Fortunately, for restaurants and perhaps for everything, I don't seem to notice anybody caring about yelp reviews or ratings anymore, and that's been the case (in Austin, Texas where I live, anyway) for years now. I mean, how often do you check on Yelp before deciding to check out a restaurant? I think it's been over a decade since I did such a thing, if I ever did. It may be precisely the tendency you mention, that is the reason people stopped caring about yelp reviews.

Ever since Yelp started excluding my (2 or 3) useful reviews of fraudulent businesses, I no longer trust them.

I asked them why they were filtering my reviews, and got the old "sorry, the algorithm has decided you're not to be trusted, nothing I can do" line.

So much for trying to warn people, I suppose. Though I've seen similar behavior with Google too.

6 or 8 years ago I used Yelp often. But when they began to insist on showing me e.g. 12 McDonalds when I searched for $Specific_Local_Burger_Place, showing sponsored results up top to obscure the restaurant I just clicked on, and tried to force me to use their app instead of their web site, I began walking toward the exit.

When I found out later how they were running a protection racket to shake down restaurants, I ran for the exit.

Nice restaurant review service you have there, Yelp. Be a shame if something happened to it. Especially if that something was your own damn fault.

Yelp is still plenty good as a rough approximation for quality for me. Anything under a 3.5ish is buyer beware and anything above a 4 is a pretty safe bet the restaurant is good enough.

Yelp specifically I check very in frequently, Google maps however shows the reviews upfront and center, so I take those fairly seriously

I'd imagine you're also getting a pool of more impulsive reviews than Yelp, for what that's worth. People are more likely to already have an account, and you can leave reviews directly from a Google search page.

Seconding Google Maps for ratings.

The tyranny of the vocal minority. Surely one of the worst unintended consequences of everyone being on the internet

Nobody cares about Yelp.

Ehhhhh maybe not for local restaurants, but I think Yelp is a lot of people's go-to source for finding restaurants when visiting a new location.

Yelp is the default restaurant rating display in Apple Maps. Between that and Google Maps, a lot of people are going to see those ratings and it does have some impact even if people don't trust them absolutely — otherwise businesses wouldn't feel that they needed to pay Yelp to hide bad reviews.

I search on Yelp when looking for a restaurant to go to. I’m more likely to go to places that show up higher in the search ranking, and the rating seems to be a big component of that.

Other the other hand, I don’t actually read the reviews at all. I do sometimes look at the user-uploaded photos.

I care about Yelp. It is still the best place to find businesses and restaurants. It is an app I rarely think about, yet use it almost everyday.

I just don’t give a fuck about Yelpers.

They won't let you see much without the app. I've never been back.

I have the app because I’d rather be a first class citizen.