Sort of beside the point, but I wanted to say how much I love the subject's whole vibe (to say nothing of her excellent mission). Her home and attire give me strong nostalgic feelings of late-80s after-church events in the SF Bay Area.
Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
21–30 of 331 posts
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#22Serious question: is Yelp still relevant? I feel like outside of select metro areas it’s not useful at all with very dated content.
I was going to ask the same. I thought this was very common knowledge for a rather long time.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ba…
It'd be easy for a reader to ignore a review about the quality of food since that's subjective on the reviewer's personal tastes.
A review claiming paid-for-fraud isn't so easy to wave off.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#24> Dean began documenting her findings, starting with serial offenders from the Facebook groups. In a list of 17 people who reviewed SavantCare on Yelp, she found what she called “a suspicious pattern”: 10 of them had reviewed the same dentist’s office in Los Angeles, nine had raved about the same California wedding DJ company and five claimed to have visited the same Mountain View tattoo parlor. Five of the accounts, she noticed, had even reviewed the same moving company in Florida.
SMH... I mean, how difficult is it for Yelp to catch this?!? Hire a high school student with interest in data analysis, and you'll catch these idiots quickly.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#25It sounds to me like Yelp is upset that other businesses are trying to do the same thing they do. My friend was GM of a new local restaurant here, and at first they were getting lots of 4 and 5 star reviews and almost none below that. But around the time they were contacted by a Yelp sales rep to start paying for promotion and advertising, the 4 and 5 star review stopped coming. My friend watched multiple people post reviews that never appeared. Then negative reviews started appearing from people that he knew never came in because he was working the host station all day. All this activity was reversed once they started paying for Yelp services. It's the kind of behavior that's impossible to prove for anyone outside of Yelp, and they of course claim they don't do it.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#26It sounds to me like Yelp is upset that other businesses are trying to do the same thing they do. My friend was GM of a new local restaurant here, and at first they were getting lots of 4 and 5 star reviews and almost none below that. But around the time they were contacted by a Yelp sales rep to start paying for promotion and advertising, the 4 and 5 star review stopped coming. My friend watched multiple people post…
You'd think there would be some whistleblowers after all of these years of the same allegations. Where are they?
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#27[deleted]
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#28Good 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…
For a related issue check out W Brian Arthur’s El Farol problem
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Farol_Bar_problem
He also talked about this on Mindscape
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/08/23/161-...
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#29[dead]
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
so you're claiming that since there was a win, that it was that egregious?
The article doesn't say whether Savant Care showed up. If they didn't show up it would have been a default judgement.
Not sure of the jurisdiction issues where the judgement was issued but the last time I looked into it you can't meaningfully collect a judgement from small claims court in my area.