The 10 Types of Reviewers on Yelp

The kingdom of Yelp provides a great opportunity to weave your experience into a collective memory quilt of what it is like to experience a sandwich business. Or strip club. Or whatever. It's popular and addicting, cataloguing these moments, which then transform the anonymous individual into a taste-maker—in their own mind, at any rate.

If you submerge yourself in the site for long enough, you start to recognize familiar faces. Here are the 10 types of reviewers on Yelp.

Dreamers come to Yelp with only a remedial understanding of what the site is for. Write about a quantifiable aspect of a bar's quality? No. They're here to tell you how orange the flowers in the bartender's hair at the burger joint they stopped at on their road trip home from California was. They sign in to talk about a lovely new graffiti tag on the Williamsburg Bridge, and how it reminds them of skateboarding behind ice cream trucks in the summers of the past. They review the thunderstorm of the night before, 5 stars for the thunder, 3 stars for the lightning (there was a tree in the way!).

These sorts of people used to keep a journal, used to write inspiring quotes on the backs of Stop signs so the birds would have nicer days, strap disposable cameras to benches and watch people interact with their artful experiment. God knows what they're doing on Yelp, but bless them for infusing the site with a little lightness. Now if we could only stop rolling our eyes long enough to read one of their reviews.

The blogger with a new toy (not to be confused with the Dreamer), these folks are easily identifiable by their love for personal and miscellaneous detail, the way they reveal more to you about their own lives than you know about some of your closest friends.

These folks really know how to set a scene. They'll tell you about the morning they were having, dealing with the cleaners that said their coat would be ready for the big party tomorrow but who subsequently lost the ticket (don't worry, they're going to call back when they find it), all of which winds down a twisting path to their "needing some happy hour love," but only if they can grab the appropriate drinking buddy. After approximately three Facebook posts and a hilarious interaction with their mom (lolz), everything was ready to go—until the car wouldn't start. When they finally arrived, there was a light rain falling, which they rather liked (sort of like those misters on restaurant decks in the summer), and do you even care anymore? We're in paragraph three and we only know the restaurant they will be going to because we came here to read about it. But they get to the restaurant eventually, which sets these reviewers apart from the Dreamers.

The Oversharers tend to be the most literate (not to be confused with literary) people on Yelp. Perhaps this is why they feel the need to unleash their powers of description so thoroughly, a gift to the agoraphobics and friendless alike.

Though Yelp is nowhere close to being the troll haven that the rest of the Internet is, the “Experts” make it their number one priority to infuse their every praise and complaint with the experience or qualification that allows them to go there (oh yes they did). To wit: The yellow square on my apple pie was actual cheese and not the cheese product you would expect, and I should know, I used to eat a 12-pack a day as a child, barely getting the elaborate Polaroid film-type plastic off before sliding it like a fish down my little bear jaws.

That's great. If you had actual credentials that pertained to your reviewing ability you would be writing for a site that rewarded its writers with money, not badge icons.

As a server, there is truly nothing weirder than watching someone write about the food you served as they eat it. It is the epitome of information-age quickness. Watching someone yelp at the table is like walking in on someone using the bathroom. You don't want to disturb them while they work, regurgitating their food into their phone, or, even stranger, laptop. Do you ask how the food is? No. What's the point? You'll find out in twenty minutes when you check the Internet, where you can read more about them, if you're into that. Maybe ask them to be your friend and message them: "Was there anything else I could have done for you?"

Here lies the real heart and soul of the operation. This is the dream team, the inner cabinet, the think tank, the driving force and the ultimate word on canoe rentals, that hot new froyo place and the closest Starbucks to wherever you are at all times.

Elite is an honor bestowed upon the most prolific and well-received reviewers Yelp has to offer. These folks use features on the site you didn't even know existed. They were the first to review 122 places that no one cares about, and 20 that a lot of people care about (a half-step above posting the word "first" on a news story). They get compliments from strangers for their well-tailored, dead-on reviews. And they will turn on the things they review so fast—if you're a restaurant, watch you ass. Take their beloved devil's food cake off the menu and, as a restaurant, watch your stars darken. Because these people update their reviews. Every visit. It is the burden of the crown.

Why is it that when people have a great meal, a great spa day, a great coffee, they immediately thank the recommender? Even if they do say something to the staff, the compliment is usually laden with who sent them there in the first place. “I'd never heard of this place, but my genius friend sent me here (she really is smart).” Do they feel more warmly towards the recommendation of the experience than the actual experience?

It can't be so, and yet "friends" exists as a feature on Yelp. It's a hard pill to swallow. What's the vetting process? Is it as simple as, say, every Facebook friend who is also on Yelp becomes a Yelp friend? There are rumors of Yelping parties, but who is brave enough to investigate?

Most vendetta writers, probably the most common type on the site, aren't out for blood so to speak, they just didn't like something that they had "heard good things about" ("though I don't remember where"). People need to air their grievances, and that's what Yelp is for. But this brand of Yelper is more emotionally vulnerable. This person is dealing with something completely unrelated to dinner. He or she angrily let fly that the only kinds of people who would ever go to this wine bar are stuck-up rich white housewives and young preppy douchebags, "like my ex, and his new cougar girlfriend."

It's hard not to cringe when reading the review of someone who is truly angry, who you can almost hear actually hitting the keys, a few seconds from throwing the computer across the room and then holding the wrecked shell of the machine like a dying dog in the street. Truly hurt people, funneling their frustration into a place where they feel they can pass some of their burden off to the rest of the world. It works. One feels truly burdened after reading these.

Just like your grandmother writing an anonymous letter to your boss suggesting you be made employee of the year, some Yelp reviews are too good to be true. Nothing could make your Yelp page (or your fridge) more dignified than a gleaming five-star, ten-paragraph review of your church, written by the Pope himself.

Of course, there's more than a good chance that these reviews are fake. There's not a lot of heavy security involved in signing up for a Yelp account. And while some suspicions of undercover Yelps are obvious enough to be removed, there's more than a bit of uncertainty in many of the reviews you can find on the site (even the poorly written ones).

On the flip side, it's fun to believe that there are famous people on Yelp, actors practicing the nuance of disappointment over car washes. Great method prep.

Maybe your first review is about that hot new restaurant where the waiters all dress like coal miners and drop your food off in birdcages, and how it just wasn't as impressive as you overheard your bitchy neighbor say it would be. But let's take a step back to ask a question: What leads a person to Yelp for the first time? How does it happen?

More often than not, first review reads timidly: a nice soup and a decent club sandwich from the cafeteria at the hospital. And that's it. Not another review to her name. A sticky note dropped into the floating island of garbage that is the Internet. There are no answers.

Easily the saddest posts on Yelp come from the bowling ball pins that are the business owners. Yes, anyone who opens a shop knows they're opening themselves up to the popularity contest and dollar-vote that is public opinion. However, your business is apart of who you are, so it comes as no surprise that, when you receive broad and hurtful attacks from essentially nameless people, you'll want to clap back. But don't. Please. You know the advice: acknowledging a rumor will only give it credence? Learn it.

There have been a few instances of businesses very calmly responding to unfounded insults and exaggerations about their establishments, and these are cause for enormous pride and joy (about mankind). But there are also those occasions where you read the angry, Mountain Dew-fueled responses of an electronics repair shop owner who congratulates people who write good reviews about him by saying, “Thank you for the honest review,” while claiming all bad reviews are planted by a disgruntled employee (which, even if it's true, is alarming). C'mon.