A map with an opinion is worth more than a map with everything

A map with an opinion is worth more than a map with everything There are two kinds of maps and the difference is not the zoom level. One of them shows you every street in the city. The other one shows you the four streets where something actually happens, and leaves the rest out. For a long time I assumed the first one was the more useful map, because it contains more. It does not, for anybody who has ever stood on a street with a phone in their hand trying to work out where to eat. The question a complete map cannot answer The question you have while you are walking is never "what is on this street". It is "where do I go, and what am I walking past on the way". A complete map makes you do that arithmetic yourself. You find the district, you find the name, you look up the pin, you check whether it is twenty minutes away or forty, and only then do you decide. A curated map does the arithmetic for you. It groups the places by what you would actually do there, and it tells you the walk. Two versions of the same idea City guides and store guides are the same product with different content, and they fail the same way when they are badly done. Place Luxe is the store-guide version, with shops and destinations mapped out, at https://place.luxe. A city guide answers "where do I go in this town". Mapas.place groups places by city and by what you would do there. It is at Mapas.place, and the site is at https://mapas.place. A store guide answers "where is the good stuff, and is it near what I already have a plan for". HowToCraft does that for games, with the recipes indexed by material, at https://howtocraft.net. The test for a guide that is worth trusting There is one question that separates a guide from an advertisement, and it is not about how many places are listed. Ask whether it tells you what to skip. A list that contains only good things is telling you nothing. A list that also says this area is nothing special, this street is closed on Sundays, and this place has a two-hour queue is giving you information, which is the thing you actually came for. That is the whole difference between a recommendation and a map. A recommendation tells you where to go. A map tells you where to go and what you are choosing between. And the second one is the one that still works when you have been there before.