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Comment by cloudkj | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking for a service that does this exact thing. Give me personalized recommendations on restaurants so I can stop trying to comb through mountains of sometimes non-sensical, irrelevant Yelp reviews to decide what new restaurant to try.

A lot of comments here have complained that this has been tried and done. My question is, where? Does Yelp already do something like this? I went on Yelp a few days ago looking for this exact service. I'm not a Yelp user, and I just wanted something quick and lightweight that would give me recommendations based on my preferences. Found nothing to that effect. In order to contribute at all, I have to write a full review for a bunch of restaurants.

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I've been using it for years, and I have never seen any sort of collaborative filtering on Yelp, even though it has become simple to implement. I actually think they might do it in response to this.

If you refuse to sign up to sites, you aren't giving them a fair chance.

The only people who give a startup a truly fair chance are the founders' parents. Everyone else skims, misreads, jumps around, and then tells their friends about a verdict formed mostly on misconceptions.

Great consumer businesses optimize for this behavior.

That was really insightful. Where's the Temple Grandin[1] of designing web experiences and UIs for Joe Blub? Complaining about not getting a chance to show off what you do is just complaining about your poor understanding of the behavior of the internet herd that's trampling all over your website or app. Stop whining, start designing. See also Luke Wroblewski's ALA article "Sign Up Forms Must Die"[2] from nearly 3 years ago and compare[3].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin

2. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/signupforms

3. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5271434/ns/business-consumer_new...

I disagree. When site doesn't let me view what is behind the login page (what will I gain after the sign up) or even doesn't give me any idea about what the site is all about (like in the case of Google's HotSpot), then I don't have any reason to sign up...

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