YOU HAD
ME @ LOL
and thought I’d do it the old fashioned way. Back on Yelp, Grier’s
distinctive and prolific reviews
earned her “Elite” status on the
review-sharing site and — along
with an eye-catching profile picture of her in a strappy black top
— lots of male attention.
Grier says she’d receive “three
or four flirtatious messages every
other day” from men on Yelp hoping for more than a restaurant recommendation. And she soon discovered that while on Chemistry.
com and Match.com she knew only
what the men would reveal in their
profiles, on Yelp, she could see
what they did in their spare time,
how well-spoken they were in their
reviews and, thanks to the public
nature of Yelp’s “compliments”
system, anyone else they might be
flirting with at the same time.
Like online dating sites, these
niche sites have built in filtration
systems. Only instead of relying
on people to self-report as nonsmokers or gym-rats, review sites
offer up the matter of a user’s life
for the public to sift through. Are
they adventurous eaters? Awful spellers? Sports obsessed? A
look through Yelp reviews — or
even 140 character tweets – can
yield incriminating evidence.
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
Grier recalls
being intrigued
by an attractive
man in Los Angeles who had
messaged her via
the site. Then she
read his reviews.
“I started
thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God,
I don’t know if
he’s an airhead or what, but he’s
not totally smart,” Grier recalls.
“You can tell a lot about a person’s intelligence level based on
what they write.”
More than a few of the notes
Grier exchanged through Yelp’s private messaging service turned into
longer correspondences, and there
were three men she actually met in
person, though not before weeks of
extensive back-and-forths online
and on the phone. Grier says she
had to have each man’s email address, cell phone number, full name
and workplace before agreeing to
get together offline (a vetting process through which she discovered
one Yelp suitor was, in fact, married). Of course online daters aren’t
known for their honesty, either: In
a survey of online dating profiles,
researchers from Cornell University