The problem with this is that everyone uses Yelp and nobody but hipsters uses foursquare. I'm fact even hipsters have moved on from foursquare. Without liquidity of use any ratings system will just be so sparse as to be anecdotal.
I don't see a problem wit yelp, reading only a star rating isn't a good way to make it useful, you have to speed read and sample the reviews. At a glance I can tell a reviewer who's fake, or one of the many that just like to hear the sound of their own voice, or they are just an opinionated asshole. But when you speed read a few comments you can pick up general trends. For example if many reviewers all say a hotel was noisy there might be something in it. Ditto for amazon. The "solution" that some have tried is to rate the rating, then use a pagerank-link algorithm to module the effect any one rater on the rating. In other words, if many people who themselves have been rated at rating highly accurately, then my influence on a rating is higher.
The suggestions I have seen here (mainly collaborative filtering) may be of merit, if that's have foursquare plan to do it then with more of a representative sampling of users and maybe it will work well. Currently though they would need a lot more users.
But personally I find yelp very useful, it just requires more effort than glancing at the star rating.
I don't see a problem wit yelp, reading only a star rating isn't a good way to make it useful, you have to speed read and sample the reviews. At a glance I can tell a reviewer who's fake, or one of the many that just like to hear the sound of their own voice, or they are just an opinionated asshole. But when you speed read a few comments you can pick up general trends. For example if many reviewers all say a hotel was noisy there might be something in it. Ditto for amazon. The "solution" that some have tried is to rate the rating, then use a pagerank-link algorithm to module the effect any one rater on the rating. In other words, if many people who themselves have been rated at rating highly accurately, then my influence on a rating is higher.
The suggestions I have seen here (mainly collaborative filtering) may be of merit, if that's have foursquare plan to do it then with more of a representative sampling of users and maybe it will work well. Currently though they would need a lot more users.
But personally I find yelp very useful, it just requires more effort than glancing at the star rating.