster fire that is Google Play/App Store in 2018? If it's a new company I haven't heard of, I am sure as hell not about to open the app store and download > 50MB on my data plan to check you out.
you can add push notification from mobile web? I suppose i see the attempts for me to enable desktop notifications but ive never seen them on mobile web before.
Feels weird to applaud add to home screen but not want the app. Also im on wifi so often that i guess 50mb to download an app is a non issue for me.
I am biased because I build native apps vs web apps but ive always preferred a rich native experience and design vs the web. To each their own!
The problem is most companies are not interested in building rich native experiences. Amazon is a trillion dollar company and their mobile app is horrendous. They don't see it as a priority, it's just something that has to exist, like how companies have to write awful PR blog posts that nobody is reading.
For me, the "add to home screen" means the PWA launches in fullscreen without any browser chrome and that helps the experience a lot. My home screen gets a tiny bit more cluttered but that's an acceptable tradeoff.
I'm rarely looking at 1 restaurant at a time, I'm trying to compare 5, or 6 or 10.
The Yelp app has no means of doing that.
Also, I can't easily select some text in the app, like the name of a dish I'm not familiar with, and quickly trigger a web search in another tab to do some quick side reading.
Often not all text in Apps is selectable and copy paste-able.
I have the Yelp app installed, but 9 times out of 10 the browser is how I prefer to use search for restaurants.
Browsers also seem to have better low bandwidth performance than most apps. Probably because doing constrained network communications is hard and only browsers have the billions of reps needed to practice getting it right. With most apps I find that network handling in poor network situations (like is all too common when traveling and looking for a restaurant) is inferior to most browsers.
So yeah, Yelp would definitely win me over if they kept their site browser and low-bandwidth friendly.
A really simple thing is that sometimes I really don't need the website for more than 10 minutes a year, but dealing with turning off notifications, being forced to create an account, being asked about app updates, having it on my home screen, etc is not worth it.
I think some apps feel nicer than a website ever could (because the app can take advantage of stuff like force touches better, and offer a nice custom usage of gestures). But some other places it really just feels like the app exists to push notifications...
I'm actually not against downloading the app. What really grinds my gears is when companies screw up the "app links" in their emails, so that the link opens in the browser instead of the app, and then they show an "Install our app!" popup. Then I click the install button, and it takes me to the App Store. And then I click the "Open" button on the App Store page, and it brings me to the homepage inside the app, but there's no way to find the content that I was trying to read.
This has happened to me more than once, with Quora being the latest offender. I don't mind the broken app links, but at least add a query param to the URL and set a cookie so that you don't show a popup and ruin the experience for your existing users.
In general, native apps suck. It's a rigmarole to install them. They insist on all these awful rights, and if there's some sort of vulnerability in the platform they're sure to be exploiting it as hard as they can. Even if they're not exploiting my data, they're probably not protecting my data very well. Many of them are bloated monstrosities. They are poorly maintained and will eventually break. They enforce some sort of psychological commitment to continue to interact with whatever crappy organization published them.
Note: I'm not saying that you suck. You have an identity and worth separate from native apps.
Yelp really tried to get me to advertise my business with them. I use Adwords regularly. However, I chose not to engage with them, even to fully register my business with them, because of their reviews policy, and the drama surrounding trying to fix incorrect or slanderous reviews.
"Create a service people will actually want to use?"
They did. It worked great and was awesome. One day, a large company changed it's rules removing most of the traffic pointed to it. It had to make changes. One attempt to survive was to move traffic to the app. I don't understand why trying to survive as a business is bad. Maybe people didn't want to click the close button on the app link -- I don't see how this should end Yelp and let google have more unchecked power to the small business reviews.
If they were that great they wouldn't need Google to send a steady stream of new users their way.
People would seek out Yelp directly. But even the search term "Yelp" itself it down roughly 50% since 2014, suggesting that less and less people would actively and directly seek out that page.
When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user.
"If they were that great they wouldn't need Google to send a steady stream of new users their way."
Right. Like Amazon not needing roads. Or Walgreens needing a working Pharmacological system.
"When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user."
Ugh. Yes. That is called a monopoly.
So this is the behavior as GOOGLE:
1) Remove all traffic to site
2) Re-create same site on Google
3) Point all traffic that was in 1) to google.
4) The site will try to move traffic to mobile -- but users will just get upset at the site. Because the interstitial is hard to tap on.
Is this really all they need todo to capture users? Sad.
The sentence you replied to wasn't even tangentially related to the definition of a monopoly. It is something every search engine should do whether they have a monopoly or not, which is ranking things highly that are most useful to me. Sites hiding stuff behind interstitials just aren't.
Now Google sure aren't angels, but the "penalizing interstitials" part hardly is the evil part.
It might've been the creation of a competing product with a decent user experience that was evil. But then yelp was hardly sitting on a secret sauce. A 10 year old with 1 year of programming experience can build a review portal, and it'll likely be more pleasant to use than one that is intentionally crippled by it's owners.
Good. Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.
On a more personal note, they also refused to adequately protect my wife when we encountered and reported an unscrupulous vendor who threatened my wife and exposed her personal information on the site.
There is a very real need for this kind of thing but Yelp has proven time and time again that they can't be trusted to deliver it.
This. After I received my first positive review on the site they called me and tried selling me all kinds of advertising. Hundreds of dollars per month worth. I declined, and around the same time my review went from being on my business page to being buried behind a "View Reviews that are not recommended" link.
It's a total scam and they should be dragged into court and their internal memos and procedures turned inside out for the world to see.
As long as we're sharing anecdata, I too was agressively pursued by their sales department after my first couple reviews. I declined, and nothing happened. My business became one of the highest-rated in its category locally. I even sucessfully requested the removal of a fake 3-star review (I know all my customers, and the reviewer was never one). And all along, I never paid Yelp a cent. I have since spent money on Yelp, but it was not necessary to reach the top of my local Yelp listings.
Playing devil's advocate here but maybe they had already targeted many similar businesses in the area and were giving them all bad reviews. For these bad reviews to make a difference, there needs to be one with good reviews.
I hear what you're saying. But bear in mind that there's an entire "SEO" industry out there, which tries to shake down businesses by either promising to improve their search rankings, or threatening to tank their search rankings.
So I'm sure your friends got a bunch of calls about this. But are you (or they) sure it was Yelp, though? Often it's some scammers in foreign countries like India.
No, this is not some conspiracy theory by a few anecdotal players. This is a quite well-documented phenomenon well-known to small business owners across a wide variety of industries. I understand that the instinct is "There's no way a big company could be doing something so obviously unethical and get away with it". But just do your own research, there's articles detailing sales calls that literally offer to remove bad reviews. Only Yelp has algorithmic control over what reviews get put into "not recommended", and one of the "coincidences" that happen after these calls is that 5 star reviews start disappearing. And do you think it is a coincidence that those positive reviews get restored after a business pays for advertising services?
Yelp has been involved in class acton lawsuits for this behavior no fewer than three times, and while they deny everything the court ruling astoundlingly claimed that this behavior isn't illegal or extortionary:
> No, this is not some conspiracy theory by a few anecdotal players.
I've been working in the search engine industry for more than 15 years (as in, worked on core ranking algorithms and other infrastructure for a long time). I've heard similar reports countless times about ranking algorithms that our team controlled, and it was all just speculation.
Once again: Yelp has been around for 10+ years. By now, surely someone will have iron-clad proof that they paid to get bad reviews removed. I have not seen any.
Though if you already have confirmation bias that anyone who complains of a large company of shady behavior is a crazy nut, maybe this conversation chain is simply a waste of time. Without access to Yelp internals, it's always possible to just write it off as hearsay. Especially when, if you read my post, the courts have ruled that this behavior is not racketeering, even if it passes the duck test for extortion in my view.
The logical explanation offered in the video is that the salespeople themselves are the ones leaving the reviews, not sanctioned by Yelp higher ups. I worked a year doing web development and SEO for an agency that specialized in small local businesses, and enough of my clients had had similar experiences with the "Not Recommended" review algorithm after receiving harassing telemarketing calls from Yelp that I just assume that there's something shady going on.
I honestly just think their business model is structured poorly. Too many perverse incentives involved. I won't be sad to see them go.
Just a random point of feedback, but you sound more like the one carrying confirmation bias here. But really, throwing that phrase around in an internet debate is pretty meaningless rhetoric. It takes YEARS of working with someone before I feel like I understand that person's biases well enough to accuse them of such a thing.
You're right. Maybe epistemic closure is a better term. And maybe I need to take some time to evaluate the evidence in context of my own biases before I make baseless accusations. You have to understand that I've internalized articles over a number of years about class action lawsuits against yelp as well as my own experiences dealing with valid 5 star ratings locked behind a Not Recommended filter. But it may be the case that I am wrong and I ought to reconsider the complexity of the situation. Thanks for the input.
You don't have to throw such claims around. If anything, they further weaken your case.
I watched the first couple of minutes of the video you posted. Even if we take that guy's word for it, you're talking about ONE salesperson. One bad actor. That's it. Which company doesn't have asshole sales people?
You are making a stronger claim: that Yelp itself is a bad actor. That, my friend, requires a much higher bar for proof.
Look, as I mentioned earlier, I used to work on building ranking algorithms for search engines (no, not Google). In the early days of the Internet (i.e, 15 years ago), there were lots of 3rd party people pulling off stunts like this salesperson.
You can call any business today, and try to get protection money (on Yelp) off of them. That doesn't make you a Yelp employee!
You're right, I apologize for implying the presence confirmation bias and I don't mean it as a personal attack. I just wanted to express that when you immediately discredit the anecdotal experience of others in favor of your own anecdotal experience, it may be a sign of confirmation bias. But I guess that kind of implication comes with connotations that I didn't intend.
Basically, I want to draw your attention to the fact that the salesperson in that video did work for Yelp at the time. Doesn't that on its own distinguish the behavior that's happening at yelp with your experience with third party scammers?
Maybe the Wells Fargo scandal from a few years back can be a reference here. If a company is structured in a way where salespeople are incentivized to misbehave for their own personal interest, shouldn't that company be held accountable?
Anyway, you're right that I'm wrong to claim with certainty that Yelp is a bad actor. I don't have proof beyond dealing with 5 star reviews for clients locked behind Yelp's "Not recommended". But any company with a monetization scheme that in practice boils down to cold calling and harrassing small businesses, is a company against which I have no problem jumping on any bandwagon that comes my way.
> and one of the "coincidences" that happen after these calls is that 5 star reviews start disappearing. And do you think it is a coincidence that those positive reviews get restored after a business pays for advertising services?
This is hearsay that is quoted in the article you link to, but I would like to see proof of positive reviews being restored after purchasing advertising. This would not be difficult to document if it is happening.
Lawsuits in which Yelp has prevailed are not compelling evidence for the claims of malfeasance.
> Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business
How do you square that claim given that both current and former Yelp employees say they do no such thing?
How do you know those reviews are fake vs coincidence? I've heard a lot of anecdotes and conspiracies about this, but have never seen actual proof. No documents, recorded phone calls, court cases etc? And given how many people have worked at Yelp it's strange no one has blown the whistle yet if they engage in such practices. They would be an instant hero.
There are plenty of salty business owners, and somewhat understandably. Yelp is far more proactive than, say, Amazon in policing reviews with its automated software. They do sometimes filter legitimate reviews, particularly when a reviewer has few other reviews on the site and is very flattering to the business. They do not want businesses to game the system by bribing customers or recruiting friends and family.
But of course, sometimes this incorrectly flags legitimate positive reviews. And when simultaneous negative reviews don't get filtered, this is understandably frustrating for businesses. And it doesn't take much imagination for a slightly paranoid owner to wonder if Yelp's pushy sales efforts have a nefarious undertone.
But this aggressive quality control is what makes Yelp ratings so much more useful than Amazon ratings. And if businesses can keep attracting positive reviews, especially from established reviewers on the platform, and perhaps more importantly, avoid negative reviews, their ratings will rise. And they will have to fight Yelp's slightly trigger-happy automated review moderation whether or not they give money to a Yelp sales rep.
Still no proof, just accusations. In fact the business owners say Yelp didn't actually say these things.
"What I got without spoken direct words..."
"The restaurateur says the representative didn’t blatantly tell Dloomy he could solve his problem by paying up, but he believes that was the underlying message"
It sounds like motivated reasoning and applying an existing narrative to the advertising calls.
Not sure, but at a business I worked for a few years ago, we perused Yelp reviews for a while. It worked, and over about 3 months we ended up with 13 five-star reviews, and one four star.
Not bad, right?
Then we got 'the call', declined, and within 3 weeks, all but our single four start review was gone from the profile. I no longer work there, but last time I checked, they had zero stars. I can't wait to see yelp fail.
I square it by actually knowing people who've been affected. It's not like it was ambiguous or hard to figure out how it works. Its a VERY commonly known thing in the F&B industry and they all hate Yelp for it.
The Yelp app/site is basically the same it was 5 years ago. Rather than innovate they chose to:
- Opt for the shakedown/extortion method of ranking sites (those that advertised with Yelp rank higher, negative reviews can mysteriously disappear for advertisers)
- Whine to regulators about Google is stealing content from them (by, you know, serving a snippet of content that Yelp allows to be scraped).
- Harass users to install their (shitty) app.
This is just bad management/leadership to the core and such a waste opportunity. A telltale sign of this is the demonization of some nefarious third-party and blaming all your woes on them, which they've clearly done with Google. Don't think that's effective? Look at the current state of US politics.
Kind of an aside to your points, but I opened Yelp on my iPod Touch (first gen) and was flabbergasted to see that despite being un-updated and on an ancient version of iOS, the app still worked! This is pretty amazing, given that most companies' API endpoints from ten years ago don't still work today :)
Actually, I would say Yelp is far worse than it was 5 years ago. Not sure how much fault it is of Yelp's, but reviews aren't really worth as much today as they were in Yelp's early days.
I can't relate to the negativity I see here. I like Yelp quite a lot. There have been a number occasions where I've found an excellent local restaurant that I wouldn't have otherwise found.
Admittedly, you have to know what you're doing. If you're in a food desert, like some parts of the US, you'll need to take those 4 and 4.5 star restaurant profiles with a grain of salt. What I would really like: the ability to select other users whose tastes are similar to mine that Yelp would then use to influence the ratings I see. This might also protect against paid spam reviews and over-picky reviewers.
I don't know, I've heard an awful lot of people who aren't tech/privacy nerds joke about how Yelp allows you to pay to remove bad reviews or add fake ones. It seems to be a common belief in at least the food industry and that employs an awful lot of people who may hear and propagate it.
Same here; I know people who are tech-averse (willing to use smartphones, Facebook, etc. but not interested in knowing anything about how it works) refer to Yelp's unreliability, without bothering to explain it. In other words, it's a known fact not needing to be explained, because they assume everyone in the conversation already knows it. I think their reputation is probably a net negative, by now, and their technology certainly cannot help them with that.
And yet no one can produce any evidence. It's just an easy excuse for a manager or owner whose location is getting poor ratings. My personal experience is that Yelp has an agressive sales force, their fraud detection system seems to fairly frequently raise false positives, but a business can do great on Yelp without paying a penny if they have happy customers.
My point was that it was widespread. There are so many small businesses that you don’t need that high a percentage to have bad experiences with sales critters or be conspiracy minded for a lot of people to hear the claim.
I meant "most people on this thread", which is the context GP was invoking:
> I can't relate to the negativity I see here.
And yes, Yelp calculated that they could get away with their shady money-grabbing since they had no competition.
Very clever, but like most dishonest behaviors - quite short sighted.
As soon as a competitor emerged, Yelp was unceremoniously ditched.
Also worth mentioning: you didn't have to be aware of their past misdeeds to be affected by the resulting rating distortions, which are still affecting users to this day.
The thing Yelp has never understood is that when they hide, deprecate, or remove a review for no good reason, the person who posted that review gripes about it to a half-dozen of their friends.
I worked directly on the code that would have done the things you're asserting to be true. There's no code to support it, and in fact, there are tools in place to prevent what you're claiming.
If there were some top-secret internal conspiracy to use the other tools on the site to do what you're claiming, you have to be especially credulous to believe that I -- or people just like me -- wouldn't have noticed it.
Unless you have some evidence to bring to the table other than "I read it on the internet", my word is worth more than your theories.
If you don't believe that what I'm telling you is true, then feel free to provide some proof.
The typical criticism of Yelp was that you could get negative reviews of your business removed if you paid them.
I'm not sure how as a coder you'd be able to guarantee that's never been done, except if your code guaranteed that no review could ever be removed by a human moderator, which I'm sure is not the case.
I'm not sure how otherwise skeptical techy people imagine a conspiracy into reality with nothing to back it up. Don't you think that of the thousands of people who have worked at yelp, that one of them would have spread news about it with their peers?
The "shakedowns", floods of negative reviews, sudden filtering, etc. Every single instance is some anecdotal story online, and has never been backed up in court, by investigative journalism, a scientific study, any kind of material evidence.
The barrier to entry to create a business listing, get reviews, get a sales call from yelp, and study the change in review is really, really low -- and yet you'd think we'd have more proof to go on than comments on hackernews and reddit if yelp were as shady as is claimed.
There are third party services that are effectively shakedowns -- similar to what shady SEO people do to spam whois contacts -- they threaten you with worse rankings if you don't pay up. These things have no connection to yelp itself.
There are multiple accounts in the same results page, and even in this very page:
> Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.
> After I received my first positive review on the site they called me and tried selling me all kinds of advertising. Hundreds of dollars per month worth. I declined, and around the same time my review went from being on my business page to being buried behind a "View Reviews that are not recommended" link.
Etc, etc. This seems like evidence. Or are all these people lying? Why is everyone slandering poor innocent Yelp then?
They’re not lying, they’re just attributing a sales call as a cause to some effect they only started paying attention to after the call, or they do get shaken down by a third party who targets them. Try registering a domain, your phone number on the Whois info, and the search rank shakedowns from scummy SEO services will start rolling in, calling themselves variations of “Google Search Advisors” threatening your site’s placement unless you pay. Some folks actually believe these calls are from google, and I’d expect people who own restaurants are targeted similarly, are much less techie and much less accustomed to these scams.
Then there’s also the effect of people not paying attention to their ratings in an objective way and immediately after the call start attributing any event that follows to the call.
And then of course there are folks who get a sales call after their first few reviews, as their business is picking up, and as that volume picks up some more critical folks show up and organically give negative reviews.
I don’t consider a blog post about someone who’s relaying something they say they heard from their friends to be evidence. I’d believe it if they collected data both before and after the call in an objective and consistent way.
They're not lying, they believe it's happening. That doesn't mean it is, however. Chances are they're seeing things that can be explained in other ways.
People who say they've seen bigfoot aren't lying when they genuinely believe they've seen bigfoot. That doesn't mean bigfoot exists.
If Yelp actually did shake people down like that, there would very likely be concrete proof by now (recorded phone calls, documents, emails, undercover journalism, whistleblower employees). Just as there would be concrete proof of bigfoot by now.
"I'm not sure how as a coder you'd be able to guarantee that's never been done, except if your code guaranteed that no review could ever be removed by a human moderator, which I'm sure is not the case."
I don't need to prove a negative. You need to prove your claim.
There's no evidence of what you're arguing, anywhere, and I'm telling you that the code didn't have any ability to support it. If there were some system to allow advertisers to influence reviews, I would have known about it. Moreover, if there were some top-secret, non-code mechanism to do it, I would have seen it in the data.
I have never seen any such thing.
On top of all of that, if it were really true that you could get your business' negative reviews removed, there would be ample evidence of this. By definition, it's not something Yelp could hide.
There are multiple accounts in the same results page, and even in this very page:
> Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.
> After I received my first positive review on the site they called me and tried selling me all kinds of advertising. Hundreds of dollars per month worth. I declined, and around the same time my review went from being on my business page to being buried behind a "View Reviews that are not recommended" link.
Etc, etc. This seems like evidence. Or are all these people lying? Why is everyone slandering poor innocent Yelp then?
I mostly like and use Yelp, and I get the negativity.
What your saying about knowing how to use Yelp is right on, but it leads to some dissatisfaction, because a 4 star restaurant should be a 4 star restaurant. More importantly, they manipulate ratings. They pressure businesses to pay them to fix ratings Yelp broke. They let businesses improve ratings when they shouldn't, analogous to Glassdoor and Amazon users getting ratings they don't like kicked off or hidden. There are plenty of fake and misleading reviews. And they have lots of dark patterns e.g. pushing you to their mobile app from the web, requiring you to create an account, etc. Some of these are observable by everyone, others there are many anecdotes.
They're not going away. They provide value to people, me included. But some negativity directed their way makes sense to me.
I was a pretty heavy Yelp user when I lived in SF, but I found the ratings not really that helpful elsewhere, even in NYC.
I mostly use Google Maps these days, and while I don't necessarily trust the user ratings or it's personalized score that much more, the fact that it will link you to, e.g. Eater listicles that mention a place is a super strong signal that a place is good in an area you don't know.
Yelp suffers the same issues that Amazon reviews has. General public is easily influenced to give high scores to mediocre food/products. I'd rather have reviews from trusted reviewers or a Netflix type scoring system that matches my picks with other people who have the same taste.
I certainly like a world with yelp vs one without it. I dont get the hate in here either. They've done some shady stuff in the past but i think every single reviews platform has issues with fraud
> the ability to select other users whose tastes are similar to mine that Yelp would then use to influence the ratings I see.
Google maps started doing this a while ago, I don't think their algo is perfect yet, but the personal match % has been more accurate than the general rating of the restaurants.
In this instance, this observation is equivalent to saying that some of the false reviews that people complain about sound like someone's genuinely expressed opinion.
I abandoned Yelp as a user pretty quick as it was just too much to filter through so many reviews by people who 1) Had some one off bad experience that is probably not representative of anything. 2) Wished that place they reviewed was like some other place that is kinda the same but ... it's twice the price so why are you comparing?
I absolutely loathe yelp reviews. Far too many people trying to act like professional reviewers spending 500 words on setting the scene of the restaurant only to end up on 2/5 stars because of something ridiculous like bad lighting. This is all within given context, but there's been so many reviews for smaller divey type places that get people slamming it over stuff only to end up with a single line of "food wasn't bad though".
I said it's within context though. Going into a divey 6 seat restaurant and expecting top tier service/experience is a bit weird. I have no problem with them, its' people taking pot shots & ranking down b/c it doesn't stack up to their preferred experience.
If I'm walking around a city and duck into a tiny Thai space that has 4 seats I am not expecting that place to compete from an "experience" stand point to some newer fusion thai spot. I go in knowing full well the food (hopefully) is top notch and that's it.
It's not great but TBH I still find it to be better than nothing. You've pretty much described every review site on the Internet. "My hotel room in Manhattan was small." You don't say.
I still prefer Zagat (though it's not what it was when it was pretty much limited to foodies) where it's available. But if I'm in an area I don't know well I still will take Yelp over picking a restaurant on total whim or because it has a clever name.
The idea that I would take some random stranger's advice because they earned some 'Yelp Stars' or whatever by wasting a bunch of their time on the site trying to feel important is ridiculous. I stopped looking at these pretty quick after I realized what a time-sink it was that did not seem to result in me patronizing any better places than I was before. (And the fact that Yelp seems to go out of there way to prevent me from surfacing details I might actually be curious about from reviews). It seems they are much more interested in optimizing the site to encourage people to write reviews rather than make those reviews useful to those who might be reading them. Why are they creating a situation where 500 people are writing 500-word reviews that no one will ever read? When the most sophisticated aggregation of this they seem capable of doing is "4 people mentioned the cashew chicken! [What they had to say about the cashew chicken, well good luck figuring that out]."
The only model of crowd-sourced reviews that interests me at this point would be one that normalizes ratings against an individual's biases (so someone who gives every place 2 stars is not skewing the average) and models preferences to give personalized recommendations (since you like establishments X and Y, you might like establishment Z that other similar users have rated highly). AFAIK Yelp isn't doing any of this.
If a place has 700 reviews and a 4.5 star rating that's good signal that it's good, regardless of how many words are put into the 3 reviews you see on the front page.
If a place has 5 reviews and a 3 star rating that doesn't mean anything to me. Maybe it's great maybe it sucks, but I'm not turned off by it. It's just basic stats. If you're trusting one good 500-word yelp-elite review on a listing with 2000 2-star reviews, frankly you're doing it wrong.
Sometimes long reviews offer good things to search for -- for example someone might talk about a patio or happy hour that isn't identified on the site or yelp listing. I've used them for that purpose a few times.
Exactly. I'm under no illusion that Yelp is a particularly useful filter to pick out the ultimate dining experience. But I travel something over 100 days a year. If for at least some of those days when I'm in unfamiliar locations, Yelp can--with a little bit of skeptical evaluation on my part--help me pick restaurants that are mostly to my tastes and on the better side of average, it's done its job. I am somewhat critical/fussy about restaurants in general so I don't mind spending a few minutes to do some research.
Same. Few things irk me more than spending money on mediocre food, especially as I've gotten better at cooking. I may not eat at the best/hottest/hippest joint in town when I'm in a new place looking things up on yelp, but I can pretty consistently eat someplace that I'm happy with.
Yelp tends to be worse outside the US so I tend to agree Tripadvisor is relatively better. But in the US, I'll often look at Tripadvisor for B&Bs etc. but I tend to come back to Yelp for restaurants.
I looked up local Zagat best in "XYZ" type reviews in my citiy, all the top listings are completely off by a wide margin in multiple categories. Some popular restaurants aren't even on there.
That being said I usually use whatever has the best content available
None of them are even close to perfect. "Best" isn't necessarily all that correlated to popular though.
The other problem with "Best ofs" generically is that most of the restaurants are more expensive than I'd pay for except on rare occasions. In my nearest city, 95% of my experience is with mid-rangeish ethnic, etc. restaurants. I'm very rarely in a restaurant that's likely to make a Best of list.
The "Best ofs" I know of are generally concensus based though. If I asked 10 people in my area who are foodies, they would all generally agree with the results of what the best "Japanese restaurants" are in town. Having been to Japan myself (and speak conversational Japanese), I know what good quality Japanese food tastes like. I also know which local restaurants make their own noodles in-house VS those that don't, b/c I know most of the owners.
Zagat unfortunately missed the mark on 3 restaurants. There aren't many Japanese restaurants in my town to begin with though. It isn't even a matter of price either. All 3 I'm thinking of, one is on the cheap-end, another mid-level, and another highend.
So I find this margin of error to be enormously large. It's okay if 1 of them was on that list, but all 3 is just unusual. Plus some didn't even have a listing on that site.
I have never heard of anyone actually using Zagat either, besides the plaques I see on restaurants to showcase their awards.
Restaurant reviews are always a moving target because of the nature of the business. So many of them go broke and disappear over the years that some restaurant with legacy 4.5 star reviews might not be anywhere near as good as a new trendy one that just opened up that has no reviews.
I worked with an IOS guy from Argentina, before software, he was paid to write reviews for companies in the states.There's some plausible deniability, he worked for a contracting company that did this work. Since then, I stopped using Yelp.
The number of people who clearly had no idea what they were signing up for was always amusing to me.
Example, if you go to a hole in the wall taco joint, you're going to get greasy tacos served on plastic or paper plates. I mean, it's not fancy, but they're also $1 each. By complaining about that on yelp you're just showing off your silliness, not providing anything useful to other potential customers.
I had a great neopolitan style pizza place open in my neighborhood. It was inundated by bad reviews by people who were upset that it was "just floppy thin crust pizza" and so forth.
Over time word got out and its reviews stabilized as their pizza and ingredients are top quality. But man for a while it was all just some idiots who just wanted some dominoes like pizza.
They hide reviews of newly active users without histories. The idea (at least) is to prevent fraud of owners asking their friends to make yelp accounts.
Was that always true? I had a call from Yelp at work where one of the selling points was controlling your profile, in which they mentioned "removing spam" and "offensive reviews" (they might have said "fake"). I took that euphemistically when combined with rumours I'd heard. But that was some years ago (maybe 5+, in UK); and could have been overselling or phishing by a third party I suppose.
How do you handle offensive reviews (like swearing, libel, personal details), do Yelp really manually intervene?
Don't they remove fake reviews, in which case a business can say the review is fake.
Yelp is incredibly annoying as a business owner. After signing up to setup basic NAP consistency, they will automatically flag it as some sort of tag often incorrectly and then continue to call and email you asking to spend advertising dollars on their site for months. Even after asking them to no longer do so.
I'm glad google reviews and others have taken their place.
My girlfriend is one of the main operators of a small chain of board game cafes here— her experience is pretty well the same as yours.
They rely on Google reviews and Facebook reviews. Facebook has even been toxic enough with false stories pushed in attempts to defame the company for money. I haven't heard the same about Google reviews and Reddit has been strangely fair.
I just never liked Yelp. It seems like it spoiled very early on.
edit: Just told her the news. Her response: "Good. Yelp is evil."
It was more that the environment (Facebook, in this case) has allowed toxic situations where less scrupulous patrons were taking advantage of the social network to spread falsehoods for an attempt at personal gain by viral traction. Basically tell the lie fast and hard enough that the targeted party was helpless to defend themselves.
Thankfully it didn't play out that way. The company has a decent amount of respect in this town, and the situation was well documented in advance.
I set up my business profile pretty thoroughly, and only ended up getting one or two sales calls and a couple of emails that I unsubscribed from. Maybe they hard-sell other business types more, but I didn't really get much.
I did end up helping the restaurant down the block when they got scammed by a service claiming to be Yelp, that actually took over their profile and was making them pay to make changes to it. I think a lot of supposed "Yelp scammed me" stories are actually that - third parties.
>I did end up helping the restaurant down the block when they got scammed by a service claiming to be Yelp, that actually took over their profile and was making them pay to make changes to it. I think a lot of supposed "Yelp scammed me" stories are actually that - third parties.
Yep. I suspect this too. It's the same thing that happens with spammy SEO services that effectively threaten to hurt your search rank unless you pay up.
They've just pivoted into "legitimate" government. The middle bunch of the org chart of some government departments in MA is sprinkled with these people.
Edit: some vs most. I can't speak for all of the departments.
AdWords seems to be set for the foreseeable future.
Before the inevitable protests, here's how it works. AdWords is quite willing to take money from Business A's competitor Business B for the precise phrase "Business A", as well as numerous other phrases that obviously refer to Business A. As a result, searches by naive mobile users for "Business A" will instead yield on-screen directions to "Business B". Business A will only find out about a small fraction of this traffic redirection, but it will still hurt them. In order to fix it, they only need to pay more money to AdWords than their competitors. That may be legal, but it is certainly extortion.
[EDIT:] To return to the topic of Yelp, it may be that extortion works when you've got the muscle to enforce it. Google have that, but a site like Yelp where most of the traffic is coming from a search engine probably doesn't.
In contrast to many posters here, I really like Yelp (as a user, at least, never been a restaurant owner). I sort by number of reviews and find places that are highly rated (4 stars or so) and almost always this has worked well. Other services I've tried are not nearly as easy to use or reliable.
Seriously, and at the very least it's a good census of what's in the immediate area. I can't even search on Google without it recommending me places 4 miles apart from each other. I'm sure Google will get there but its immaturity is palpable.
Maybe I just like it because I never read reviews. Like YouTube, comments are poison to otherwise good content. People suck.
For what it's worth, I've tried Google (absolute and total bottom of the barrel trash level reviews in my opinion -- cannot say enough bad things about that review quality) and Tripadvisor (not bad, better for lodging and sights than food). I do like Eater but it's a different service and not user-driven.
I'm in the US. Have been all over the place, all over both coasts, texas, and colorado.
I bet Apple will be snooping around for a cheap acquisition here. Apple already uses Yelp for their place data in Apple Maps and they are still way behind Google.
Eventually Apple will probably need to have its own place data if it wants to continue to compete in maps. Yelp would give them a starting point.
Doesn't Apple tend to buy relatively unknown companies and fold their IP into their products? Beats Audio was the only major one I remember them absorbing, and was rebranded as Apple Music.
But Beats had that upscale demographic and positive brand image that Apple covets so dearly, whereas Yelp feels very much like a bygone brand of the 2010s IPO rush (along with Groupon and Foursquare). Not sure Apple would be interested. They can just pay for the POI data. Why buy the cow when all you need is the milk?
I don't think Apple cares about any Yelp "IP". It's a local establishment discovery and review site.
You suggest "they can just pay for the POI data." Which is basically what I'm suggesting.
Yelp's actual underlying asset is its POI database. Apple might want that if they decide to own rather than rent (which is a transition Google made a while back). Not at any price, but if Yelp continues to struggle the valuation might make sense.
Wouldn’t Foursquare make more sense as a much much cheaper acquisiton if none of the things actually driving most of Yelp’s value don’t matter? Yelp is still valued at close to $3B. If it recovers half of what it lost, Apple would have to pay close to $4B for Yelp. If it doesn’t recover at all, still talking over $3B.
While Foursquare wouldn’t even be for $1B. It was last valued at $300M 3 years ago and just raised money again. So at worst it’s 4x cheaper. At best, 5x or 6x cheaper. The business model probably fits better too with having an enterprise package with Apple Maps.
Wow, I would have thought the revenue stream from advertisers, the returning users that make the ads worth buying, or the reviews that tie them together would be more valuable assets than then location data anyone could scrape out of the state business register.
Great news! I run a local service company and stopped advertising with Yelp several months ago. No transparency how clicks go to $12 when they used to be $5. That's not even a click to your site, just your Yelp profile still on their site!
On top of it, my 5 star reviews keep getting filtered, even ones that have shown for months. Meanwhile two recent 1-star reviews we got with people from brand new accounts still show just fine.
Yelp positions their product primarily as a consumer service; the fact that the other side of the marketplace (service providers) is dissatisfied may affect Yelp's business but not necessarily the product they provide to consumers.
Does anyone else find that their best restaurant experiences come from places that only show up on a yelp search several pages down (if at all)? A number of years ago I stopped using yelp to find places to eat in my hometown because I found that the app completely overlooked smaller, locally run places for big name places near tourist hot spots.
Nope, not if you sort by rating instead of default (which seems to include things like popularity).
Yelp ratings (at least here in NYC) are the most reliable signal of a restaurant's quality I've ever found, particularly when you look at the histogram.
If a place has significantly more 5-star ratings than 4-star, you're basically guaranteed it will be amazing.
And it has more 4-star than 5-star (assuming it's also more 4-star than 3-star), it's probably fine but there's a reason it's not getting 5 stars, and it's unlikely to be amazing.
Obviously this relies on having a large enough sample size (e.g. 30+).
If you actually run a good restaurant ( not subjectively good, but objectively good ) then you can tell Yelp to take a hike every time their sales person calls so it would never be surfaced more than some taco place which for some reason did decide to give Yelp money. I'm sure this affects placement, not to mention probably frequency of reviews/checkins plays into placement.
It is not that Aska NYC gives two cents about it not showing up on every Yelp search - after all they are a place that gets away with charging your credit card when you make a reservation and offers no refunds!
Small, locally run places don't deal with Yelp's extortionate practices if they don't have to. If they've already got a regular clientele, they can tell Yelp where to go.
IMO, the best ways to find restaurants are Google reviews or OpenTable/Bookenda/Resy/etc...
Yelp ads were completely ineffective for me as a business. I was paying about $900/mo for 3 months (they force a contract) and literally got 0 leads (calls, clicks, messages, etc...). If I was even able to get a project from Yelp ads it would have been worth it. I can't imagine if you're a restaurant (where the average sale is a _lot_ less than web design/development services) that you can make any money advertising on Yelp. No surprise that ad sales are going down/staying stagnant.
Yelp in NYC is infuriating to use. Not only it does not know neighborhoods, it is incapable of identifying rivers that separate areas. Ask it for places in Greenpoint and it would happily include stuff in Manhattan, sometimes well before it runs out of the Greenpoint options which could be OK had Greenpoint not been separated from Manhattan by the East River.
Yelp is also happy to manipulate reviews contrary to their denials. It is rather funny, of course, because it seems that no one in the tech leadership of the company understands how easy it is to take a screenshot of a review.
It was honestly faster to do a lot of searches with the old paper Zagat books than modern Yelp, since they were compiled by people who understood the cities they were covering.
I don't remember this being as much of an issue when Yelp launched? It seems like there are certain restaurants (advertisers? mathematically trending places?) that they're determined to shoehorn into any search result.
Also, it's frustrating how every review site I've tried constantly turns off the "open now" filter. I get that people want to plan tomorrow's lunch at 10pm, but other people just want to quickly find a decent place to take their hungry friends.
The problem is even now Yelp is probably the best resource out there for finding new restaurants but I find Yelp poorly run. There is no innovation, the UI hasn’t been updated or changed since the first release. They have so much potential, for example, they should have been the leaders in delivery and should have provided the api for Uber eats. They just don’t do anything outside of maintaining the servers for their basic service, at least that’s what it feels like.
What you are describing sounds like a lot of work for not much payoff, and that's not what you pursue once you IPO. Yelp just became yet another "we sell ads" company, and that's not surprising considering that it was basically an online directory with reviews.
These large corporations need to knock off the bullshit and make their websites well developed and designed in-browser apps. Something so simple could save Yelp and many others. There is no need to have a native app unless you require certain hardware features that are unavailable on the browser to meet your apps purpose.
Old Urbanspoon reviews are still available on Zomato, but recent reviews (in my area) seem few and far between. Activity seems to be mostly on fb and google maps now.
To me, every time there's a migration of platform for restaurant reviews, the user experience gets worse. :(
Yelp is full of wannabe food critics/influencer types who complain about the ambience or quality of service. I always get the impression that these people only go to places that are already popular. For things not related to food/drinks, Yelp is no better than Google.
Also, they focus too much on search/ratings, so finding a place is harder when you aren't quite sure what you're in the mood for. I hope Yelp focuses more on the discovery aspect, because right now that's happening on Instagram and blogs like Eater.
Tons of places have low Yelp reviews but decent Google reviews and in my experience, the Google reviews are more accurate. I think it's because you get more off the cuff honest opinions from Google users instead of someone that went out of their way to get on Yelp.
They've tried to hold restaurants and other small businesses hostage for years and never expected that, given how despised they are, someone would displace them?
The way they run their business is comical as well. In my city Yelp is basically a non-factor. Businesses that have 500 Google or OpenTable reviews will often have a dozen Yelp reviews at most, yet Yelp will constantly phone you trying to get you to sign up for their services... Usually very aggressively and during peak business hours.
I've always enjoyed Louis Rossmann yelp rants. A week ago he posted a great interview with some people who made a documentary about yelp practices of bullying businneses to join their service
Link: https://youtu.be/BHEbVh3Yhrw
I wonder if there’s a way to get the quality of reviews and rankings from Tabelog in the USA - for those who don’t know its the Japanese equivalent service and diners are so critical that most restaurants have 3 stars, 3.5 is an exceptionally good one and 4 and up generally have Michelin stars; I’ve never been disappointed by a decently rated restaurant on it.
The magic sauce for them might be cultural; though there’s definitely room for a better (probably nonlinear) type of reviewing system in the market given how bad quality Yelp reviews are in comparison.
This has probably nothing to do with them losing advertisers, but I really dislike the app UX. Examples:
1. Videos auto play in the app, stopping my music or whatever else I'm listening to. And I can't disable that feature.
2. Frequent crashes and other glitches (eg, the Recent category doesn't actually show many of the places I visited today).
3. No way to save default settings, like sort by rating. So with every search I have to manually set those preferences. Similarly, no way to save searches or even to go back to a previous search I just ran.
google maps has a lot of ratings and I find is good at suggesting a list of places from which I can select one. Look into the explore around me feature
I have a question: Would it be possible to do something like Fakespot for Yelp reviews or just restaurant reviews in general?
I can appreciate that the problem is harder than say spotting fake Amazon reviews, but it seems plausible.
Given that there is really no good verification for restaurant reviews, there must be a ton of fake reviews out there. In theory, it would not be too hard to periodically crawl reviews and figure out when/if they got deleted and use that dataset to find patterns.
Yelp is an unscrupulous business, however, I do find it useful. I don't read the reviews but I enjoy looking at pictures of food before choosing a restaurant.
Yelp is tanking because it is putting profits before customers.
Case in point: let's say you're looking for a restaurant in a certain area, maybe in San Francisco? So you zoom into that area and do a search: find "x" in the map.
So what do they do? They zoom out (sometimes, far out) to include some advertisers.
Rule #1 if you have a customer-facing product: if you give the users choice, then respect that choice! Always respect the user. Always.
Well, you don't really have to have distinguished insights to tell that Yelp is doing a horrible job as an advertising company. Their ads are unattractive and annoying. What is fundamentally wrong with their business model is that, good restaurants don't need ads to wow customers: they are already oversubscribed, only troubled ones do.
Foursquare! I've been using it pretty regularly and it always seems to give me cool neighborhood gems compared to over-advertised entires that Yelp gives you. You can kinda even feel that the app was built with some heart.
Also, I love the filters on there compared to Google (Google maps always seems to hide a lot of places)
The only redeemable feature on Yelp that I come to often (from Google Maps) is Open Now, where I can fill in a time and it filters for that time. If its close to closing time, its rare that I want to know what's open right now given I've to drive to that location.
Other than that, I get the same value prop else where.
The problem I have with yelp is really the central idea of it. Who said random people are good at reviewing restaurants? Everyone's meaning of good is different, everyone's expectation for everything is on different scales with different meanings. Consolidating it all into a simple interface doesn't work. I really want two different services, one for finding something I'll be very happy with and may return to (usually found through trusted reviewers) or I'm someplace random and want whatever I get to not be terrible. Yelp is only okay at the later of two.
The thing about yelp that's nice is you can see aggregates, rather than some individual persons good or bad review. This includes, what dishes are popular at a particular place, and how popular regardless of any one opinion is a given restaurant (number of reviews). Additionally, being able to filter for niche things such as specific regional ethnic restaurants.
The actual reviews themselves are honestly the worst part of the whole site.
I think they could have leveraged their friends system to weigh the reviews more based on "people like you". In other words, use all that data to show the rating they think you'll give (a la Netflix).
There are people that are influential on yelp. I know people that get preferential treatment by the owners of higher end restaurants because their rating carries so much weight. It's pretty interesting. Tagging along with one guy we got to skip lines at special events, no wait times. The chef and owner would see him and greet him.
It seems kind of like frequent flier miles for eating out. I know a dedicated yelper who gets all kinds of perks and special treatment, but she has to write a lot of reviews to maintain her status. Which I guess is OK if (like air travel) your meal is a business expense.
In my view Yelp's first real product is their credit card rebates. That's what they need to concentrate on. Speaking with owners of a few places that are using it, they are super happy. It actually gets customers in and they (owners) are in complete control of what kind of discounts they give to people without having those people use coupons or otherwise jeopardize full value sales to those who aren't using it.
One time I used the Eat24 service built into Yelp's app to avoid a difficult phone call with a nearby restaurant. I waited a while then drove to the restaurant. When I asked about my order the hostess told me the FAX had just arrived and they would get started on it. Terrible.
This is kind of funny because I've ordered deliveries and made reservations through yelp as late as this year. I see from the other comments now that apparently the delivery services was sold to grubhub.
Wow people have passionate opinions about Yelp. If I need a quick meal while on the road, I just pick out some fast place. If I want a nice meal, I cook it. Spending a lot of my own money at a restaurant is only very rarely a satisfying experience.
I don't get the negativity here, Yelp is an incredibly useful service; especially living in NYC. With such a dense amount of restaurants in the city, you need some way to cut out the cruft.
I'm yet to eat at a Yelp 4-star restaurant in NYC that I didn't think was good. Besides Foursquare as an alternative, the reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, etc. are all way too inflated.
