221–230 of 331 posts
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…
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…
> Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, People must have read a different article than I did. This woman is finding tons of third-parties that are either posting fake positive reviews for money, or extorting businesses by writing bad reviews and offering to reverse them for money. She's looking for people who are trying to scam Yelp, or trying to scam businesses through Yelp. But HN seems…
I just mean that Yelp has chosen to filter and limit in addition to what I'm actually searching. It might be a conversion thing - if I have one really good match it's easier to decide than if they actually show me all 10.
But it means it's really really important to the business now to be that 1 that doesn't get filtered.
And THAT really increases the market for all these fake-review things.
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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.
There's a Malaysian/Chinese resto near me like that. It's an absolute sleeper of a place to have eat. Barely visible from the road, and connected to a supermarket (and they wheel in and out shopping carts from next door as they run out of ingredients during the day). My Japanese roommate at the time was turned onto it by his Korean boss, and I took my Chinese/Filipino/Indian/American coworkers there and then they sta…
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've heard the same stories from several local restaurants. With one added detail, which was consistent between the 3 restaurants: The sales pitch was always $300/mo. to ensure they have only high ratings. When they don't pay the fee, the negative reviews start showing up, and the positive reviews start disappearing. It's such a consistent story it beggars belief that there's nothing there.
https://www.youtube.com/@fakereviewwatch
It's pretty good stuff. She builds a devastating case very methodically, showing how the identical glowing review text is posted to yelp, to FB, and to Google, by different users -- and then traces other reviews posted by those same user ids showing how they are plagiarizing Tripadvisor posts.
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 gets worse. People have been 'following' the ratings when they rate foods. A popular local restaurant came under new management and their food is now atrocious. We actually threw their food in the garbage after getting takeout there a month ago. Meanwhile, tourists are still leaving thousands of rave reviews on their google maps page. Noticeably, you will see one or two bad reviews every 50 reviews or so, where a…
So you're getting both new reviewers (or travelers) who don't know it used to be better who still call it good, mixed with old reviews calling it good.
It's not even just a management change that causes this. This is when you almost wish Google maps would put your location history to use. It sees you visit the place frequently and thus if you stop visiting and leave a negative review it should weigh that review higher and give it more visibility. An old stale review or a review from someone who visited once I don't think should be as impactful or useful on the experience.
Overall I find discovering new places to be frustrating as reviews often seem useless. Usually I find the best method of discovering new places is still via word-of-mouth in person.
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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…
Google maps is also terrible at showing _only_ relevant info. I searched for “coffee” in a small area earlier today (small because I wanted to walk); it zoomed out to a much larger area and showed me coffee shops along with taquerias, oil change shops, banks, etc. both in the results pane and scattered all over the map. It was such a mess as to be unusable.
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There's a Malaysian/Chinese resto near me like that. It's an absolute sleeper of a place to have eat. Barely visible from the road, and connected to a supermarket (and they wheel in and out shopping carts from next door as they run out of ingredients during the day). My Japanese roommate at the time was turned onto it by his Korean boss, and I took my Chinese/Filipino/Indian/American coworkers there and then they sta…
It's super weird to me that people will leave a bad review because there were things on the menu they didn't like. I like some types of organ meat, and dislike others, but it would never even enter my mind to be like "2 stars because 40% of the menu is stuff I don't like". People are weird.
My take, having seen a lot of these posts on yelp, is that people leave such reviews because restaurants are offering something which they are not familiar with, or does not match their notions of "normal" (however narrow that may be). You see this less at restos which serve burgers and pizza, and more with places serving non-American food.
I just took a spin through the couple of Asian places in my town, and they have relatively high numbers of 1 star reviews. Digging into them, what you see a lot of are is complaints like:
"This is the worst Asian food I have ever had because (proceeds to describe exactly how the dish is supposed to be)". Also a lot of complaints about these Asian restaurants being "dirty" (which they aren't - as I'm only reading through places my wife and I go to / order from frequently). It was like this specifically with Asian food in the last town I lived in as well. I recall one complaint about how they romanized a Thai word, insisting "pad see ewe" was misspelled (ORLY!). It's bizarre. Mexican restaurants by comparison, get complaints about the food being too spicy, or the decor (at takeout places no less) being bad. And, of course, "dirty", which again, the places I frequent, aren't.
I can't help but conclude that people who write these reviews are judging things based on their own biases, of which they are not self-aware. A more harmless example is a review from a great Thai/Chinese resto where I used to live where someone suggested the place smelled "musty". Well - it was in a sublevel of a large building ("basement" is the word they used), but it was not in any way musty in the 10 years I spent going there. None of my friends ever took issue, even a good friend with a really sensitive nose.
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I've heard the same stories from several local restaurants. With one added detail, which was consistent between the 3 restaurants: The sales pitch was always $300/mo. to ensure they have only high ratings. When they don't pay the fee, the negative reviews start showing up, and the positive reviews start disappearing. It's such a consistent story it beggars belief that there's nothing there.
Interestingly, I never hear this about TripAdvisor or Google / Google Maps...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I hesitate to suggest that this may indicate there aren't that many 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants. Even great resaurants in my area struggle to break the 4.5 barrier.
At least viewing the most recent comments and reading the comment that goes with it helps figuring out if it might be a decent place or not... at least sometimes.