Lone Yelp review dogs business owner • Hacker News Board

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#121

Post by rorrr » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 11:03 PM UTC

bkbleikamp wrote: post #111

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate. The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—i…

Then how do you explain this?

http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-ye...

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#122

Post by Evgeny » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 11:30 PM UTC

So technically if something like that is part of the algorithm ...

            if (customer.RefusedToAdvertise) { foreach review in Reviews ( if(review.Score > 1) { reivew.visible = false; } ) }

Yelp can then say that "employees can do nothing, everything is done by the computer" and that would technically be true. And nothing can be done because they can not be forced to reveal the actual algorithm and any case will be thrown out of court?

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#123

Post by bugsy » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 11:31 PM UTC

#1

Yep, Yelp is still a total scam despite their claims of reform everytime they get publicity about their criminal behavior.

For those who ask "What crimes?", among their crimes are extortion and fraud. Deleting genuine positive reviews if you don't pay them, and deleting negative reviews if you do is simply not legitimate: there is no defense for it; the only explanation possible is that it is an extortion racket. The fraud is that they misrepresent themselves to the public as an impartial review site.

It's obscene that they are still in business and just shows you what a lousy job most state attorney generals are doing.

#2

A completely separate issue is the review. The article says that he gave several 1 star reviews to dog trainers, but only one 5 star review on 11/9/2010 to a dog trainer, "Perfect Manners Dog Training" in Naperville. This suggests that he may be an employee or friend of the owner of that business. However, comprehensively searching his 463 reviews reveals that he also has a 5 star review on 11/9/2010 for "Thunder's Pack Canine Training" in La Grange Park and there are only two 1 star dog trainer reviews in total, the other being for "Wetnose For Dogs" in Forest Park on 9/11/2010. So either the reporter was inaccurate, or some reviews of Justin G's have been changed. Hard to say at this point. Given the huge number of reviews by this Justin G., many extremely detailed, he is probably legit.

#3

Yelp covers things up. Here's the bad review in question:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

Notice that there are now several good reviews shown. However you can verify in Google's cache of Yelp that there was a single 1 star review on Aug 26, 2011 23:28:48 GMT, last week, a total rating of 1 star, and no other reviews shown. Since then, this article has come out (on September 4 2011) and Yelp has just now changed the site, with the date of all the good reviews being 9/4/2011, obviously when they approved them and not when they were originally posted, which was obviously before the article came out. Time and time again, when bad publicity hits from Yelp's criminal fraud, they patch things in a single spot to cover up their fraudulent activity.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#124

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 04, 2011, 11:52 PM UTC

bugsy wrote: post #123

#1 Yep, Yelp is still a total scam despite their claims of reform everytime they get publicity about their criminal behavior. For those who ask "What crimes?", among their crimes are extortion and fraud. Deleting genuine positive reviews if you don't pay them, and deleting negative reviews if you do is simply not legitimate: there is no defense for it; the only explanation possible is that it is an extortion racket.…

[deleted]

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#125

Post by joezydeco » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 12:18 AM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #114

joezydeco wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that ask this Tribune reporter for help are people that can't get a problem solved by another means because the company is uncooperative or in denial about the problem. So when someone calls the business and says "Hi, I'm calling from the Chicago Tribune, where I'm going to write a story about you that will be read by half a million readers", do you think that will get a better outcome to the problem than…

Sure it will. But if the business had done nothing wrong, journalistic ethics (which play no role in the "moderating" position taken by Yelp between "customer reviews") would stipulate that the newspaper could not report anything other than verifiable fact.

But the business owner (or government agency in most cases with Trib/WYP) see it as "if I don't fix this issue, it's going to be in the newspaper where my boss will see it".

The reporter doesn't have to be unethical in the slightest. The message is implied and, in most cases from what I've read in the Tribune over the years, very effective.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#126

Post by jamesbritt » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 12:21 AM UTC

bala_tangylabs wrote: post #82

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…

"The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes" Is there any data to support this point. Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.

Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.

It may lead to a higher number of snitty reviews, as in "I gave this restaurant 1 star because I went there for my friends birthday and she was depressed at getting oder." Or, "This book gets 1 star because UPS delivered it while I was not home and they left it in the rain."

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#127

Post by megablast » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 12:31 AM UTC

yoda_sl wrote: post #91

From personal experience Yelp is a company I do not respect or trust in anything. Yelp absolutely don't care about small business and how their filtering system works. My wife is running a small business and she has been facing exactly the problems described in the article. Real customers posting real reviews but quickly disappearing in the filtered reviews for unknown reasons, some of her customers have been on Yelp…

Yelp are in a hard place, they show negative reviews about peoples businesses. People who work there, or own the business absolutely hate this, because it could cost them there business. Nobody likes having their work threatened.

And most people who own businesses think they are doing a good job, and don't like criticism. They take it very personally, and blame Yelp rather than the reviewer.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#128

Post by megablast » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 12:33 AM UTC

yoda_sl wrote: post #113

bkbleikamp wrote: post #111

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate. The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—i…

It's hard to believe that so many business are complaining about Yelp if nothing was wrong... If what you are saying is true then the only conclusion is that the algorithm used has a major flaw but Yelp doesn't want either to acknowledge it or fix it. I believe that they rather don't want to fix it so it help their true business of selling ads. Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is f…

I don't think so, people running businesses hate seeing negative reviews about themselves. No matter what Yelp did, nothing is going to change that fact, and nothing will put it right in the minds of those being criticized.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#129

Post by bkbleikamp » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 12:34 AM UTC

rorrr wrote: post #121

bkbleikamp wrote: post #111

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate. The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—i…

Then how do you explain this? http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-ye...

I am not sure what you mean.

Why would filtered reviews distribution match up to the unfiltered reviews?

Typically a "fake" review is either going to be someone who is raving about a business to try to boost the rating or someone who for some reason wants to bad mouth the business (e.g. a competitor) so it makes sense that 1 and 5 star ratings are the most filtered.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#130

Post by bkbleikamp » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 12:36 AM UTC

yoda_sl wrote: post #113

bkbleikamp wrote: post #111

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate. The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—i…

It's hard to believe that so many business are complaining about Yelp if nothing was wrong... If what you are saying is true then the only conclusion is that the algorithm used has a major flaw but Yelp doesn't want either to acknowledge it or fix it. I believe that they rather don't want to fix it so it help their true business of selling ads. Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is f…

There are significantly more stories of businesses having a great experience with Yelp than a bad one. But it's not exactly a great story for the Chicago Tribune to highlight all of those businesses.

What does it say to you that a judge threw the case out?