I have been using Foursqaure for years in NYC, and I think it is really useful for finding new places and picking food on the menus. Checkins, at the end of the

I have been using Foursqaure for years in NYC, and I think it is really useful for finding new places and picking food on the menus. Checkins, at the end of the day, are a means to an end. Mayorships/Badges/Game Mechanics/etc. might have made their app more viral (I stress might), but it appears there was never going be a way to monetize them, hence their "pivot" This is how I see it now: 1) If you still live in a major metropolitan area (like NYC, San Fran) then the service is still useful (probably more useful with this new design) 2) If you do not live in a major metropolitan area, Foursqaure is pretty much useless - but it always was and always will be. 3) Now that they removed checkins, I dont expect to ever get recommendations better than what I am currently getting, because I am not downloading swarm. The fact that they removed checkins from their core app seems really crazy to me - not because I thought checking in were useful, but more because the whole concept around the new app (I think?) is their machine learning algorithms leverage their huge database to provide great recommendations. With Swarm, not only did they add friction to creating more of this data easily (I have to switch apps to do it), Swarm was actually pretty buggy and doesnt appear to be gaining user adoption (per app store reviews, which are obviously subjective). Disclaimer: I rarely use Yelp, and never use it in NYC because of Foursqaure