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Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

I can’t wait for Apple Maps to dump yelp. Am I the only one that that thinks yelp reviews are useless?

Apple has nothing to replace it with. It's hard to imagine Apple adding reviews and trying to police that — policing their own App Store reviews seems to give the trouble (but perhaps is not a solvable problem).

They could surely negotiate something to get access to Google's reviews. A nice thing about Apple's position is that they have enough money to build or buy whatever they want, depending on how strategic it is. If they buy google's reviews then they get to have access to the best data, and also inject themselves as a middle-man which can allow them to collect their own useful data and know exactly what people are looking at, but also able to claim privacy benefits because they shield people from Google (i.e. stop Google and their evil privacy invading tracking). If content in reviews is objectionable, they can just say "our partner didn't filter as they should, it wasn't us." I think it's actually a pretty good position to be in.

I would argue over a certain threshold of human comments/reviews/inputs this is invariably an unsolvable problem

People rightfully give FAANG crap for improper policing (as they should) but in their defence I have yet to see a single solution successfully implemented platform wide, ever

They've added ratings to the Maps app for certain categories of businesses (or maybe it's for businesses not in Yelp, dunno). It looks like they are testing it out. It also supports picture upload.

A one star place on Yelp is a warning, especially if there are implied health code violations. But anything else between two and five, I look at the pictures of the food and decide for myself. There's gaming going on for years but pictures can tell a lot, even if it's not everything.

The anti Yelp restaurants that delist themselves from various sites for whatever reason do not exist to me and will never get my business because I will never even think about them when I am thinking about where to eat.

Is there anything better to replace it with? Even if they could use Google's reviews, I don't feel they are much better. I guess they could do a deal with TripAdvisor, which is the only other site I can think of that has fairly comprehensive coverage of reviews, but is TripAdvisor really a step up from Yelp?

Yelp's biggest advantage is that if there are recent reviews, the business probably still exists.

Yelp was high value in the past - its going to low value in the recent years. It's also regional in its value.

yelps relevancy had already declined by the time it was included in apple maps

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