Yelp!! I’m out of touch!
The other night two couples were in line with me at my favorite New York restaurant: one in front and one behind. The one in front were out of the ordinary to this place (it has a specific point of view and customer) so I focussed on them.
In the waiting area space is tight, so usually pairs stay close, talk, laugh, and step around each other as others pass by. This couple was on their phones. As I looked over the girl’s shoulder I saw that she was on Yelp, looking at this restaurant’s Yelp page. She scrolled through the reviews, ostensibly to decide if the wait was actually worth it. [I might have told her it was if she wouldn’t have made me wait longer.]
After a few moments of my observation she seemed to feel my observing eyes. She turned slightly toward me, failed to hide an embarrassed look, and sheepishly put her phone away, encouraging her boyfriend to do the same.
I didn’t say anything to this girl.
But just my observation of her using Yelp, ostensibly because I appear to be a regular (I am), was enough to leave her feeling really embarrassed.
Yelp is really embarrassing.
This experience seems to highlight two axioms:
(1) If you live in a city and are still using Yelp (or any of its staid peers) to find out about the “good spots,” you’re out of touch.
(2) If you write comments on Yelp, you’re probably out of touch.
Yelp’s motivating intuition is probably the same as that of Google Maps. Everyone wants to be able to plan and access business information quickly; and Yelp solves this. It has menus, hours, location, contact info, photos, and, perhaps importantly, reviews.
But Yelp turned out to induce some really bad behavioral patterns on both the reviewer and user end. Yelp makes anybody a Critic, even if they’re Lame-o McLamest, deathly selfish, dishonest, or so socially awkward they’d prefer a public fight over a private conversation. And users prefer to find confidence in their choices by following the ‘taste-making (read: boring)’ choices of trend-setters, rather than being confident in their own instincts or judgements.
Even ‘regular’ reviewers are at least a little weird, some spilling nearly one hundred thousand words on their reviews. Others Yelp primarily to complain. [Maybe Yelp could collaborate with Talkspace?] And does anyone actually enjoy looking at (or watching people, with flash, take) poorly composed low-light photos on their cell phones?
Worst of all, Yelp can really make or break small businesses (big ones are unaffected on average), leaving owners at the mercy of Yelp’s (mostly annoying Millennial) users. That one time (at band camp) a bartender missed an order — 1 star. That one time (at band camp) a customer who is always right knew he was right — 1 star. And these reviews are just of Gato, Bobby Flay’s legitimately awesome spot downtown. Imagine what happens when high-maintenance north-of-14th-street Millennials end up at a cool hole-in-the-wall downtown at the recommendation of their Pete Wells-loving mother. [Pete Wells is eminently lovable.]
But above all these details, Yelp facilitates and indirectly encourages an odd detachment from cities and the communities that drive them. While friends bond over booze at brunch, the small business owner who created that awesome vibe worth waiting fifty five minutes for at 2pm on a Sunday is somehow alien. When Jen J. is unhappy she pulls out her phone to Yelp-plain rather than try to resolve her unhappiness with a conversation. When Sam S. is on a trip to Miami, he’d rather humble brag to an anonymous e-crowd about his dessert (that was “to die for”) rather than reach out to his best friend to tell him about it.
Yelp destroys a key ingredient of a community: lively in-person engagement. Yelpers get around a city not by walking into the restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, hardware stores, or bars that comprise it and examining these businesses for themselves; for the details that make them cool, kind of weird, a little bit shoddy but otherwise great. They keep their heads in their phones, take an Uber somewhere if it has at least four stars, and hurriedly leave a 1-star rating if their second mimosa came five minutes too late.
With Yelp facing increasing flack, it really seems to be time that we reevaluate our Internet 1.0 ‘everyone-is-a-critic’ paradigm. Everyone is not a critic. Most people have bad taste and far too little empathy.
Cultural institutions, new and old, exist for a reason. We can get back in touch by putting down our devices and returning to engage authentically and meaningfully with the communities wherever we find ourselves (and maybe we should work on finding ourselves too).
