You're Not Yelping!

I'm always fascinated by the human condition of sticking with something even after it has long-since served its purpose. It seems that having a hard time letting go of routines and familiarity is something which is common no matter what your walk of life is. Now, I'm as guilty of doing this as anyone. I will stitch, repair and clean something I have owned for years a dozen times instead of going out and getting a new one. It can be the same way with entertainment. I've known of people who continue to watch shows they haven't enjoyed in a couple of seasons simply because they have always watched the show and want to be there just in case it ever gets good again. (Spoiler alert: it is never going to get good again.) Lately I have started to see this trend with websites. While people are very quick to abandon blogs or other frivolous one-joke internet addresses, it can be a lot harder for people to walk away if the site actually served a purpose at one time or another. These people are the only reason sites like MySpace and Yahoo are still operational. Again, I do the same thing. The site I can't seem to get away from? Yelp.

For those of you who are not familiar, Yelp is a website where locals people can go to rate the restaurants, bars and other entertainment venues near them. On the surface it seems like a very good idea, after all who can give better reviews than people who spent their own money and actually went into a place with an open mind? They are going to be a lot more unbiased than some food critic who has been doing this for a dozen years and has become jaded by the process. It is supposed to be ratings by the people and for the people. And when it first started out that was exactly the kind of service it was providing. But lately I find myself going to the site and leaving unsatisfied every time. You see, the problem with this site is that it is like every other site on the Internet, which means it is nothing but the extremes of the world. The majority of people who visit don't leave any kind of review, which leaves the kind of people who either take their reviews way too seriously and compose a 4,000 word opus on a particular venue (as if this post will be the one which gets the discovered and leads them to be hired by Zagats), or not seriously enough and write two sentences, usually along the lines of, "Food was good, price was good." Turns out I'm going to need a few more details than that.

The other problem with the principle behind having reviews by regular, average citizens is that I don't know what kind of  background they are coming from. If you've ever read my movie reviews you know that I try not to tell people whether they should or should not rent a movie unless it is truly horrible because I don't have enough of an ego to think that everyone has the same tastes as me. Plus, I hate giving places bad marks based off of one experience, because I feel like we all have bad nights. Just because a waiter wasn't at the top of the game doesn't mean I want the place to be boycotted by everyone. (This is why I was a bad sportswriter, but why I also feel like a pretty decent human being.) Well, the people on this site don't have such an issue, as one woman railed against a particular restaurant because she suffered through a 45 minute wait before being seated. Wow, a 45 minute wait on a Saturday night in Boston? What are the odds of that happening? Oh, right, they are extremely normal and not something to get all excited about, but it was enough for this woman to only give the place 2 stars. Maybe I'm not picky enough, but I'm not about to get bent out of shape over waiting like everyone else.

Seeing reviews like that from a clearly snobby person is what has lead to my increased practice of not using the site for anything other than a map to let me know of restaurants in my general area that I haven't made it to yet. I don't even care how many stars Yelp has given a place because I no longer care what other people may think of them, I just need to know if they are within walking distance and if nothing else at least the site lets you zoom in to within a couple blocks of your house. Now, you're probably wondering why I still use the site at all. Well, it does help narrow the search down because you can eliminate the kind of restaurants you aren't interested in going to and sometimes that is all you really want to know. Plus, as I mentioned before, it is just where I normally go to check out restaurant options and without an alternative it is hard to break from the routine. As a creature of habit it can be really annoying to try and find another good site to use for finding local restaurants, even if it is ironic to habitually use the same website because you are trying to break a habit of eating at all the same locations.