Review sites are hard. Yelp was wonderful when it first started because the people on it all loved restaurants enough to actually want to sign up to some rando

Review sites are hard. Yelp was wonderful when it first started because the people on it all loved restaurants enough to actually want to sign up to some random site and review them. The community was small and I was easily able to pick out people I trusted and people I didn't. As it grew, more of the general public started reviewing things and things started to go downhill. No longer can I remember who has similar taste as I do or who to trust. There are so many reviews that it has become rather useless. Every business seems to be 3-4 stars from Michelin two star restaurants to the taco cart on the corner. Worse, ratings change over time. Restaurants I rated as 5 stars years ago no longer qualify as 5 stars today, so even when I see someone I know, I have to look at the date of their review and discount appropriately. Compounding things, there are all sorts of reasons why people give negative ratings from food delivery being late (which has nothing to do with your experience going to a restaurant) to having bad service because the restaurant opened the day before to not feeling like you got enough subjective value out of it. Now, if Yelp had a collaborative filtering engine ala Netflix or only showed reviews from people who shared similar taste as I do, it might regain some of its usefulness. Maybe if they did something ala Hacker News and required constant up votes to keep the rating from falling over time? Or an OKCupid-style personality matching matrix to tell if someone is just cheaper than I am or demands a higher level of service.