All posts in yelp

I was doing some work looking at how people set up content rating pages, and I looked at Yelp as an example.

While Yelp has had some issues recently, it still provides a good example of how community-driven ratings can work.

I've always liked to see ratings embedded alongside comments, and Yelp does this well. Their comment form is simple and effective; this is a good strategy to help mitigate drive-by raters; aka, people who put little to no thought into their feedback. While the comparison is not strictly accurate, I tend to think of these things in terms of sensitivity versus specificity: when collecting ratings, it's better to get fewer ratings of higher quality.

However, Yelp's page where they display content to end users is incredibly busy.

By my count, there are 11 different ways for people to rate a business, like a business, write a review about a business, and/or like and/or rate a rating or a reviewer.

When you are looking at content/information that has been rated by a community, what do you look for? What helps make community ratings valuable to you?