Lone Yelp review dogs business owner • Hacker News Board

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#21

Post by revorad » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:00 PM UTC

Customer reviews and ratings can be one hell of a mess, not just for businesses but also for customers.

As a customer, they are often useful in narrowing down one's choices, even with a margin of error from cheating or lack of enough data. But, they are still a heck of a lot of work! Ever tried choosing a wardrobe, washing machine or laptop based on reviews? You can spend hours reading wildly different accounts, which leave you more confused than when you started.

I generally read reviews to answer simple questions which the product listing does not answer. I try to find out if there are any common problems with a product.

A good FAQ and a list of the most common problems may be a better solution than pages of reviews.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#22

Post by pbreit » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:01 PM UTC

marquis wrote: post #7

eps wrote: post #5

The obvious thing to do for the guy is to post a note explaining the situation on his website and link to Chicago Tribune's article. That should alleviate most if not all concerns of those who read that Yelp review. (edit) And display the note only to those coming from Yelp.

I would expect that the note is then buried or removed under Yelp's labyrinthine terms of service.

Wrong. The note goes right in the same box as the review.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#23

Post by pbreit » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:04 PM UTC

flourophore wrote: post #10

How can a computer evaluate the 'realness' of a review? The idea of Yelp, crowdsourced business reviews, is great, but do we really prefer trusting super active web content contributors, seeking cyberspace attention, over experts (eg Zagats)?

Zagats is primarily crowdsourced.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#24

Post by joezydeco » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:06 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #13

Extortion. This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up. Google's running more or less the same racket. It's "soft"...there are no threats, exactly. But imagine if the Chicago Tribune called vendors and threatened to run a miserable review of them if they didn't pay? So why hasn't that happe…

Ironically, mild extortion is the point of the Tribune's "What's Your Problem?" column.

People who can't get results from local businesses write the column, where they're publicly shamed into doing something to help the consumer.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#25

Post by cowkingdeluxe » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

marquis wrote: post #6

I use a great car rental service at LAX. I've tried to put a glowing review on their Yelp page to help them get business to no available. It doesn't even show up. I'm guessing this is because they choose not to advertise with yelp either? I just wrote another review right now to test this out again, and my account shows I have written two with them. Why is Yelp not displaying these on their business page, and their s…

Because Yelp is a scam business which extorts. I'm more surprised to see people defending Yelp on this site.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#26

Post by pnathan » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

This also goes to show that a business owner can not afford to be Internet-illiterate.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#27

Post by pbz » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #4

This raises several important issues. The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes. This has several important implications. - It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both…

What Yelp does is a racket, similar to what BBB does. In Yelp's case they are being helped by Google and other search engines. The problem is that when people link to them that's an upvote in Google's eyes. After enough upvotes are gained, provided they don't spam, there's little anybody can do to downvote them. It's not like you can negatively link to them. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the like and +1 buttons. There's isn't a -1 or notlike option.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#28

Post by jxcole » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:10 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #13

Extortion. This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up. Google's running more or less the same racket. It's "soft"...there are no threats, exactly. But imagine if the Chicago Tribune called vendors and threatened to run a miserable review of them if they didn't pay? So why hasn't that happe…

Wrong, but with the right attitude. A while ago, SEOMoz reported a similar problem with ripoff report:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-ripoff-report-la...

Apparently, suing them for libel laws is impossible because of CDA, but suing them under RICO might work. CDA says that you can't sue someone for content posted by their users. RICO is an anti-mafia law that says if you are part of an organization that causes illegal things to happen, you could also be liable.

(IANAL)

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#29

Post by kenjackson » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:10 PM UTC

Given Yelp's size, why doesn't it employ some collaborative filtering options? In general I don't care about everyone's reviews (especially of restaurants). But it would be interesting to know -- for people who like White Castle, McDonald's, and Denny's, but not Applebees -- what would they recommend. This is not the type of thing you could typically get by reading reviews by themselves (and maybe those people wouldn't do Yelp reviews in any case). But standalone reviews of things where taste is such a large component I find almost worthless. With that said dog training is probably something where taste plays a much smaller role.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#30

Post by spooneybarger » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 5:12 PM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #24

noduerme wrote: post #13

Extortion. This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up. Google's running more or less the same racket. It's "soft"...there are no threats, exactly. But imagine if the Chicago Tribune called vendors and threatened to run a miserable review of them if they didn't pay? So why hasn't that happe…

Ironically, mild extortion is the point of the Tribune's "What's Your Problem?" column. People who can't get results from local businesses write the column, where they're publicly shamed into doing something to help the consumer.

Whether yelp's business model meets the definition of extortion is debatable ( either way, i find it distasteful ). However, there is nothing extortionist about this.