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Comment by caublestone | Hacker News Reader

Rotten tomatoes tells me if a movie is worth seeing, not if its worthy of a place in afis top 100. Yelp and others push answers to decor, service, lighting and mood above the most important question of "should I eat here?". I've seen restaurants with the shameful 3 star rating on Yelp with the top reviews complaining about a party of xx's experience in splitting a check while mentioning that the food is good. It turns out there are "3 star" restaurants that are just fine for one or two diners. I'm excited to see a binary opinion to my decision of where to eat.

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The idea I had for a restaurant review site when I lived in SF was to allow only positive reviews, and it's basically a binary "did you enjoy yourself?" > "yes"/"yes, very much". And require a photo of receipt within X days of posting the review to guard against businesses buying votes. I figured the restaurants with consistent bad service/food would just not bubble up as much as ones with real fans.

If they are willing to fake reviews what makes you think they won't fake receipts?

I admit I never fleshed out the idea, but I thought of it as at least a higher bar against a random person on the internet being able to post a review. I could post a review to any restaurant on Yelp right now, but I'd have a much harder time producing a real-looking receipt for a specific restaurant. I guess I assumed when business owners pay for fake reviews they do it through some shady service that farms it out to other people indirectly.

While I can see your point in only capturing the positive reviews I wonder about something. Obviously consistently horrible shops just wouldn't show up but much of whats bad is much less consistently bad and this isn't just true of restaurants.

Bad reviews don't just help me find the contractors that would light my house on fire, rob me and piss on the ashes they help me find the ones who only deliver without difficulties 90% of the time so I can avoid being part of the 10%.

Also people would still be able to write negative things while giving what amounts to a 4 or 5 star review on your site. People after all love to complain. Being able to filter or sort for the bad reviews helps me obtain that information whereas it would be harder to do. In effect all the same negativity would likely be there just without the extra metadata.

My issue with places like Yelp is that people could post a negative review for the silliest of reasons and it can be hard to tell if the restaurant actually messed up or the person had different tastes than me, crazy expectations, or caused the problems themselves. I just don't trust them. If I had, I would never have discovered and repeatedly enjoyed some of my favourite restaurants.

For something like a contractor working on your house, yea it's important to see those reviews. For a meal? I'd rather just take a chance based on a lot of people saying they had a good time. It's what you do anyway when you check out a new restaurant based on a friend's recommendation or just on a whim.

And the whole point is not to have any star system, you either liked it or loved it and that's it. No opportunity for commentary so if you want to complain, go elsewhere. The tagline I dreamed up was "Haters gonna hate, eaters gonna eat."

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