The Wily Filipino

Why Yelp Sucks (Sometimes).

So is it just me, or is Yelp one of the most casually racist websites on the net? (There are, of course, bloggers who make spewing hate rants part of their business; the old Yahoo forums, now closed down probably for the same reason, were way worse than Yelp.) But Yelp seems far more insidious to me because all the slurs are done under the guise of reviews; what's more, they're perpetrated by young people who clearly think this is all funny and cool and hip and vote for similar entries.

I don't think you'd find any other major "review" site -- not Epinions, not Amazon, and certainly not Zagat's -- that would include references to (and this is just a random sampling) Vietnamese gangsters, rat meat, Filipino thugs, cat meat, greasy Mexican busboys, dog meat, the size of Japanese penises, Russian mafia, a waitress's poor English, and diarrhea. Granted, the insults are fairly equal-opportunity -- wait staff and clientele are mercilessly portrayed just a shade below slander -- and I understand that Yelp is supposed to be irreverent and all, but this is ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong: Yelp's a great reference for maps and addresses and price ranges and so on. And the reader familiar with Yelp knows that it's not all like this, of course, and that I'm focusing only on the bad stuff; there are a lot of sophisticated reviews written by people who are obvious foodies and actually know what good food is like, as opposed to what is merely cheap and decent. (The dive bar reviews are also hilarious.) But still.

Probably the worst impulse that Yelp panders to is the delight in trashing a particular place. The wittier the insults are, the higher the ratings, and thus Yelp tends to inflate the value of writers who can trash-talk the most lyrically. Yelp provides a user-friendly venue as well for some of the most egregiously ethnocentric opinions that many of my friends and students wouldn't dare say in public. The writer can then walk away, safe in the knowledge that she or he is now a Reviewer. (I am by no means innocent of this, of course -- I make criticisms from the safety of my blog, just because I can, even without any requisite expertise -- but I'd like to think I'm a little more responsible.)

It's significant, I think, that a common theme to the restaurant reviews is the writer's shock in the face of unfamiliar cuisine. And "unfamiliar" here tends to be anything that can't be found inside a suburban American mall. How one could be rewarded for such willful ignorance -- especially in a city like San Francisco! -- is beyond me.