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Ask HN: Google Maps alternatives that uses OSM and has a review feature

by rd07 on 8/11/22, 3:06 AM with 12 comments

• by jakecopp on 8/11/22, 5:15 AM

  How could a review service without an associated company/service be built? As in through some decentralised mechanism?

  That seems like properly hard problem - reviews aren't objective facts like OSM data & verification/spam would be tricky.

• by pajko on 8/11/22, 6:16 AM

  There's http://openplacereviews.org/map?q=4/39.97712/-34.98047 and it's integrated with OsmAnd.

• by agent008t on 8/11/22, 11:09 AM

  This is an interesting question. In my experience, Tripadvisor used to be 'the review' place. It seemed impossible to overtake them, since a review aggregator needs some critical mass of reviews to even get started. However, in the last few years, I have found Google Maps more useful for reviews - looks like the critical mass has shifted. They were able to take advantage of the fact that it is easy and natural to check out the reviews of a place while looking it up on the map.

  Now, however, I worry that Google will try to monetize the maps more and more in ways that are hostile to the user. They have already started showing ad-sponsored restaurants/locations on the maps, last I checked. Reviews are so critical to many businesses (particularly restaurants), it seems important for maps and reviews to be run by a user-friendly entity, ideally something like OSM.

  Providing such a service is expensive, however. The fact that OSM does not have a decent Android app even is telling (Osmand is laggy and barely usable; Organic maps is nice, but is not a replacement for Google maps).

  So we are stuck in the situation we are in, and I am not sure what a good solution would be.

• by 3np on 8/11/22, 4:14 AM

  It's a new project and a review feature is most likely not on the short-term or even mid-term horizon (as implementing it in a decentralized manner is nontrivial) but it could be nice if you fleshed out a more detailed feature request over at https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/ - it checks your other boxes.

• by londons_explore on 8/11/22, 6:15 AM

  One way to do decentralised relatively spam-resistant reviews:

  * Allow anyone to review.

  * When viewing other people's reviews, you rank them by how similarly they review places you and they have both been to. Ie. Do you agree with them? If you agree with them, then weight that users reviews higher. If they rank places highly that you think got 1 star, then rank them negatively.

  * This approach can be done on the complete review graph, so you don't need to have reviewed the same places someone else ranked.

  * The downside is you can't see any meaningful reviews till you write a few yourself.

• by eliaspro on 8/11/22, 9:25 AM

  I also wanted to start using Openplacereviews a few days ago, but according to a discussion in an OSM/Osmand Matrix channel its development seems to have mostly come to a standstill.

  A recommended alternative is Mangrove [1] which allows anonymous cryptographically verified reviews, but I have neither had a closer look yet nor given it a try so far.

  [1] https://mangrove.reviews/

• by haunter on 8/11/22, 9:35 AM

  https://organicmaps.app/ I use this, no reviews though