There's a local restaurant known for it's macaroni and cheese. That and a few sides dishes are all they serve, and it's all fantastic.

One of their bad Yelp reviews was that their beer list of local microbrews wasn't extensive enough.

I don't find reviews helpful at the best of times, food is simply too subjective. Some people want "authentic" dishes, others want anglicized (think texmex) versions, each will give poor rating to the other. Some people will want something sweet others will find the sweetness too strong. Everyone has a different definition of "too spicy". "Restaurant" is often to granular too, sometimes a good place will have some bad dishes, should I care about the reviews of people that bought those dishes?

For me finding good restaurants is still a trial and error process that technology can't improve on.

It could use your ratings of restaurants to inform which reviewers to give more weighting to when giving you reviews of other restaurants.

Google maps is doing this now. I hope it catches on.

That would be nice.

I'd love to not see all the reviews from "This guy who thinks Dominoes Pizza is the best pizza."

Like I might eat it too and it's ok... but man I don't want that guy's opinion on other pizza places.

I do wonder how a system like that might evolve ... if it even does. Google News determined I like a certain sports team. I do not, but it shows me news from them endlessly and not the team I like no matter how much direct feedback I provide..... Tastes change, that system could make Maps kinda useless if someone's tastes change but they get a bunch of garbage reviews.

- Our waiter, Bob, was really good. Bob took our order, brought our food, and kept our beverages filled. Bob is a great waiter. <signed> totally-not-Bob.

Also "the staff is so RUDE!". Any review which uses the word "rude" can be safely ignored, because it's written by the kind of person who considers it rude that his/her water glass went unfilled for nearly 30 seconds after being emptied.

I always wonder about that, like who is the rude person... really hard to know.

I don't think I've ever encountered "rude" staff. Maybe just dumb luck but it's just not something that has occurred to me where I thought that.

"Rude"ness is almost always a feedback loop, and my guess is it more often than not starts with a customer being rude, and then builds from there.

Like you, I basically never have encountered a restaurant employee that I would say is rude.

I see many negative reviews that I suspect are from people acting in the interests of competitive restaurants.

I always thought that some of the bad reviews must be from ex-employees.

With so many good restaurants, why would I go back to one where I had a bad time?

That's not the question. It's natural not to want to go back to somewhere something bad happened. The question is why anybody else would care about bad luck that someone had, as opposed to a bad experience that was representative.

There is no canonical bad experience. The best estimate is the ratio of good to bad reviews, and most will be from a single experience, unless people suddenly start volunteering to visit restaurants that treated them poorly the first time...

I think that relates to my point in the sense, I really don't care about reviews if they're that ephemeral / arbitrary.

People might post a lot of those, it might be human nature to some extent to do it.... but that kinda fits my point that the reviews become useless at that point.