Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
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Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#2A bit of a side note, but this is super rare:
> Meanwhile, Dean took SavantCare to small claims court over the letter and calls she later received, and won a $275 judgment in March 2018 for “negligent infliction of emotional distress.”
NIED claims are nearly impossible to win. In law school we were taught to point them out on issue-spotting questions, but that they were basically unwinnable.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#3> A Yelp post from December 2017 was the first crucial clue. “Melissa R.” wrote, “I was offered money to leave a positive review for Savant Care Clinic. Must be a shady company.” The user attached Craigslist screenshots of the apparent offer, which Dean took her own screenshot of just before Yelp removed the post for violating its terms of service.
Why would Yelp forbid people from talking about this? While it is certainly possible to create fake email screenshots, this seems like a relatively small risk compared to the much more common risk that's being called out here.
I guess they just don't want people to know how common this type of occurrence is, since it would undermine all trust in their platform.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#4> A Yelp post from December 2017 was the first crucial clue. “Melissa R.” wrote, “I was offered money to leave a positive review for Savant Care Clinic. Must be a shady company.” The user attached Craigslist screenshots of the apparent offer, which Dean took her own screenshot of just before Yelp removed the post for violating its terms of service. Why would Yelp forbid people from talking about this? While it is cer…
The risk (mostly) isn't fake email screenshots, the risk is that I create postings for (or even commit to paying for fake reviews for) my competitor, and tarnish their reputation. It's hard to establish provenance of such an arrangement.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#5First and only Yelp review I ever left was three stars for an Indian restaurant in 2011. It was quickly hidden because "it didn't pass the bot filter" or something. I've never used it since as a reviewer or to find places. It lost all credibility on my first interaction with it.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#6A bit of a side note, but this is super rare: > Meanwhile, Dean took SavantCare to small claims court over the letter and calls she later received, and won a $275 judgment in March 2018 for “negligent infliction of emotional distress.” NIED claims are nearly impossible to win. In law school we were taught to point them out on issue-spotting questions, but that they were basically unwinnable.
so you're claiming that since there was a win, that it was that egregious?
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#7Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate.
If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street.
And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to try to keep people from talking about it, and the moral interests just get worse and worse.
Google Maps isn't any better; OpenTable seems the "least bad" of options I've looked at recently, at least for fancier reservation-having places, in terms of actually showing my options.
(It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending" algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when probably there's half a dozen other options within 10% of taste and quality, that some people very well could legitimately like better if they heard about them too.)
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#8> A Yelp post from December 2017 was the first crucial clue. “Melissa R.” wrote, “I was offered money to leave a positive review for Savant Care Clinic. Must be a shady company.” The user attached Craigslist screenshots of the apparent offer, which Dean took her own screenshot of just before Yelp removed the post for violating its terms of service. Why would Yelp forbid people from talking about this? While it is cer…
The risk (mostly) isn't fake email screenshots, the risk is that I create postings for (or even commit to paying for fake reviews for) my competitor, and tarnish their reputation. It's hard to establish provenance of such an arrangement.
I think we're thinking the same thing — that someone would (on their own or for money) write a review claiming that an innocent business had tried to pay for a good review, or take down a bad review. This could happen, but it's just as easy to pay someone to write a review saying the service/food/etc. was lousy. Why spend more time faking an email screenshot?
But from Yelp's perspective, a paid-for review claiming bad food is just fine, because it only tarnishes the restaurant's reputation. On the other hand, a claim of fraudulent review manipulation hits both the business and Yelp's reputations.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#9First and only Yelp review I ever left was three stars for an Indian restaurant in 2011. It was quickly hidden because "it didn't pass the bot filter" or something. I've never used it since as a reviewer or to find places. It lost all credibility on my first interaction with it.
I probably would have reacted the same way. But at the same time, Yelp's algorithm probably treats accounts with a track record as more legit than ones that were just created and then wrote a review. I wonder if they ever would have unhid your review if you had kept reviewing, or even just using the app to search for places to go.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#10A bit of a side note, but this is super rare: > Meanwhile, Dean took SavantCare to small claims court over the letter and calls she later received, and won a $275 judgment in March 2018 for “negligent infliction of emotional distress.” NIED claims are nearly impossible to win. In law school we were taught to point them out on issue-spotting questions, but that they were basically unwinnable.
so you're claiming that since there was a win, that it was that egregious?
Not egregious, certainly for the couple hundred dollars recovered. I was mostly pointing it out (1) because any lawyers here would find it interesting that someone, somewhere, once won on an NIED claim, and (2) so that non-lawyers wouldn't get the sense that NIED claims are winnable, in general. They are often tacked on to other, more legit claims, but they are very rarely won.