431–440 of 461 posts
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What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
Google Maps? I mean, it's not perfect, the reviews aren't great, but usually anything rated 4.5+ is at least solid and they don't mess around with restaurant phone numbers.
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It’s absolutely warranted here because the article author mentions they are calling their favorite sushi restaurant.
Wouldn't they have a menu at home from their favourite sushi takeaway? Then they can just call the number on the menu, and even store it in their phone.
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What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
An American version of tabelog would be amazing but idk if it would ever happen It's something I've wanted to do for awhile. Do Things that idk yelp does like give older ratings less weight. I also think the the ratings are mostly useless. 4 1/2 star restaurants in the same area are not comparable. The rounding to half puts restaurants that are miles apart to close together. Ratings below 3 are useless. Sushi in sf i…
I mean because you've either had a good experience or a bad one, and if you've had an average experience why post a review?
It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value. In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced…
The "something else" is a protection racket. "Nice restaurant you got here. Be a shame if something happened to your high ratings." Yelp should be prosecuted under RICO.
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Sounds like they provide a search/aggregation service that many users find useful.
Lets say the internet isn't around yet, and people still use the yellow pages. One day, they decide to charge a 10% tax on all the revenue of a business, if they want to keep their listing in the yellow pages. Those that don't pay, get delisted. There is a competing service, the blue pages, that charges only a few cents for a listing. But it has far fewer readers, so any business that has only a blue page listing, no…
People did use the yellow pages to find restaurants, but a better comparison to yelp might be Zagat's, which had restaurant reviews.
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The "something else" is a protection racket. "Nice restaurant you got here. Be a shame if something happened to your high ratings." Yelp should be prosecuted under RICO.
Ummm, do you not see a difference between forcing people to pay you money on threat of violence, vs. choosing whether to allow people to market on your platform?
https://cliffbig.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-yelp-protection-ra...
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Google Maps? I mean, it's not perfect, the reviews aren't great, but usually anything rated 4.5+ is at least solid and they don't mess around with restaurant phone numbers.
Google itself isn't exactly ethical anymore unfortunately
In Denmark you will find almost all restaurant and food places in Openstreetmap.
I have created tools that help to keep POI'd up-to-date by mapping to public health inspection reports.
https://github.com/elgaard/OpenStreetmapTools/tree/master/re...
https://digitalfrihed.dk/restaurants/all.html
We could use some kind of open reviews. That is more tricky, which is also why the commercial platforms are not that good.
Wikivoyage.org is great for tourist, but too limited for locals (you cannot have every single pizza and burger place in travel guide).
The Osmand app with Wikivoyage is a great example of what can be done with free software and data. It is all offline. You can search for restaurants near you without revealing you location to anyone. When you click on the the webpage of a restaurant, it opens in your browser without redirecting from Yelp or sending the URL to Tripadvisor. And when you click on the phone number for the restaurant, your phone just calls directly.
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When I used to use Yelp, I found the reviews are so hard to wade though. So many: - I had a bad time .. once. - This restaurant isn't as good as this other place that is twice as expensive. - We had to wait a "long time". - The food sucked (because they don't like the kind of food they serve...). - This place sucks and you should go to this other completely different place.
With so many good restaurants, why would I go back to one where I had a bad time?
People might post a lot of those, it might be human nature to some extent to do it.... but that kinda fits my point that the reviews become useless at that point.
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I don't find reviews helpful at the best of times, food is simply too subjective. Some people want "authentic" dishes, others want anglicized (think texmex) versions, each will give poor rating to the other. Some people will want something sweet others will find the sweetness too strong. Everyone has a different definition of "too spicy". "Restaurant" is often to granular too, sometimes a good place will have some ba…
It could use your ratings of restaurants to inform which reviewers to give more weighting to when giving you reviews of other restaurants. Google maps is doing this now. I hope it catches on.
I'd love to not see all the reviews from "This guy who thinks Dominoes Pizza is the best pizza."
Like I might eat it too and it's ok... but man I don't want that guy's opinion on other pizza places.
I do wonder how a system like that might evolve ... if it even does. Google News determined I like a certain sports team. I do not, but it shows me news from them endlessly and not the team I like no matter how much direct feedback I provide..... Tastes change, that system could make Maps kinda useless if someone's tastes change but they get a bunch of garbage reviews.