I like to leave reviews for places I stay and eat. But, I hate to keep feeding the Google machine. Yelp seems to be mostly a US thing, and I’m not a power Trip Advisor user (although I have nothing against them).
Where do you read/leave reviews the most?
Now that OP mentioned it, I just realized how few alternatives there are to Google Maps…
For reading reviews, sadly I think Google is still by far the best review aggregator especially for restaurants, in big cities especially the star ratings are scarily accurate (edit: with caveats). I guess expert reviews (such as all of Michelin’s ratings) are good too but they aren’t always available
For writing reviews, I sometimes order food with apps (recently using Too Good To Go) so I’d still leave comprehensive reviews on those. If the place is not on OpenStreetMaps I’d add it. Other times sadly I just don’t, I don’t really have a functional Google account at this point
Agreed Google maps is the best review aggregator (and I wish it wasn’t) but “the star ratings are scarily accurate”? I think you mean “hugely inflated”. Like almost any review system a I’ve seen recently: if you like a place and you give less than a 5 then you’re hurting it.
Yes they are… the reason I think that way is that I like to look at relative rankings; as in, it’s not accurate to just look at how many stars a place got, but rather compare it with other places around it
If I recall… at least in Chicago where good restaurants easily get 500+ ratings. I have never had a “miss” at a place 4.7 stars or above on Google, and the local “cult classic” was at like 4.9; 4.5-4.6 can be hit-or-miss; any fine dining below 4.5 is almost always a miss. Obviously since almost none of those establishments got below 4, just looking at the number of stars isn’t useful… but if I have adjust my expectations accordingly (>=4.6 is solid, <=4.4 is bad) it’s actually quite useful
Sadly I have no clue whether it translates to other places. Fairly certain ppl in my current city are a lot more critical (so maybe a 4.7 in Chicago would be… 4.4 here, or something like that)
How is that not inflated? For my personal ratings, a three is something I’d be happy to eat every day. A five is close to unattainable. It’s basically centered on 2.5 with something like a tapered normal distribution. It’s tedious mapping out so I’m not lowering ratings for good places so I don’t rate anymore.
But getting past me being difficult, you can’t even rate 4.5 can you? Isn’t that information being lost when the way people rate is basically 5 for thumb up and every other number is a thumb down?
You’re right about it being useful to look at relative ratings, I just wouldn’t label that as really accurate.
It’s a separate issue but you brought up categories. I never loved rating in a situation like on Airbnb where one place might be a deliberately expensive penthouse and another might be deliberately a cheap shared room in the wilderness, especially with something like a “cleanliness” rating