Most cities have sketchy places, what is unique about Tenderloin, it has hole-in-the-wall restaurants that are actually quite good. So you go in to a place and might say in the review, this place looks sketchy, but the food is great. As apposed to purely sketchy place that you do not even want to go in to. So you do not go or leave a review. Another possibility are the massage parlors, which are truly sketchy. I learned that having the opportunity to sit in at the SF Coalition Against Human Trafficking which is a collaboration between the non profits and the government organizations in the city fighting the issue.
This is actually a good way to figure out where to stay when visiting a city. Click tourist and avoid, click hipster and go there. Maybe go to the slightly less red areas for a more low key night. At least that's how you'd have fun if you were a 20-30 something in NYC.
So you're too good to be a tourist when you're a tourist? You sound like a hipster.
> click hipster and go there
Oh wait...
But in all seriousness, if I go to Rome, I want to see The Colosseum. If I go to Amsterdam, I want to see the Van Gogh Museum. Not being a tourist somewhere means having already seen what the tourists there are just seeing for the first time. Would you really prefer to go everywhere and never see anything at all? I'm not going to NYC just to see hipsters. I can see that at home.
Or you could see historic landmarks during the day and explore restaurants and bars local residents actually enjoy in the evenings. Restaurants that cater to tourists do so because you can profit off of their unfamiliarity with the area without having to provide a competitive dining experience in a municipality that broadly offers many excellent dining options. Wanting to find a plethora of interesting experiences when you travel and avoid being taken advantage of doesn't make you a hipster. And even if you are a hipster, who cares?
PS - this comment was written by someone who you probably would consider a hipster. Full disclosure just in case that colors your view
How does being a tourist based business mean you don't have to "provide a competitive dining experience". Sure local based businesses have to cater to local residents in order to win repeat business but that doesn't stop for tourism. People vacation in the same places each year, the businesses that do well are ones that not only cater to these visitors, but leave a lasting impression. Top business get reviewed by publications/websites and generally do better if they provide a competitive product.
Don't let the exceptions (aka tourists traps) cloud the rule which is fairly globally true no matter what sector you operate in.
Disclosure: I live and work (B2B) in a primarily tourist based economy. I talk every day with business owners who cater to tourists, locals and part-time residents. Tourist traps that do well despite shitty service are rare.
Fisherman's wharf is no colosseum. Golden gates worth a look though.
Overall sf city culture is the main tourist attraction of sf, so it makes sense to seek that out. I was pretty unimpressed by sf until seeing some of the massive displays of humanity its fond of putting on.
It has nothing to do with being a hipster, just different tastes.
If you come to Amsterdam and go to the Red Light, Museumplein, and Heineken brewery, that's one experience, but most Amsterdammers are never at those places. They're having a picnic in Westerpark, and beers on a terrace at Browerij 't IJ... Same with SF... I grew up there, but I've never been to Alcatraz, and I think I've been to Pier 39 once when I was 10.
Not that those places have no value, but some travelers are more interested in lifestyle than photo checklists. If you only have a few days in Paris, a day at the Louvre just getting in your way of seeing the real city, unless you are a big art history fan and love lines.
Wow, your post brought back such great memories of my first trip to Amsterdam. Visiting the Van Gogh museum, walking through the red light district, having savory pancakes at a famous place... while all fun, are not the experiences I remember. Taking the tour and tasting at Browerij 't IJ, grocery shopping for a BBQ with a local friend in Muiderpoort, eating Bitterballen, the random pub I hung out in waiting for my tour of the Utrecht Tower... Those are things that I will always remember.
There is nothing hipster about wanting to experience things locals regularly do. There is also nothing wrong with doing touristy things. I love the pictures I took at "The Bean" in Chicago, or climbing the steps of the Utrecht Dom Tower. If you /love/ classical art, then the Van Gough museum or Louvre are must sees, otherwise I agree that in 20 years it'll just be a checkbox "I've been to the Louvre!". For me, it comes down to that I remember more experiences with people than with things.
Having mistakenly bought a house in a hipster infested area of London a few years ago, I wouldn't recommend your approach unless your idea of a good night out is doing copious amounts of coke in front of children out with their parents, getting pissed and vomiting over the pavement (sidewalk), getting your iPhone nicked and then wading through broken glass until you get to your hotel.
If you go to the London hipster map. I live square dead in the middle of it (the Shoreditch triangle). Granted I've only lived here for 4 months but the only 2 bad things that I've seen were:
1) Someone puked in the alleyway that leads to my door. I walked around it.
2) One day when coming home at 11pm, there were people smoking weed in front of my door and one guy was pissing against the building close to my door. I went inside and everyone minded their own business.
Yeah those are not the nicest of experiences, however I'm rewarded every day by incredible access to art & culture (and amazing music gigs I can walk to by foot) and -- plainly -- I love people who step outside normalcy in terms of how they dress & express themselves. It's fun to see and makes me push my own boundaries :)
EDIT: Shoreditch is by now also an incredibly safe & affluent/expensive area. Never once have I felt threatened here, I feel safe carrying my phone on me at all times of day/night. This might be different in the cheaper-but-also-hipster areas of Hackney like Dalston.
This was shoreditch. Don't forget between city road and shoreditch is one of the worst estates in London. You must have been lucky but we had constant problems 2-3 times a week.
Sold up and bought a nice place in Strawberry Hill for the same money and am awarded with peace and quiet and literally zero crime and antisocial behaviour. Everyone is either financial and/or tech, legal or medical as well.
Kinda interesting but I wonder if it is normalized at all for the yelp review density in a given area. See xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1138/ as I draw some unusual correlations in the Boston maps.
Either answer should give a valid measure of regional hipsterdom. Is it just hipsters that use Yelp? If so, go where they're reviewing. If not, follow the hipster tag. I can certainly vouch for the validity of the London version, that's for sure.
Am I missing something? For LA, it's telling me that the hipster areas are Silver Lake, WeHo, Venice, etc. Well, duh. As the Dothraki would say, "It is known."
Why doesn't it actually show the individual establishments adding heat to the map? I realize I could just search for it on their site, but I don't know if the measure of relevance would be the same. I'm really curious what's causing all that bacon heat.
My initial thoughts were to comment, This is really freaking cool, great idea whoever. But when I realized I couldn't put my own keywords in the url and zoom the map out and move it around I was somewhat less impressed, it's still a neat idea though.
But, I think it would be 'really freaking cool' to do this while accessing the entire database of places and reviews with any keywords you want. I know that would require more development and server resources. It would probably be rather challenging to do this efficiently on the fly rather than using preprocessed data from a limited geographic range, I'm sure there is a yelp engineer or two that would like to take on the challenge though.
I have no idea how Yelp has implemented this but I've done Heatmaps before.
Basic process I built relied on caching map tiles.
Pre-compute your raw data by lat/long. Build that into map tiles you overlay on the map by determining map area and converting lat/long to pixels on the tile. Load new tiles as the map is panned. Do it quickly if you want users to be happy. Cache everything.
Soho pretty much is both at once. Expensive cocktail bars next to old men's pubs, fancy restaurants next to fish & chip shops, exclusive members' clubs next to dirty downstairs speakeasies.
And full of people who say its not the same since "Jeff" died - I had a pint in the coach and horses in Soho and the barman actually "apologised" for me having to wait while he changed the barrel - I felt short changed :-)
Here's something similar I recently created.
http://ifdefined.com/hack_week.html
It uses a collection of keywords that you choose and then uses Nokia's HERE.com APIs to create a heatmap. The fun is coming up with the keywords. "Vegetarian" and "yoga" work pretty well for finding hipster places in the US, but for India not so much. Instead I tried "coffee", "pub", "pizza". "Sushi" works internationally except you-know-where.
And another one.. this one doesn't have Phoenix or San Antonio.. I mean there are a LOT of techie types in Phoenix and other cities in the top 10 excluded... it's not all "creative" most of the development here is more business oriented.. I just really get sick of these types of things not taking into account some of the largest cities in the country.
I'm just getting really, really tired of living in the 6th largest city in the US, not even including the very large suburbs, and always being excluded from these kinds of things.
I'm pretty sure Yelp has actual usage data that provides a better signal of which cities are worth the effort than population. Plus, trendy cities get talked about more than non-trendy ones by definition. More people care where hipsters hang out in Austin than where they hang out in Phoenix even though Austin is pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
The problem is, in not including the top 10 most populated cities in the US in things like this, they exclude a lot of the nation. This example in particular may not be great... but I am constantly seeing posts about new service X that doesn't include even the top 5 most populated cities... It's like excluding a large part of potential users. It's similar to releasing an IE-only site today.
This is pretty interesting. You might say that anybody who doesn't want the term hipster applied to them is a hipster. And everybody else is not a hipster. So then the best thing a hipster can do to lose their hipster status is to proclaim that they are indeed a hipster after all. How ironic...
Doesn't have the DFW either.
I really feel like the country wouldn't even know San Antonio existed if it wasn't for the Spurs and the Alamo. It doesn't seem like a place people find desirable to move to it seems.
> It doesn't seem like a place people find desirable to move to it seems.
I've been through a few times. There's litter everywhere. It's trashy. San Antonio does not make a good impression. Strange because Lady Bird Johnson started her beautify America (crying native chief) from Texas.
It would be interesting to turn this into an API for use with looking at apartments/hotels, Google Now (and related), etc. as a warning system for people new to an area. (Thinking more in terms of the 'sketchy' warning than the 'hipster' warning here.)
This is great! Anyone have information on the technology used? Specifically what they used for real time front end and data analysis. I also wonder if they could open it up for dynamic keywords.
Indeed. My guess is that people who are using the word "hipster" in a review are using it pejoratively to describe a place that they think hipsters would frequent, whereas the actual hipsters who are mapping out sources of PBR have long since moved on to places that aren't cool yet.
And don't forget the red blotch of shame where Ballard has been getting gentrified into the ground. Hipsters here have more overlap with yuppies than most places I've lived.
It's high quality content that people want to share. Some of those people will inevitably share it on their blogs, with links pointing at the site. As a result, Yelp's pagerank improves and they stay ahead of their competition for things like "best restaurants in San Francisco".
A ton (I'd guess 80%+) of Yelp's traffic comes from Google / Bing search. Maintaining / growing that traffic is probably a substantial driver of their decisions.
I think in this case, as Yelp have admitted in the past they are dependent on Google/organic search traffic, it is likely that this content is intended to function as SEO as well as (and due to the fact that it is) something cool.
With a company with more of a business-to-business angle, it might have been more ambiguous, but in this case it seems likely that SEO is part or all of the motivation.
Yelp is very aggressive against crawlers. They IP banned me for curl'ing their site a few times for something or another that their API didn't provide. I had to email them and promise never to do it again. I'd imagine it has provoked some to attempt to crawl them via Tor. I just use the Open Table API instead.
