I was once traveling and some friends found a highly reviewed place on Yelp. When we got there it turned out the glowing reviews were all written by the owner's son. At least he felt bad enough about it to give us free dessert.
How/why was this revealed to you?
I assume you mean it's among the hardest to game except by paying Yelp to remove negative reviews - that's a pretty important caveat when it comes to trustworthiness.
I'm almost entirely de-Googled at this point, but I make an exception specifically to avoid Yelp, which somehow manages to be even worse than Google within its niche.
I haven't bothered to look in a long time, but the reviews I've seen are obviously bad. I can find menus on the restaurant's real page. The locality views are worse than, say, Apple maps. There's just no reason to use them.
Add in that they harm the livelihood of restaurants owned by people I like, and yeah, they're another crap site that continues to be annoying by trying to get in between me and someone who wants to feed me.
Hardest to game is like lesser evils. Lesser evils remain evil, as hard games remain played.
I personally value direct interactions with people I do business with more than ever in my life. Too many middle companies all working some angle to make more than the value they may actually deliver.
Well, a few things:
Trust in all this kind of service is reaching a low ebb. We keep finding incidents where the behavior is not as represented.
Frankly, the money might be too good.
And that's fine. Is what it is, people do what they do
I am stepping back, reevaluating these kinds of value propositions, and recommending peers do the same.
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.