There was a brief period where Foursquare based recommendations were good and drawn from your wider social graph. Now we’ve gone back to Yelp and Google Maps where reviews and ratings don’t mean anything. A lower than 4 star review on GMaps has netted me a cease-and-desist e-mail for defamation.
That puts personally curated travel docs and word of mouth back in play as Thrillist describes here. Every Dutch person has or knows somebody who has a Berlin Google Doc with all the Geheimtipps. Dutch people’s tastes are fairly predictable and pedestrian, so these’ll mostly be cheap Asian eateries in Prenzlauerberg but that’s also fine.
For me the most interesting recommendations for Berlin but also for other cities come through TikTok. The algorithm is well tuned to my type of person and in the short videos it’s pretty easy to size up whether somebody knows what they’re talking about or not.
https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/google-docs-are-the-ideal-travel-guides
