Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

sfgate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 331 posts

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#51

Post by 111111IIIIIII »

nickstinemates wrote: post #26
dwater wrote: post #25

It 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?

> You'd think there would be some whistleblowers after all of these years...

I wouldn't think so. In a society so rife with obvious scams everywhere you look, at every level in public and private sector orgs, it would be patently idiotic to trash your own career on account of a dishonest restaurant review operation.

I wish we lived in a world where such bravery were meaningfully valued, but we don't. For any might-be whistleblowers, this reality has been made painfully clear in the time since the Snowden leaks nearly a decade ago, during which nothing has changed.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#52

Post by spiznnx »

gnicholas wrote: post #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 cer…

Yelp's stated policy is to remove reviews by people who didn't actually directly interact with the business, regardless of the content.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#53

Post by TimPC »

I worked on a start-up that was basically a Yelp competitor with a less-bad business model. Unfortunately, all the incentives in the business are about boosting the performance of your paying customers relative to free businesses on the platform. While we never went as far as faking reviews or helping businesses eliminate bad reviews and we at least were clear to customers about our search lists being curated rather than complete, there were clear pressures towards all the things that lead to Yelp being the shit-show that it is.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#55

Post by brnaftr361 »

emodendroket wrote: post #48
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

secrets can't be kept in any large corporation therefore this is a conspiracy theory of course secrets can be kept in large organizations, but it's funny how often that get repeated.

I mean, this isn’t the CIA here. It’s a tech company people are probably filing in and out of in about two years. And the salesmen are all meant to be in on it?

Yeah, if pay incentives are there, and we're talking sales... They're not necessarily people of the highest esteem. And if the hiring party puts a little pressure on the candidate, I could definitely imagine a tight ship.

A scrupulous person wouldn't join the Gestapo, y'know?

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#56

Post by oefrha »

floren wrote: post #13
majormajor wrote: post #7

Good 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…

> 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. Instagram doesn't help -- gotta get a shot of me eating noodles at th…

> and anyway would people be lining up like this if it wasn't good?

That’s why new restaurants hire people to line up outside.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#57

Post by emodendroket »

> Before Fake Review Watch and all her research, Dean used review sites often, she said. But now she tells everyone she knows to stick with good old word-of-mouth — especially with recent additional hits to the online system, like the surge of reviews spurred by COVID-19 policies and new reports of AI chatbot-written Amazon reviews.

Kind of sick of reading this advice. If I knew someone I trusted to recommend me a contractor why would I be on Yelp looking in the first place? Hello.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#58

Post by MarkMarine »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #45
dwater wrote: post #25

It 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…

Isn’t this cause for defamation? Or is it protected under article 230? Even if it’s not yelp doing it the fact that they are publicly advertising the reviews should make them culpable.

There have been cases on exactly this, and the basic summary of the result is Yelp can do what it wants on it's own platform:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=336153126478324...

which ended with: The case was dismissed on appeal on the grounds that the complainants had not adequately proven (1) Yelp had wrongfully threatened economic loss by manipulating user reviews, (2) it was unlawful for Yelp to post and sequence both positive and negative reviews, (3) Yelp authored negative reviews, and (4) Yelp’s conduct amounted to a violation of antitrust laws by threatening or harming competition.

Yelp was also sued for false advertising (essentially saying they were a trusted, unbiased review source) which they somehow also won:

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-finally-d...

anyway, I actively avoid Yelp reviews because of this chicanery.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#59

Post by FireBeyond »

irskep wrote: post #34

Edit: I would have loved to add to the conversation, but people do love their pitchforks and I should be working instead of commenting on HN. :-) Admitting you worked for Yelp on HN: not even once

> It's amazing to me how many people have conspiracy theories about Yelp reviews, when in reality it's just really hard to determine good vs bad actors in review systems and it's possible to do a bad job as an engineer.

When cards are cloned, it's exceptionally easy for a bank to determine which merchant is compromised by looking for common denominators.

Take three actors.

What are the odds that two of them have reviewed one business, and only that business? Pretty high. All good. Same for all three.

Now, what are the odds that two of them have only reviewed two businesses, and both businesses are the same, on both accounts? Still decent, sure. All three actors, same two businesses reviewed, and only them? Getting a little dicier.

Two actors, seemingly independent, have each reviewed three businesses only. And they've reviewed the same three businesses, in the same order. And perhaps they each reviewed the first business, then two weeks later, the second business, and then the third. Odds? Getting pretty slim now. A third actor, doing the same? You're stretching the bounds of credulity for sincere reviews.

This stuff is basic probability theory. Looking across reviews for sets and unions of reviews and reviewers, and increasing the number of reviews, but still seeing commonality between them points to SOME malfeasance worthy of review.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#60

Post by emodendroket »

brnaftr361 wrote: post #55
emodendroket wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this isn’t the CIA here. It’s a tech company people are probably filing in and out of in about two years. And the salesmen are all meant to be in on it?

Yeah, if pay incentives are there, and we're talking sales... They're not necessarily people of the highest esteem. And if the hiring party puts a little pressure on the candidate, I could definitely imagine a tight ship. A scrupulous person wouldn't join the Gestapo, y'know?

Most tech companies leak like sieves and the incentive isn’t there after you’re no longer being paid. It seems hard to believe it could be that airtight to me.
Post reply on HN