Hacker News Reader

It surprisingly has up to date content where I live, and generally anything 4+ stars is good and below 3 stars is not too good. The individual reviews are usually not useful, but looking at patterns and trends of recent reviews can be useful if you know how to filter out the obvious BS and one-off overreactions.

The problem is a real lack of reviews for smaller places, especially outside the downtown area. Google Maps has more content there.

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I agree, though the other issue for smaller places is that they are more susceptible to review-bombing by one disgruntled party (do we really need 6 reviews from 6 different people about how the same table had to wait an hour to get the check one time?) or "5 stars for 30% off" incentives (which I have unfortunately seen a number of, especially at small businesses trying to distinguish themselves).

Google Maps I still don't understand where they get a lot of reviews from in the first place. While some look like normal reviews, there's a lot that have no comments at all or comments completely unrelated to the place ostensibly being reviewed (or just cryptic things like "not good" or "good"). It's not a bad comparison to use alongside Yelp, but it's definitely led to more clunkers, especially for places with n<20 reviews.

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