This is how I evaluate restaurants on Yelp. I go to the 1 and 2 star reviews. If they are things like the weather was bad, the prices are too high or the waiter was rude to me, I assume the place is pretty good. People without much taste love places with cheap food and extremely polite and fast service. I like good food.

Because reviews are sometimes fake, and often from people who don't know much or have a lot to compare to, the most useful thing is to filter for when people complain about what you don't care about.

Another thing I do for restaurants on Tripadvisor is look at reviews by language (works better abroad than in the US). While it's a bit stereotyping, I find that if a place is well reviewed by reviewers who write in Italian, French or Japanese, it's generally more likely to be to my taste. I'll add other languages depending on context , so if I'm looking for a Mexican, filtering by Spanish reviews is definitely helpful.

And helpfully when filtering by language, Tripadvisor will show the spread of reviews for that language making it easy.

This seems to be the only approach that works anymore. Are all the negative reviews petty or entitled? Then probably the thing in question is fine.

Next trick: solicit a flood of one star reviews for your business that all have trivial complaints beyond your control.

I wonder if part of the blame here comes to the apps pushing people to write reviews. I have a hard time thinking that person would go out of their way to leave a negative review like that, but if Yelp pings and encourages them to describe what they thought of their meal, I could see someone just typing whatever came to their mind.

This reminds me of the Amazon product Q&A section. Someone will respond to a question with "I'm not sure" likely because Amazon notifies purchasers when someone asks a question.

Oh absolutely, I've been getting more and more email from Amazon Q&A telling me that I recently bought a product so I should try to answer a question about it.

On the other hand, I did ask a question on Amazon just yesterday and have received 5 answers in under a day, so it their system does work to some extent.

I think this is a valid point, especially if the review count is gameified so you are rewarded when leaving more reviews. I see plenty of Google maps reviews from people tagged as "Local Guides" that respond to questions about a location with something like "I don't know, call them".

As an aside, favorite negative review I have heard of is one for the Taj Mahal complaining that it is too far from the airport.