Any open forum takes on the perspective of its users. Quite visibly on Yelp, judgments between the best and worst restaurant or spa can devolve into remarks about “sketchy” neighborhoods or complaints of workers speaking with accents. Despite the intended universality of the 5-star rating system, each individual’s ideas of what makes a business worth supporting are inherently shaped by their cultural and economic background. (Their almost suspiciously eventful stays have garnered over 3.5 million and 500,000 views respectively.) But among these are also videos that call the entire enterprise of crowdsourced reviews into question. Searching through these videos, it’s not hard to find the horror stories, as when YouTuber Brennen Taylor appears to find a mouse at the worst reviewed hotel in Los Angeles and then pornography under the mattress at one in San Francisco. “’Cause I wasn’t really expecting it to go this bad, but it did and it’s actually quite funny.” In the final shots and in the description she reveals that the experience gave her an allergic reaction, a testament to the video’s veracity and the latent dangers of being a consumer. “This was a really fun experiment to film,” she concludes. When recounting her trip at the end of the video, she cringes while remembering how her makeup artist (whose face she shows unblurred) used unclean applicators and old products on her face.

In another popular worst reviewed video, YouTuber daisy kaur visits a 2-star-rated beauty salon in Manhattan. “I love doing this video even though I wasted $27 and had a really bad experience,” says vlogger Tiffany Ma in her video “ Going To The Worst Reviewed Nail Salon In My City! (it's WORSE than I thought),” which as of this writing has nearly 2 million views. But unlike the latter, which are meant to deter customers from spending their money on bad customer experiences, in worst reviewed videos there’s a schadenfreudist pleasure in seeing those experiences go wrong. “Worst Reviewed” videos combine a Fear Factor–esque approach to late capitalism with the heightened melodrama of Yelp reviews. The genre has since germinated easily brandable, dollar-specific offshoots like “$100 challenge” where creators “challenge” themselves to spend $100 at a specific store or $1,000 at a vape shop or at Urban Outfitters for the ugliest clothes or to simply click on every ad on YouTube. Meanwhile, “ haul videos” have flourished for more than a decade on the platform. The appeal lay in observing the mysteriously pleasurable (and wasteful) wonder of seeing someone crumble as they struggle to slather one more layer of mascara on their quivering, encrusted eyelashes. Frequent YouTube viewers will recall summer 2016, when it seemed like any vlogger looking for guaranteed views was putting 100 layers of a beauty product, and sometimes variants like glue, on their bare and willing bodies. The worst reviewed genre is just the latest iteration of the frivolous consumerism that’s long been a staple of the platform’s trends. The end of each video then comes with a breakdown of the highs and lows of the visit as well as the ultimate judgment: Is this business really as bad as Yelp reviews say it is? They then read some sample negative reviews to prime their viewers, and themselves, for what to expect, a ritual that nearly always involves the YouTuber exclaiming, “I’m so nervous!” or “I’m so freaked out right now!” Next comes the actual visit to the business, which the video creator attempts to film, either covertly or outright. The willing customer scrolls through Yelp reviews until they find the lowest rated of one particular kind of business. Each “worst reviewed” video follows essentially the same format.

In recent weeks, a legion of YouTubers big and small have been subjecting themselves to discomfort in a novel way: by visiting their local “worst” businesses as determined by online reviews, particularly the behemoth app of the sector, Yelp.

It’s why a video called “Pencil Stuck in My Eye Prank” has nearly 13 million views, why some of the platform’s most popular vloggers have taken baths in liquids like hot sauce, and why a video of a woman stomping grapes and then falling and injuring herself was an early viral hit on the video-sharing platform. There are no illusions as to what YouTube users are looking for when they click on titles that hold the promise of catastrophe.

Yelp reviewers ganging up