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Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

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Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#61

Post by x1798DE »

cerved wrote: post #48
metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

Your standard of proof is very high. Who records all of their phone calls (presumably without consent which is illegal in my jurisdiction) and makes an archive of their yelp page periodically? This is not the only company to face such allegations and afaik it's not the first time yelp has been accused either. I think you'll have to base this one on anecdotal stories.

I think they were not saying that everyone has to record their conversations as a matter of course, but that no one making these allegations has any hard proof. They even mentioned that in many of these stories, Yelp is calling them multiple times - it would be nice if next time this happens to someone in a 1-party consent state, they would record the second call from Yelp.

In my experience, almost all stories get bigger in the retelling, especially when you have a grievance, having some hard proof at least helps to give you a baseline assessment of how much of an exaggeration the claims are.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#62

Post by golfer »

metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

Looks like they are working on it.

http://yelplawsuit.com/

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#63

Post by koolba »

golfer wrote: post #43
metalliqaz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I became active on Yelp after a new Cafe opened in my town. I loved it so much I just had to go home and write a good review. I did so, and it was embargoed. A user with one 5-star review is usually not taken into account. After I had written more like 5 or 6 reviews, all my reviews started to count. Remember how viral those recordings of Comcast shenanigans went? If she keeps getting those calls from Yelp, record on…

Why would those embargoed reviews start to count after she paid Yelp? That is what the Yelp salesperson is implying. Embargoed reviews shouldn't suddenly have more legitimacy due to her buying ads on the site. Something is shady here.

I can imagine the corp spin on this being something like: We embargo reviews until we can validate the reviewer. Paying Yelp can bump the priority of who is validated...

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#64

Post by DamnInteresting »

Via a bit of sleuthing, I managed to figure out what business this person is writing about. I could post a link to the Yelp page, but that feels a bit doxxy, so I don't know if it's appropriate.

The business does have more one-star reviews than one might normally expect, but the texts of the accompanying reviews contain specific details of complaints, and the complaints are appropriate for the ISP/TV category. For example:

Absolutely atrocious. I have never had a worse experience with a company. After multiple calls to service my internet connection they refused to accommodate me efficiently. The customer service representative was rude, disinterested, and frankly mean. On top of this, they have messed up my bill several times, and failed to rectify them even after acknowledging that they messed up the billing. The service was simply unacceptable. If you can avoid using them, by all means do.

A couple of the users' reviews do show cities outside of the business's city, but that could just be out-of-date user profiles, or people who have moved since they posted their reviews. The oldest of the one-star reviews appears to be April 2015. Of the reviews "not recommended" by Yelp (i.e., hidden by default), two are one-star and one is four-star.

My feeling is that these are not fake reviews, but rather that an ISP/TV service is a business quite unlikely to attract positive/neutral reviews. Personally it had never occurred to me to review any ISPs on Yelp, even those I liked. It seems likely that these are legitimately upset customers who realized they can use Yelp to harm the business they had a bad interaction with. So, if I am correct, these reviews are legitimate, but not representative.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#65

Post by tulop »

chinathrow wrote: post #58
timr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blunt, they're total bullshit. Which is why you never see any evidence , outside of vague hearsay from someone's uncle. Yelp has a small army of people cold-calling every business in the country to sell ads. Simultaneously and independently, they have a system that filters out bad reviews, all day, every day. Just by chance, someone is going to get called soon after reviews have been filtered. This leads, inevi…

"Yelp has a small army of people" Like how big is that small army? Your terms imply like, I dunno, maybe more than 1000?

They do have more than 1000 sales people. Their data sheet shows 2,400

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#66

Post by drzaiusapelord »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #64

Via a bit of sleuthing, I managed to figure out what business this person is writing about. I could post a link to the Yelp page, but that feels a bit doxxy, so I don't know if it's appropriate. The business does have more one-star reviews than one might normally expect, but the texts of the accompanying reviews contain specific details of complaints, and the complaints are appropriate for the ISP/TV category. For ex…

The issue isn't that they're fake but that positive reviews end up hidden as 'not recommended' and negative ones suddenly float to the top once the protection money stops.

It looks like there's manipulation of the algorithm that determines what reviews are legitimate on a per client basis. The 'free' package is pretty unforgiving, but if you pay then its tweaked more towards your favor. Nothing about this would be illegal. Its how Yelp manages their site and I believe have already won a lawsuit against this.

Consumers need to be taught that Yelp isn't trustworthy. Sadly, it seems to have a Facebook-like network effect that'll be tough to beat. On the plus side Google reviews are the default on Google maps and other Google services and they seem to not play these games.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#67

Post by notatoad »

jly wrote: post #52
metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

A business I used recently for some tree maintenance in my town had a 1-star Yelp review which was perplexing. In this case, the business and owner are well-known in the area as one of the best at what they do and top subject matter experts. While digging a little, I found that Yelp was highlighting only the four 1-star reviews and factoring only those into the score. Each of these reviews is responded to by the owne…

Were the one-star reviews the most recent ones? it seems like a fairly reasonable optimization that if the average score takes a sharp trend in any direction, reviews from before that trend started shouldn't be counted in the score.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#68

Post by post_break »

metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

Here is some hard proof... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#70

Post by tyingq »

oconnor663 wrote: post #32
jacquesm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14237684 You think they made that up?

It doesn't have to be that people are making stuff up. Yelp is a big site, and there will always be some people who have really bad luck, even if everyone's being honest. If popular opinion focuses on those stories, and no one really tells the stories of people who have good experiences (because why would you tell a boring story :p), it can sound like Yelp is making it happen deliberately.

It also doesn't require a coordinated conspiracy. Yelp salespeople are like anyone else...there are some a-holes in the bunch. They could, individually, make this sort of thing happen. Even without any admin access. A few fake accounts, or friends and family, etc.
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