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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2910 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 8, 2026

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Anyone else feel like Google maps reviews (and most other online review systems) have become totally worthless the last few years? It seems like every single place has overwhelmingly 5 star reviews, no matter how bad it is. I can't tell if it's bots, paid reviewers, or just a weird culture where people think they're "being nice" by leaving a 5 star review. Either way, i no longer trust them at all.

The star system is broken, and nothing can fix it.

For one thing, no one can agree what the scale even means in the first place. Reviewers will write "Wonderful, quaint little burger truck by the beach. Best I've ever had. 2/5 stars", because they think there's some objective restaurant ranking ranging from broken vending machine to Michelin, and a particularly good burger truck sits at ~2/5 on that scale, so it gets a glowing review and 2 stars. I think this derives from hotel ratings, where there was a defined meaning for what each star meant.

Do restaurants work like hotels? no idea. Personally, I'm inclined to rate things by what they're trying to do, so a perfect food truck gets 5 stars, and a slightly flawed upscale place gets 4. But then, do prices matter? If the burger truck has great food, but overpriced, to they get docked stars? Is the rating scale linear or logarithmic?

And then there's the 5 star/1 star problem. Everyone knows the average rating is important, so they rate to affect the average. If you like the place, you want to give them as much of an advantage on the algorithm as you can, whether they bribed you for that rating or not. You are being nice by leaving a 5 star review. Meanwhile, haters give a mean-spirited 1 star no matter what the actual quality because it's going to hurt the place more that way.

Reviews in general have that problem, but if you focus on the text instead of the score you can usually get some useful information. Ignore the Karens complaining about rude employees or the manager not taking their problems seriously, or the 5 star reviews probably prompted by employees or bots and focus on unique information. A Google Maps review recently warned me off an automated carwash that was malfunctioning on one side, with the reviewer having pictures of his car half washed as proof.

It mostly comes up when I'm trying to find a place in a city i haven't been before. So I'm skimming through hundreds of reviews accross dozens of different places, and they all seem to be people who have never eaten at a restaurant before so they're just dazzled by the concept of having someone bring food to them in exchange for money.

My process for finding good restaurants in a new place

  1. Generate a )ist from Tiktoks and the local subreddit. From that list:

  2. look at menus, you can generally immediately eliminate places with shitty menus. You can maybe tell upside from menus, but this is easier to fake. You'll also go through their website on the way to the menu, which is also a signal.

  3. huge agree on reviews, at this point I largely ignore positive reviews. I mostly focus on the pictures of food, and then I read a bunch of negative reviews. Are they negative because the person is mad or from things outside of a restaurant control? Great. Negative because the food sucks? Eliminate.

Usually you end up with like 3-5 places, now just pick one, you won't be able to make a perfectly informed decision and this is enough.

An acquaintance of mine was bilked out of a five-figure some by a shady contractor a few years ago. After fighting with him in court for two years, she finally agreed to settle. He returned a tenth of what he stole, and in exchange, he demanded that she change her one-star Google review to a five-star. I mentioned this story to a friend of mine who works in a related field, and he said he’s seen that same scenario play out several times before. There’s unfortunately just not much anyone can do to prevent such behavior.

A tenth of a five-figure sum? So a few thousand dollars? Surely she spent more on 2 years of legal action than that.

Should have told him to suck a fat one, and leave the 1-star review.

My understanding is that the sum he returned pretty much paid her legal fees, and that was it. Her family was pissed that she settled for basically nothing, but she felt she “just had to move on.”

Yeah that’s less than nothing, unless she values her time and sanity at zero.

If the story is accurate as you say, I’d have been going to every local news station, calling up his competitors to let them know how to market against him, maybe buy a billboard or two myself…

she values her time and sanity at zero

You may be surprised at the number of people to whom that applies. If you ever get the chance, ask a civil lawyer to describe some of the most trivial lawsuits he’s been involved with.

They are still useful. However you must sort by "new" and not the default recommendation! This is a much more random sample. As always, the 2-4 star reviews are also very useful. The main thing I wish they would include is whether or not the place solicits reviews. This is doubly true for non-restaurant reviews, which are by far the lowest reliability.

Also, it's more useful to think of the reviews in "bands", or relative to others, rather than a point estimate. A 4.6 restaurant is going to be meaningfully better than a 4.1 restaurant nearly 100% of the time. But a 4.4 vs a 4.2? I wouldn't ever make a decision based mostly on that.

Reviews as a whole have become fairly useless due to bots and paid shills. Even forums like Buy it For Life have been seeing hints of bots posting to fluff a product.

The best way to wade through the grey sludge I've found is to focus on 4-star reviews, but we'll see how long that lasts.

The details in the 1-star reviews' text can sometimes be helpful; just ignore the ones where the reviewer's an idiot and see what legitimate complaints are left. But yeah, uncalibrated numeric ratings are worthless.

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