Everybody Gets a Star
August 06, 2024 at 02:39AMReal people, real reviews: this was the early tagline for Yelp, which was founded in 2004 with the aim to democratize the world of reviews. It changed how we think about the services we seek and businesses we frequent, especially restaurants. Twenty years on, Yelp and similar platforms have shaped and transformed online review culture. For Eater, Jaya Saxena writes about Yelp’s effect on the restaurant industry and the review ecosystem at large.
“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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/05/everybody-gets-a-star/
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