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

sfgate.com

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

#71

Post by Solvency »

1024core wrote: post #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,…

"I mean, how difficult is it for Yelp to catch this?!?"

The mistake you're making is assuming Yelp: * Wants to "fix" this problem. * Isn't actually complicit in this problem as a means to incentivize small business owners to sign up and pay for Yelp to help "manage their business profile".

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

#72

Post by Guest9081239812 »

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…

Google Maps is terrible for hiding results. I'll use the filter to show restaurants with a 4.5+ star rating, and it hides dozens of places 4.5+ stars while instead showing results 4.0 - 4.4 stars and even some that have no reviews at all. I find the arrogance insulting. You want to see 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants? Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm going to replace some of those results with 4.1 star Caribbean food restaurants that you'll like instead.

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

#73

Post by wnissen »

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…

I think they tend to interpret anything that makes Yelp look bad as a violation. The owner of a wine store I bought thousands of dollars of wine from was arrested for running a $45 million Ponzi scheme (and eventually went to prison for years). I immediately put up a review, and Yelp took it down because the arrest wasn't my personal experience. Never mind that I had to get refunded by my credit card company. I was doing a public service, as a customer, and Yelp wouldn't let me. I took down all my reviews and deleted my account.

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

#74

Post by CoastalCoder »

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…

I'm curious what laws (if any) Yelp would have violated in that scenario.

My non-lawyer intuition is that this is something like fraud, extortion, or racketeering.

The parent comment doesn't mention the restaurant's location. Are the relevant jurisdictions are some combination of the following?

(a) the restaurant's location

(b) Yelp's HQ in the restaurant's country, and/or

(c) Yelp's HQ in the U.S.

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

#75

Post by jaktet »

Solvency wrote: post #67
emodendroket wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I find it a bit hard to believe. If you really think reviews are inauthentic it’s not hard to click on their profiles and see. I find it hard to see much evidence for astroturfing. If anything I think it’s fairly generous about not putting negative feedback front-and-center. That, and, as the article details, and I’ve seen in my own personal experience, business owners are extremely aggressive about trying to ge…

I am friends with 3 different businesses in my town. A baker, a cafe, and a small restaurant. All three of them have experienced the exact same thing. I've seen it happen first-hand on their accounts.

So just to be clear, you unselected the default “yelp sort” and sorted by either review date or best or worst and they don’t show up?

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

#76

Post by Ichthypresbyter »

gnicholas wrote: post #19
whalesalad wrote: post #11

Serious question: is Yelp still relevant? I feel like outside of select metro areas it’s not useful at all with very dated content.

I find that if a restaurant has 4.5 or 5 stars (assuming a decent number of reviews), typically it is very good. However, plenty of the places I eat/enjoy have 3 stars (none have 2 or 1). So I use it as a rough filter for that purpose. It's also useful for seeing if particular menu items are good, since fake reviews don't typically get into that much detail (or at least there are other real reviews that would outweig…

There's the ongoing meme that the best Chinese restaurants have 3.5 stars on Yelp- from the combination of 5 star reviews from people who love the food, and 1 star from people who didn't like the brusque service or didn't get the American Chinese food they were expecting.

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

#77

Post by jaktet »

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…

Just to be clear did you change from the default “yelp sort” to one of the other options? I don’t know many small business owners but the one I did know that didn’t pay Yelp had their default “yelp sort” results filled with negative reviews. Sorting by most recent the reviews were all positive and the one I left finally showed up.

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

#78

Post by mtlynch »

FireBeyond wrote: post #59
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 revi…

This comment is fairly dismissive of GP's experience and intelligence. If you think you can solve a problem just by spitballing it, and GP's team at yelp couldn't figure it out for years, either you're much smarter than everyone on their team or you're underestimating the problem.

I worked on an anti-fraud team in a similar role, and I agree with GP that it's a harder problem than people realize. It's easy to come up with a simple metric that would identify the fraud that you observe, but you don't know what false positives it would catch as collateral damage.

Like this example that you find wildly implausible:

>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.

I think it's highly likely that if you used this metric to find patterns, you'd find fraud, but you'd also find lots of legitimate reviews (e.g., friends who go to the same restaurants together, friends who recommend restaurants to each other).

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

#79

Post by CoastalCoder »

jollyllama wrote: post #69
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.

ITT: people who have never heard of NDAs

IANAL, but can an NDA legally bar someone from reporting a suspected crime to law-enforcement?

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

#80

Post by winrid »

emodendroket wrote: post #66
winrid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter what you did as an engineer, and in fact automation isnt really a big part of the discussion. If sales people etc have special access to add or remove reviews, which they do, or at a minimum leave negative reviews themselves when you don't pay, it is corrupt. It is well documented at this point that they do this.

That’s not what the article describes at all so I’m curious what documentation you are referring to.

There are so many people complaining about the sales people doing this stuff.

https://youtu.be/C67Lh4LE5LY

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