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How Yelp destroyed the thrill of exploring
- drcode 15y agoJust a nostalgia fluff piece. "Remember the smell of white out? Don't you miss it nowadays?" "What about those carbon-copy sheets they used to have for typewriters?" "Remember the pleasure of receiving mix tapes?" etc, etc.
- ryanklee 15y agoThe problem is that it's not just a nostalgia fluff piece. It tries its best to parade as thoughtful, sincere journalism. And my impression is that the writer believes it to be so. But it's really infuriatingly ersatz. People will read this vapid bull and go, ah yes, someone who respects the value of experience, I know just what you mean. But this is the kind of thinking and writing that couldn't be further from respect to experience, raising no questions, answering no needs, analyzing no data either subjective or empirical. It just goes "blaaaaaaaaah" and drools and stands there mouth breathing and surrounded by dumbfounded onlookers, made actually more idiotic for having read the piece. Because 1/10 of the readers will go to some horrible cocktail party and repeat the author's lament, spreading it like a memetic disease and suddenly you'll have some non-trivial number of the populace saying stupid things about yelp being "a thief of authentic and adventurous experience" without ever actually picking apart the moronic semantics of that phrase. And these are undoubtedly the very same individuals who fetishize printed materials, insufferably toe prescriptivist "linguistic" lines and think "The Help" is instructive on the topic of racism. My rant is extended, yes, but it angers me, maybe overly much, that Salon allows such crap to be published and, more, that it somehow nears itself to the front-page of HN.
- cafard 15y agoSounds like terrible stuff--I had to go to the article to be reminded what Yelp is.