Hooked on Yelp

 

There’s my hook. Hope I got your attention in the corniest way possible.

The cool thing about social media is that you can brag to your audience about your awesome life. Then your audience will double tap to like, comment, or whatever they do.  Now I use the term audience because, well you know as well as I do, you hate most of the people you’re “friends” with. You click on their profile to look at that one bad photo they have or you visit people’s profiles because you’re bored with your own life and you have nothing better to do.  Now is that the really cool thing about social media? We have the ability to connect and build relationships with people from all over the world and we click on the person’s profile we went to high school with to snicker about their current lifestyle. That’s low.

Now, I don’t mean to make you feel bad about yourself, I am no better than you are. I just wanted to draw attention to the way we sometimes use social media.Think about some other ways we use social media. I think we also use it is to visit websites that rate businesses such as restaurants. Being a human being that loves food more than life itself I use websites like yelp a lot. Sometimes I go on yelp and just browse! People post the most delicious photos of food and they capture the ambiance of the restaurant in words. Because of yelp I am able to “shop” for a restaurant and when I visit the restaurant I know exactly what to order because people on yelp have given me recommendations.

Guisados Tacos

Photo by Roland L.

I become the know it all. All of the knowledge that I have gathered from yelp about the restaurant has made me the expert. Everyone in my group that I am dining with looks up to me for advice on what to order and they thank me because I had helped them put the best food into their little belly. It feels oh so good.

Yelp is cool, resourceful, and creates a fan base for a particular restaurant. It’s the way social media should be used—connecting and bringing people of similar interests.  But, to every pro there’s a con; unfortunately everyone that comments is…well… not the most intelligent people. As an avid Yelp user that goes on to read reviews it’s infuriating to come across reviews like the ones below:

Urth Café

Kody M. writes

“We got vanilla latte's which were pretty good, but for.our food that we got to go took 40 minutes and it was just a turkey sandwich and soup. Lousy service.”

Bestia

T.T. writes

“What is all this hype all about? 
The food was nothing special, I'd even say below average. Every single dish ordered was significantly (!) over-salted, my pappardele pasta was overcooked and was falling apart. The pizza's that were being baked in front of us looked burnt. The crowd wasn't interesting either. 
I liked our waiter and the atmosphere of a busy restaurant, but seriously, the place is nothing to write home about.”

This is why we can’t have nice things! People who are unfamiliar about seasoned foods or who go to a café (known for their drinks by the way) and wait forever for “Just a turkey sandwich” are disappointed and rant about it on yelp. Social media has so much potential, but it gets ruined from people like the above. 

I think Aziz says it best : ‪@azizansari

There needs to be a new Yelp feature to help accurately assess ethnic restaurants - "Remove white ppl reviews."

 So if you yelp, yelp with a purpose, write a thorough review that people will appreciate. That’s what its for right? Let’s get the nice things back!