My advice is to stop trying to optimize every event in life, and live more serendipitously. Pick places at random, have low expectations, and spend your life constantly being pleasantly surprised.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with talking over ideas of where to eat with friends. It doesn't mean that I'm living my life wrong.
But let's just say for sake of argument that it's best to always be random and spontaneous. Tonight, you should randomly pick a channel on TV, and watch it. Or randomly select a movie. Maybe you don't watch TV or movies. Then a random book off the library shelf?
I do in general terms like your suggestion about being spontaneous, and living in the moment, and embracing chaos and randomness. And here's a suggestion for you: don't tell other people how to live; it's unseemly.
It's a nice suggestion, to live in the moment and be spontaneous, but it's highly impractical. Sometimes it makes sense to work with more information when it's available. Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse? Sometimes it makes sense to be discerning with limited resources. I'm as zen as the next guy, and live in the moment. I just got to this town, and I'd like to start my search with what people think are the most awesome places to eat. Is that so wrong?
It's surely not as wrong as you guys thinking I'm conducting my life improperly for wanting information about where cool places to eat are.
Maybe someone can steal that idea and apply it to restaurants.
Tripadvisor et al have the advantage that, with all the Internet posting (admittedly with dubious quality, but...), they can show a review of almost anything.
Within my social circle? They won't even be 10% comprehensive for my own town, let alone once I start going away.
Nice idea, won't work.
What counts as a personal link, anyway? There are people on my Facebook profile I knew years ago in a different town, people on my LinkedIn profile I worked with 6-7 years ago. All people with whom I'm happy to stay in contact at a low level and retain in my wider professional network, but would I want to trust a recommendation from a similarly distant contact of theirs as much as I would a day-to-day colleague of my brother-in-law who I see every week? Probably not.
Like I said - nice idea, won't work.
If there's somebody on your review site, who ranks highly several of my highly ranked coffee shops, and ranks low a subset of my lowly ranked coffee shops, I'd be much more prepared to consider their other coffee shop reviews as relevant to me. Even better, location based services like 4Square of Facebook checkins could expose their "revealed preferences" to the algorithm as well, someone who rates Fourbarrel and Ritual highly, but checks in to Starbucks four times a day is less likely to be someone who's reviews I'd want to read than someone who perhaps rates Fourbarrel and Ritual lower on an absolute scale, but checks into both regularly as well as, say Sightglass and BlueBottle.
I'd really like a time and event aware as well as just venue aware review function. Zeitgeist on a Thursday night, or after a critical mass ride - is a _vastly_ different experience than Zeitgeist on a sunny Saturday afternoon when it's full of slumming sunset and marina crowds. DNA Lounge really needs separate review categories for Death Guild nights, Bootie nights, and out-of-town dubstep artist nights - people who love (and hence rate highly) one of those events are significantly less likely to enjoy the other two as much - which makes a Yelp-style single rating for DNA Lounge not particularly useful.
Another problem is that if your taste is not really mainstream, you have to rate quite a few movies to get accurate predictions. After I reached a couple of hundred movies, the predictions were nearly always completely accurate.
Also, the OP said he just moved, so that's probably why he can't just ask friends. Also, even once firmly established in a given region, not everyone has friends in their specific neighborhood, or a given neighborhood they might find themselves in with a rumbling tummy.
You seem to be overreacting. Suggesting is very different from telling.
Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse?
I think you are conferring a level of undue gravitas to food. Can you really equate selecting where to have lunch with whom to wed?
You can spot a place with a local cliental by the way they interact. If all the tables look like circled wagons fending off marauders, they are tourists. If everyone is well dressed, it's a trendy place with good marketing - people go their once to impress their friends, but don't come back. Expect pretentious overpriced food, if that's what you are looking for.
If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business. While you can't guarantee you'll like it, some people do.
If you're visiting a new place (presumably the typical use case for Yelp), how can you possibly look inside a restaurant and know if the people inside are repeat customers?
>If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business
Oh. So when travelling, you recommend selecting restaurants by looking inside each establishment and inspecting the clothing of the customers? By that argument, how could any restaurant beat (eg) McDonald's, with its casually-dressed, repeat customers?
You can tell by the look of the place that it's not a high end restaurant or a locally run restaurant. That should let you set your expectation for the place.
HN works best when downvoting is not used as disagreement. If you don't like McDonalds, fine. But it's clearly true that many people do.
Now the fries and Coke aren't doing much for you.
This, I think, is the future of crowdsourced review sites. Not necessarily "friends", but at least people with some form of shared experience and mutual interest - and a track record of being honest about what's good and what isn't.
I want the ability to look at a reviewers history, and increase the weighting of reviewers who's reviews I agree with, and to mark as irrelevant the ratings of people who (in my opinion) clearly have no clue about what they're reviewing (or who are obvious shills).
I suspect this could be built on top of Yelp - automatically collate lists of reviewers who's reviews of places we have in common align, and allow me to browse other places they've rated highly (or rated low). I'm guessing doing that as a non-yelp service would be against their TOS, and I'm guessing their business model of "Sorry, we can't 'help' you with negative reviews… Unless of course you choose to become an advertiser?" type extortion would be far less effective if there was a good way to show those poor reviews up as the rantings of the delusional disgruntled that they so often are…
(Of course, if someone were to give me exactly what I'm asking for, I suspect I'd end up with a sanitised subset of "stuff I already know I like" with very little opportunity to discover interesting new things…)
If you see someone whose reviews you like, you can follow them. This will cause their reviews to be at the top of any other businesses you look at. Also, you can click on the name of a person whose review you trust to see a list of other places they reviewed.
I think the only things they are missing from what you suggested (just from what I saw in the FAQ) is personalizing the average rating and aggregating information about the people you trust for you.
If you want to try to implement something like this (perhaps as a browser extension), their APIs look pretty thorough. (http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v2/business)
No it's not. I don't understand why so many people are reacting with philosophical criticism to a comment about specific problems with Yelp, in a discussion about that very issue.
Wandering around and finding new places and experiences can be great, but it's not for everyone, and it's certainly not for everyone all the time. There are people who really don't like being "surprised", pleasantly or otherwise. It's not a failing on their part, it's just how they're wired. Services like Yelp are (ostensibly) great for these types of folks, since it allows them to try new things with a little bit of reassurance that if the new thing sucks, it shouldn't suck too bad.
For, say, your tenth wedding anniversary, would you really just show up at the train station with your spouse and your low expectations, hoping to be pleasantly surprised by your randomly-chosen destination?
You are absolutely right, though, my advice is not for everyone, nor all situations. I actually think I am wired a bit wrong, for instance I spent three days in and out of a hospital in Wulumuqi, and I have fond memories of the event, even though at the time it must have been miserable. All I can remember are the cute nurses, the funny glass IV bottles, the $35 CAT scan, and how surprisingly good the hospital was in the farthest place in the world from an ocean.
Part of the problem with something like yelp is that there's no way to gatekeep the genuine and false reviews. Netflix or Amazon, for example, know what you actually paid for. Yelp's got no way to know if you really dined at the restaurant or whether you just know the owner.
Don't they have "Yelp offers"? When you redeem one of these, it's probably because you ate at the restaurant. With the right software, they could even figure out what food you ate, who your server was, and if you tipped well.
Regrets is a bit of a strong word, no? If I walk past a nifty looking sandwich shop and pop in for a meal, and it turns out to be sub-par, is that really a regret?
I'm with jcampbell - if you are inclined to experience significant regret/remorse over having a meal that wasn't too great, it may be time to re-evaluate.
It's not as though I'm saying people are having long dark nights of the soul over a poorly-made salad. But they still feel regret because it's easy to imagine what they might have had.
People will do a lot to avoid even minor regrets. Do you have a favourite restaurant? Do you have a favourite dish at that favourite restaurant? Do you ever feel even slightly reluctant to try a complete new dish at a completely new restaurant? Why?
Exploring new restaurants is fun, but also potentially risky and typically needs to be moderated with some degree of caution and preparation.