Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has desired to air grievances against those we felt have wronged us: This is not hyperbole, but fact. An almost 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet from the ancient city of Ur gives us Nanni, who writes to copper dealer Ea-nāṣir, accusing him of failing to follow through on a deal, sending him low-grade copper, and treating him poorly. According to one translation, Nanni asks, “What do you take me for?” and demands the ability to select his own copper on his own schedule “because you have treated me with contempt.”
Who can’t relate to Nanni? It feels good to bitch about being ripped off, to snatch back a bit of the power that was taken from you when you were forced to rely on someone else for a service and your needs were not met. The Ea-nāṣirs may insist they are giving you the best, but you, the everyman, know better. You can tell it like it is.
Here’s how Yelp advertised itself in a Thrillist newsletter in 2008:
Value honesty? Trust the everyman? Hit Yelp for user-generated write-ups on pretty much any local business — from bars and restaurants, to pet stores, to haberdashers. If you’ve got your own opinion on an establishment, get on Yelp and add to the chorus of unvarnished opinion. Yelp: Real people, real Swiss chocolate. No, wait, real people, real reviews.
In 2004, former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman founded Yelp, which has become the ultimate repository for, as they said, “unvarnished” opinions. Stoppelman said he was inspired by the lack of reliable, unbiased information when he was looking for a new doctor. From there, Yelp flourished into a forum for reviews of every kind of business. Almost immediately, however, restaurants — likely the kind of business you frequent most in a given week — became the most popular. Today, 49 percent of all reviews on the site are for restaurants.
The point of Yelp was of course not just to air grievances, but provide recommendations and feedback in general, a group answer to the ultimate question: Is this restaurant worth it? Previously, diners relied on personal recommendations or newspaper reviews, both of which hinge on trusting the opinion, however expert, of a single person. Unlike other existing websites like Citysearch and Chowhound, Yelp seemed to split the difference between straightforward directory and nerdy, niche internet forum, where anyone had the power to bestow stars upon a business. It felt like nothing short of a sea change.
“I remember from the moment of knowing about it, it was like, Yelp is happening, the streets are talking,” says chef Tiffany Derry of Roots Southern Table. Before Yelp, any customer feedback was entirely internal, says Derry, whether it was guests having conversations with managers or sending an email to the restaurant. Now, those critiques were public, bolstered by the law of averages: Dozens, hundreds, thousands of people collectively rating a restaurant — presumably with no skin in the game other than the well-being of their fellow diners — can’t be wrong.
That egalitarian vision has yielded conflicting results. Yes, you can go to Yelp and see which restaurants have been rated well and which seem broadly unpopular. But look closer and you’ll often find a slew of petty tyrants, untrustworthy influencers, straight-up review bombs, or just people with bad taste. People were removing stars because they couldn’t find parking, because the Thai food was spicy, because gratuity was included and they didn’t realize it until after they’d tipped on top of it. And while choosing to trust Yelp is up to you, search for any restaurant and its star rating is likely one of the first things you see.
What Yelp has really augured is an entire review culture. Twenty years later, it is now nearly impossible to get through a day without being asked to rate something: your Uber driver’s friendliness, the waiting time at your doctor’s office, the cleanliness of the airport bathroom. It is a culture that professes to value populist truth, the democracy of everyone’s voice getting equal weight. But even within Yelp’s pages, that’s never actually been true. What it values is what all social media values: engagement. A sheer quantity of opinions. It doesn’t matter what you think, as long as you’re rating.
For chef Marco Canora of Hearth in New York City, Yelp, at first, felt like a welcome change. “The age of the gatekeepers was beginning to end and personally, I thought that that was a wonderful and great thing,” he says. Previously, to get wide attention as a restaurant, you had to rely on reviews, which presented some problems. First, any restaurant critic could review, at maximum, about 50 restaurants a year, which in a large city like New York leaves thousands out. And second, who got on a critic’s radar was often a matter of being in the in-crowd. “If you’re in with the cool kids, then good shit would be written. And if you weren’t part of it, then nobody would know about you,” he says.
This was the great democratizing promise of Yelp. As Nish Nadaraja, an early marketing and brand director for Yelp, wrote on Medium in 2015, “The tagline we came up with along with the early crew — ‘Real People, Real Reviews’ — was a call to arms against paid critics, shill reviews, and the pay-to-play paper directory giants.” Yelp and the New York Times arrived on your computer screen exactly the same way. There was a wild west vibe to it all, the fizzing opportunity that you could get praise without having to “know the right people,” that your food could speak for itself. And after a while, the number of reviews began to look like consensus. “There’s something to be said about the law of large numbers,” says Canora. “3,000 reviews over the course of nine years, I think those trends tell you something.”
But there were problems almost immediately. “I cannot remember a time when restaurateurs and chefs and restaurant people have not been appalled by the existence of Yelp,” says Helen Rosner, a staff writer covering food at the New Yorker. She notes that early on, anyone could make a Yelp page about any business; the restaurant didn’t have to be involved. “So many restaurants had Yelp pages before they had web pages,” she says. “There’s this platform where, if somebody were to search the name of your restaurant, the first thing that comes up is something that you have no control over. Where a lot of people are weighing in with opinions about what they’ve experienced, that might be factually wrong, or that is totally right but you don’t have an avenue to correct it.” (Yelp didn’t introduce a way for business owners to respond directly to reviews until 2009.)
For Ellen Yin, restaurateur behind Philadelphia’s High Street Hospitality Group, the anonymity and after-the-fact-ness makes it harder to act on any real issues. “Sometimes the truth hurts, especially when it was being said on a platform where you didn’t have the chance to correct the situation,” she says. However, “you can write something and not have any ramifications for it.” A truth began to arise, which was that most people are only compelled to review something if they’ve had a really amazing or really terrible time. Restaurants obviously hated the latter, and this hatred in a way only fueled the thrill of Yelp. For every chef writing about how much they loathed Yelp came a chorus of would-be reviewers assuming these chefs just couldn’t handle the truth. “It was really destabilizing for people on the business side of the equation,” says Rosner. “And it was really thrilling and empowering on the other side, like drinking the blood of the gods.”
In 2005, the site launched the Yelp Elite Squad, a community of reviewers Yelp deemed reliable, whose reviews would be bumped to the top of searches to hopefully inspire more people to contribute their own. (A common strategy for social media at the time was to reward frequent or engaged users — Foursquare mayors, Reddit trophies, etc.) As Nadaraja wrote, “Early supporters and fans needed to have a shared sense of a Yelp identity in order to participate. The more we made Yelp feel special, the more invested people would feel.” The Elite, he wrote, were designed to feel like “royalty,” and given access to Elite-only events and parties. “We even created physical membership cards as a tip of the hat to Amex and Diner’s Club cards to give members a sense of identity,” Nadaraja wrote.
“It was the earliest inkling that we had of influencer culture,” says Rosner. “You would hear these horror stories of people marching into coffee shops and saying, ‘I’m Yelp elite, where’s my comp?’” Instead of destroying the “paid critics, shill reviews and the pay-to-play paper directory giants” as promised, Yelp replaced them. Almost immediately, it undermined its own raison d’etre — that this was a democracy — by creating a favored class of reviewers.
Yelp did develop credibility; even the cruelest, dashed-off reviews can still have validity. Derry says she watches reviews come in in real time, and reads them to her staff. Sometimes, they have proven legitimately helpful. “Let’s say we get an alert and it says the sweet tea doesn’t taste like it did last time. I send that screenshot and say hey, someone check the sweet tea,” says Derry. “Sometimes it’s nothing wrong, and sometimes we find things.”
But a good restaurant reviewer is aware of the biases they inevitably bring to every dining experience. And on Yelp, there is no such encouragement to hedge or contextualize opinions. As researcher Sara Kay wrote in 2019, Yelp reviewers have a tendency to review non-European cuisine based on stereotypes of “authenticity,” which binds restaurateurs to certain signifiers. “Bringing in newer decor, sourcing local produce, charging higher prices, or taking creative liberty with a menu might allow non-Western restaurants and cuisines to compete in the larger dining landscape. But then, the restaurant might not meet the expectations of diners who expect authenticity in the ‘correct’ way,” says Kay.
And that’s saying nothing of the other ways reviews and ratings are warped. Like any good website, Yelp moderates its comments, attempting to delete those that are obviously hateful. But Yelp’s moderation is sometimes no match for the practice of review bombing, when groups of people encourage others to shower a restaurant, one they likely have never been to, with bad reviews. Over the years, cases of online groups targeting a restaurant for any number of reasons — for requiring COVID vaccination or for being Palestinian, for example, just until they pay the scammers off — have proliferated on Yelp, Google Reviews, Facebook, and other platforms. The abuse goes both ways. There have also been numerous instances of restaurant owners rallying groups to harass and cyberbully people who leave negative reviews. Yelp explicitly bars harassment, bigotry, promotional content, and conflicts of interest in reviews. But because confirming that a user has in fact experienced what they’re reviewing relies on Yelp’s content moderators, and for questionable reviews to be flagged by businesses or users, fake reviews remain rampant, used to boost ratings and business on sites like Yelp that so many businesses have come to rely on.
We can assume that a solid percentage of complaints on Yelp were written by people who would not complain in person. “That kind of online forum is really amenable to being negative,” says Rosner. “If there’s one fundamental human impulse that the internet has indulged more than anything else, it’s our desire to be huge bitches. And to do it in writing feels much less real than to do it to someone’s face.”
Yelp makes money through a variety of services, such as sponsored ads for restaurants (which you see at the top of any Yelp search), allowing businesses to advertise deals, and now through reservations — all of which rely on users continuing to use the site. Bitchiness only drives engagement, and this is what Yelp harnesses when it calls for a “chorus of unvarnished reviews,” an echo of The Real World’s slogan that pits “polite” as the opposite of “real.” To be unvarnished is to be harsh and raw. To be real, much of the internet assumes, is to complain.
This is now what most online resources are trying to be. Goodreads was founded in 2006 as a way to track and rate books you’ve read, and share those ratings publicly or with friends. In 2011, Lettrboxd launched as the same for movies, and Rotten Tomatoes added the audience scoring system back in 2004. In 2007, Google began incorporating star reviews for businesses into its maps, and in 2012, Yelp ratings became incorporated into Apple and Bing maps. During this time, TripAdvisor continued to grow, allowing users to rate everything from hotels to tour guides to museums. And though Amazon has allowed users to rate products since its inception in 1995, in 2019 it began allowing people to just leave a star rating without a written review. It is now possible to publicly rate, positively or negatively, just about any experience you have.
This can cause a tiny change in how one might approach these experiences: Instead of focusing on how you feel about it now, the perception shifts to what you might say about it later. A culture all about reviews welcomes constant real-time evaluation, which puts you in a different mindset than just being. Now you are asked to explain, and sometimes justify, your likes or dislikes, to uphold them in a way you wouldn’t have with a passing thought of pleasure or disgust. Writing them down makes them lasting, concrete in a way they may never have been otherwise. Sometimes this is wonderful, to think closely about why something like a work of art might have moved you. But often, it just results in the strongest and most fleeting feelings being given an uneasy permanence, like if you had to stand behind who you became every time you stubbed your toe.
In 2021, former Eater NY critic Ryan Sutton wrote about why he was getting rid of star ratings in his reviews, following the lead of critics like Soleil Ho, Tejal Rao, and Bill Addison. “The interesting thing about restaurant reviewing is how it straddles those two different fields, blending the urgent, service-y aspects of bare-bones product reviews (the steaks are so overcooked they’re barely edible) with the more complex inquiries of full-fledged arts criticism,” he wrote. Dining is a sensual, tactile experience; giving a restaurant three out of five stars and moving on doesn’t communicate the context and fullness of a restaurant’s goals and whether they’ve been successfully accomplished. And, he notes, two stars in the New York Times for Superiority Burger was a triumph, while for Per Se was an insult. How is that helpful for diners?
This rethinking might be, in part, Yelp’s influence. Saying whether food is good or bad, what is worth ordering and what is worth skipping, whether the restaurant has a full bar or is good for kids or is wheelchair accessible, “that is exactly what sites like Yelp are great for,” says Rosner. But to say the food is bad is to invite the question of why, which Yelp is worse at answering. Yes, sometimes food is just bad — overcooked, poorly seasoned, rotten. But often, as we saw with questions of “authenticity,” this has much more to do with the reviewer.
“I think that restaurants that are doing more difficult things, restaurants that are cooking less mainstream cuisines, restaurants that are catering to less mainstream clientele, suffer in the winner-take-all ecosystem of Yelp,” says Rosner. When you determine a restaurant the best in the neighborhood, or the No. 1 Chinese cuisine in the city, what does that mean? If it means the most possible people like it, is that the same as greatness? When everything is being ranked, “that’s a real flattening of something that is much more multifaceted,” says Rosner.
And now, we may not even be able to know what’s real at all. In the New York Times, Pete Wells covers a new study that showed that people had an incredibly difficult time distinguishing between reviews written by humans and those written by large language model GPT-4: Readers were more likely to think those written by AI were real. “Aside from marking a threshold in machine learning, A.I.’s ability to sound just like us has the potential to undermine whatever trust we still have in verbal communications, especially shorter ones,” writes Wells. “Who is going to believe a Yelp post about a pizza-croissant or a glowing OpenTable dispatch about a $400 omakase sushi tasting knowing that its author might be a machine that can neither chew nor swallow?”
This is not to say that Yelpers are inherently wrong, only that it’s all subjective. The difference is that Yelp, and the review culture that has followed, does not present itself as such. Instead, Yelp is “real.” One- to five-star reviews punched in every time you get a coffee or order pizza are indicative of “honesty.” The stance is still that these are the everymen speaking a secret truth the establishment doesn’t want you to hear, when the truth is that many restaurants are now affected by Yelp and similar services more than they are by the press.
Canora says it feels like better innovations are being made in the customer review space. On Resy, his restaurants have a public star rating, but any written feedback is private to his team. “I do think it’s really interesting that they chose to not allow them to be publicly facing. It’s a real service to the operators,” he says, allowing them to parse feedback without worrying that thousands of other people will read it first. Derry also emphasizes that Resy and OpenTable only let you leave a review if you’ve made a reservation — you have to actually eat there before offering your thoughts.
Twenty years on, Yelp is just the water we live in. Beli, an app that lets you track and rate restaurants and share lists with friends, is growing in popularity among Gen Z, and Google ratings show up automatically in your maps. There is almost no place you’ll learn of a restaurant without a corresponding score attached, a chorus of unvarnished opinion a click away. Whether that’s the truth is, unfortunately, still up to individual interpretation.