I think we collectively concluded some time ago that reviews are worthless, even on GMaps?

Honestly, using it for daily hotel searches for 500 days: The reviews are not worthless.

It requires a lot of sorting out and the results have to be taken with a grain of salt.

I stopped using GMaps and I still don't think they are worthless. Some companies buy fake reviews, some use shady techniques such as free drink/appetizer for a review. In my experience so far those are exceptions, not standard. I think corelation between quality and GMaps average review score is quite high - at least for restaurants.

You could check out reviews on gmaps and use Organic Maps or OSMAnd for everything else. A bit of a pain, maybe, but change is rarely trivial.

Maps.me, from which this is derived, uses third-party data (e.g. booking.com, etc), to integrate both booking and reviews into the map. I ultimately went away because maps.me is a real sinkhole of personal data, but experience is otherwise pretty good (and the tiles look better than osmand for sure).

maybe worth it to make up your own mind

are you under the impression he eats at a restaurant and then checks reviews to see if it was good?

no.

i am under the impression that he avoids going to a restaurant if the reviews are bad.

I don't find reviews helpful in making a decision for a restaurant - as long as the food isn't so bad it'll make me sick it's fine. I do like to see the menus and opening hours, though.

But a lot of people really do appreciate that kind of help, so much so I don't think any competitor will get anywhere without that kind of data.

Would you be interested in starting an open source business review project?

This already exists: https://openplacereviews.org/

There is even a plugin for OSMAnd but I have not tried it yet.

Thanks for pointing that out. I was not expecting: "Data is stored in a blockchain form"