It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday

Well, I finally did it. Something I've been meaning to do for a few months now, but could never fully bring myself to do.

I quit yelp. Never thought I'd type that out.

Well, I'm not quitting per se. But I'm definitely taking a break. For a while. At least until the end of summer. At that point I'll reassess the issue and try to figure out if it'll be a labor of love, or just labor.

Now a lot of you are probably surprised at this. Me too. I remember when I first joined yelp. It was in the balmy June of 2007. I had broken up with a real ballbuster of a woman. To say I was a little "off" would be an understatement. I figured I had to do something besides staying locked up in my apartment trying not to think of her. So I started scoping out restaurants and bars to go to.

Now while google will give you plenty of options, it won't give you any way to make a reliable decision as to whether a certain restaurant is good or not. At least not on its own. So I figured I'd scope out the Washington Post's (now defunct) CityGuide.

Or, as I started to call it when it proved to be less than adequate, the ShittyGuide. Most of the reviews were quite old, and it seemed a lot of them were written either by the owner, or people who had an axe to grind with a given establishment. I wasn't getting the real scoop.

AOL's restaurant listings were a little better, but again, too many of the reviews were dated, and I found a few intriguing restaurants that turned out later to be closed. So clearly no one's minding the shop.

As I started googling restaurants more and more, I kept on getting steered to a site called "yelp." What was interesting about yelp was that the reviews were a lot more credible on first glance than those of other review sites. It was strongly encouraged to have a picture to go along with your profile, and the whole site just had a certain trustworthiness and sense of community that other sites were lacking.

So I started relying on yelp more and more to make informed decisions. And one day it hit me: if yelp's helping me out so much, I ought to contribute reviews of my own so that I can help people make similarly informed decisions. That whole "leave the woods cleaner when you leave than when you got there" mentality. So I dipped my toe into the water and wrote my first reviews. One of which was for a "diner" called Pete's Diner. My ex had raved about this place, and after going here for breakfast with her once, I was... underwhelmed. Nothing special. At all. Honestly the coffee tasted like Maxwell House and the eggs tasted exactly the way I made them. I mean, to me the point of dining out (unless you're feeling lazy) is to get food that's better than you'd make it at home, assuming you actually know how to cook what you're going out to eat for. That's been my guiding philosophy for dining out.

Yet there were yelpers who thought this place was the be all, end all of greasy spoon fare. Time to put my own two cents in! So I did. And then I thought about all the other places I went to recently and started to yelp those too! It became addictive. Moreso when Miriam, the DC Community Manager, sent me my first compliment welcoming me to DC yelp.

And then it finally dawned on me... yelp's as much a social networking site as it is a review site. I started to make (virtual) friends on the site (often to become actual friends, or at least acquaintances). I still remember when Richard posted a thread along the lines of "I'm bored and want to see a movie. Who's with me?" and several of us joined him on a spur of the moment lark to see Once (an incredible Irish film). Soon I started going to trivia nights and gradually expanded my social circle. And started going out to new restaurants just for the sake of yelping them. Hell, I had a bad date, knew it wasn't going anywhere after the initial brunch, and raced home merrily so I could write the damn review while it was still fresh in my head! Yeah, who gives a shit about the date man... I can't wait to get home and write about the scrambled eggs!

Eventually I got my first Review of the Day. For those of you that don't know, each day yelp selects a review (how it's actually selected is a matter of conjecture) and highlights it on the home page of its respective yelp community. So now I'm swimming in compiments and praise (I liked that!) and had even more motivation to craft reviews. Man... how could I have ever been yelping! The rush of gaining new friends quickly, the accolades and praise for writing reviews that were fun to write, the joy of showing off yelp (and shamelessly self-promoting my reviews!)... it was like I was on Cloud 9.

And then it all turned to shit. Right about this time last year. No virtual community is immune from the presence of trolls, and yelp sure got one in the form of S. If you can think of the most narcissistic, rude, self-diagnosed Asperger's headcase that you've ever known, chances are you're thinking of S. No one liked this prick. Moody, self-obsessed, belittled others while trolling for compliments, couldn't get laid in a whorehouse (pretty much by his own admission), this guy should've had his pictures placed on advertisements for RU486. And the pisser was, he never reviewed anything! And everybody (rightfully) hated his guts! So here you have a person who everybody hates (for no other reason than he's a total putz) and doesn't even use the site for what it's intended for.

So of course he got into pissing matches with everybody on the yelp Talk threads. And naturally when that happens, that just attracts people of a similar mindset. Kinda like the broken windows theory: you leave an abandoned car outside someone's house, and it sets off a signal that people don't care about the area. You get vandalism, petty crime, etc. as a result. Yelp would routinely suspend him from the site, but for reasons indeterminable, never gave him his walking papers. Big mistake.

Things kind of spiraled out of control on yelp for the past 8 months or so, and I don't think it was a coincidence that yelpers, heretofore active on the site, started disappearing en masse. So now the solid core of yelp was being dissolved, and in its absence, even more trolls started visiting the site, only with less people to keep such matters in check. I always thought I'd be one of the last defenders up on the parapets, raising the banner and marshaling the remaining forces in the keep to make a last stand in the courtyard. Well... that didn't come to pass.

You see, in the past few months, yelp became a far, far more toxic environment than it had been even a few months prior. For reasons that I have yet to figure out, DC yelp seemed to have become a shingle for people who didn't want to review restaurants so much as they wanted to shit up the talk threads with truly inane commentary. And of course when anybody took issue with it, it was met with a barrage of "hurr... teh intarnetz iz not serious bizness." You'd see the same five or six people start (or hijack) a thread that honestly resembled an IM session.

The straw that broke the camel's back, however... the event that truly disappointed those few old school yelpers who remained, was yelp's decision to let business owners comment on individual reviews. Now, yelp was going to enable individual business owners to comment on individual reviews of their establishment. Reasons why this was not warmly welcomed by the yelp community include:

• the potential to shit up reviews. Imagine an endless back-and-forth pissing match in the reviews section between a yelper and a business owner. "You suck. No, you suck! No, YOU suck! No, YOU"... you see what I'm getting at here? If I pull up yelp because I want to read reviews for a new steakhouse and see a catfight, guess what? I'm going to go to another website.
• the potential to have reviews that are less than 100 percent honest. If you're afraid of getting negative feedback by the owner of a restaurant that you had a bad experience at, are you now going to come out with both guns blazing? Or are you even going to bother writing a review at all?
• the potential to water down reviews because people are afraid to be as creative as they once were. Hmm... maybe you liked a particular restaurant, and you want to write a funny review. It'll be positive, maybe even 5 stars, but you want to jazz it up a little. Maybe one or two F-bombs or some adult humor. What if now you're censoring yourself because you're afraid someone'll take it the wrong way?
• the fact that it's too "corporate." One of the big selling points of yelp was that they didn't try to suck up to the business community. You were free to be honest and not worry about being censored due to sponsors or a given business not liking what you had to say (key word being "honest"). This just reeks of being co-opted by the business community.

While yelp says there will be features "in place" to guard against this, I'm not particularly positive they'll be of much use. Yelp has its hands full with trolls and spam as it is (a lot of which falls through the cracks as it is), and I don't think they'll be able to garner the resources needed to keep tabs on this.

Compounding this is the fact that yelp's been called out for ethical issues in the past (such as sucking up to sponsors by removing critical reviews, and bullying business owners to pay for sponsorships (and when they don't, good reviews mysteriously get removed and negative ones fill the void). It's been enough of an issue that many of us speculate this new business owner comment feature is yelp's way of playing damage control. To be fair, I can't prove any of these negative allegations (like the aforementioned extortion), and I've always defended yelp on this score in the past. No more.

When I saw yelp's email alert about this new feature, I actually got angry. And I thought about all the other things wrong with yelp:

• It seems yelp's a beacon for every person who can't be assed to use the search function on yelp and instead post useless threads like "Halp! I want a steak for dinner. Where should I go?" Seriously, a lot of them were about this inane.
• Moderation on the talk threads was near non-existent. Too many trolls allowed to run rampant. And if someone did get flagged or suspended, too many people turned it into a witch hunt to find out why anyone would find a comment like "get the fuck out of here asshole, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about" offensive. FREEDOM OF SPEACH AMIRITE RAAAARH!!!1!
• Too many serious, long-time yelpers (okay, long-time being a matter of perspective) being turned off by the direction of the talk threads, which devolved into the same five or six people (some of whom I believe are truly a little "slow") bantering back and forth.

So, I did what I thought I would never do. I wrote a review of DC yelp, laid out what was wrong, and announced that I wouldn't be seen on yelp for the foreseeable future. While I don't want to say it broke my heart, I'd be lying to you if I said it wasn't a decision that was made lightly. And when I started getting feedback from people who agreed with me... well, I'll admit I had second thoughts. Maybe I should stay (as some have advised) and try to become a positive influence to mitigate all the rot currently associated with the site.

But no (sigh). I quickly talked myself out of that notion. When I wrote my last review, it seemed like it took forever to write. And I didn't have any fun writing it. It almost seemed like an utter burden. And then I remembered something.

There was an early 80s porn star by the name of Veronica Hart. She starred in some critically-acclaimed movies (as far as smut goes) and walked away from it all in the mid-80s. Her reasoning? It wasn't fun anymore, and she made a promise to herself that she'd stop performing the minute it felt like her job was a job.

And... that's where I find myself now. Will I ever write another review for the site. Perhaps, but not for now. It also remains to be seen if the site will take a turn for the worse in the coming months (I have my suspicions on the matter, but I think the site's headed for a sea change, either for good or for bad, in the next few months).

So why did I call this post It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday? Because the one thing that kept me from abandoning the site completely (I had actually toyed with closing out my account, in which case the reviews would be deleted) were the warm fuzzies I got when I first joined the site. There have been all sorts of things that I would have never done or experienced prior to joining yelp:

• Hung out in Georgetown (thanks Kathleen, Stef, Kevin, Michelle, and of course Jeff, for whom we were trying to find at least one comfortable pair of jeans!)
• Played trivia with a group of complete strangers (thanks Craig!)
  
• Rode a city bus (I had a serious distrust of buses for years)
  
• Modeled in the buff in front of a roomful of strangers (thanks Mikkela!)
• Gotten a Brazilian wax (thanks Jade!)
• Found the one decent barber shop in DC (thanks Venu!)
• Eaten at two Peruvian chicken joints. Back to back (thanks Su and the Carnivore Crew!)
• Gone out for a group manicure and pedicure (thanks Karman!)
• Eaten sushi. And discovering I liked it (thanks Armenoush!)
• Gotten excited about going to Target. Yes... Target (thanks DC!)
• Braved the inexorable crowd at Matchbox for some of the best food in the city (thanks Kathleen!)
• Liked it so much that I came a goddamned week early to a UYE and will never live it down (thanks Kevin!)
• Hiked about a mile to the Metro with a heavy box, working up a sweat on a cold day, but giddy that I finally found a place that carried all my Belgian beer favorites (thanks Jim!)
• Discovered that if I want Mexican food in the District, I know exactly who to go to for recommendations (thanks Mary Kay and Laura!)
• Found out that I really had the inner strength to walk away from something that gave me all these experiences, knowing that it's the people I met along the way that are truly important (thanks Stef!)

In the end, it's the people that made the site what it was (and could still be). So rest assured that while I may have said goodbye to yelp, I'm not saying goodbye to any of you.

I just gotta reconcile myself to the fact that you can never really go back to the way things once were...