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

261–270 of 331 posts

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

#261

Post by bombcar »

m463 wrote: post #245
Graziano_M wrote: post #212

Seeing the 'Moving company from Florida' triggered me. I was scammed by a moving company from Florida in 2020, and I did a deep dive to look into them and I found huge networks of moving companies, scammers, & reviewers, all in cahoots. I actually managed to get one company's fake reviews removed from google maps, bringing them from a 4.8+ to a 1.x overnight. Within a few months they were back to > 4, but the owners…

Same with tow trucks. Trying to find a tow truck on your own is a HUGE mess. Finding a tow company in the area invariably leads to some sort of "virtual tow truck call center" that takes a bunch of money and subcontracts out to actual tow truck drivers. My solution was to pay for the roadside assistance via my car insurance and call them to sort things out. Now emergency plumbers - same mess, but I haven't figured ou…

I just give up and use commercial services. They’re usually willing to do residential or recommend someone who can.

For tow trucks just search for ones that can do a semi. They’ll know who to call.

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

#262

Post by jstarfish »

m463 wrote: post #245
Graziano_M wrote: post #212

Seeing the 'Moving company from Florida' triggered me. I was scammed by a moving company from Florida in 2020, and I did a deep dive to look into them and I found huge networks of moving companies, scammers, & reviewers, all in cahoots. I actually managed to get one company's fake reviews removed from google maps, bringing them from a 4.8+ to a 1.x overnight. Within a few months they were back to > 4, but the owners…

Same with tow trucks. Trying to find a tow truck on your own is a HUGE mess. Finding a tow company in the area invariably leads to some sort of "virtual tow truck call center" that takes a bunch of money and subcontracts out to actual tow truck drivers. My solution was to pay for the roadside assistance via my car insurance and call them to sort things out. Now emergency plumbers - same mess, but I haven't figured ou…

Same with locksmiths. Where there's clients in need of emergency services, there are always grifters willing to take advantage of desperation.

(Use AAA for tows and vehicle lockouts, never a locksmith you find on your own.)

Unlike roadside assistance (which works), the one thing I can tell you not to do for emergency plumbers is trust a home warranty service like American Home Shield. These sorts of "services" pay contractors subpar and flat rates, which deprioritizes your claims and incentivizes corner-cutting. They will not deliver miracles like finding you a plumber on Thanksgiving.

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

#263

Post by bombcar »

erehweb wrote: post #172
CoastalCoder wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is sufficiently widespread, seems like there's an opportunity for a honeypot operation. I.e.: (1) Guess at what information triggers this kind of shakedown by Yelp for a new business. E.g., credit-card sales data for new restaurants. (2) Set up a fake business that pushes all of those buttons. E.g., register a new restaurant business in the state; temporarily rent a space and maybe put up signage; generate re…

Seems like a lot of work for a speculative theory, given all the stuff government has to do.

It’s exactly the shenanigans investigative journalism used to do.

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

#264

Post by klabb3 »

If you think it’s bad now (spoiler: it is worse than you think), this is merely the calm before the storm. We haven’t yet seen the massive saturation of LLM generated content on everything from reviews to job applications to anything else you can possibly think of. The friction of sentiment-hacking operations will be dramatically reduced and we don’t have any effective mitigations. To make things worse, the only ones who can integrate the solutions (the platform owners) are not incentivized to take it very seriously.

Fun times ahead!

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

#265

Post by bombcar »

g42gregory wrote: post #248

Who thinks that these reviews can be trusted? When I read Yelp reviews, I look for the absence of negative, not presence of positive.

I just read a few of the middle/bad reviews and see if they seem like reasonable complaints.

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

#266

Post by marcod »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #39
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,…

> Hire a high school student with interest in data analysis, and you'll catch these idiots quickly. The calls are coming from inside the house! It's not in Yelp's interests to try to catch this. At least in the short term.

Only because they don't factor in what their users will do when they get wind of it... become ex-users.

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

#267

Post by jcrash »

sjf wrote: post #227
el_benhameen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, this is a huge problem with maps search results. It's showing too many results and the ranking is rubbish. Searching for coffee shows tons of low quality results including ones for Target and McDonald's.

You're being flagged but you're absolutely correct. Maps search is awful. Yes, most McDonalds might have more than 4 stars, but that's not what I want when I search 'cafe'! I avoid most chain restaurants in general which makes it much worse. I wish there was at least an option to block restaurants from showing up in your results.

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

#268

Post by makeitdouble »

xyst wrote: post #118

I am surprised a yelp/google alternative has not been created with a feature to establish provenance of a review. Perhaps something like a receipt which contains a unique link and that person can provide a review through the link. The review will be posted as "verified transaction" on the site and overall score of the restaurant is determined from there. "Anonymous" reviews can still be posted but won't be factored i…

I'm curious how you finance the operation.

You need restaurant's and the reviewer's cooperation, and it seems your proposition would to have the restaurant foot the bill. Which means, they pay to you give more control over their reviews and ultimately their business to random customers.

The user spend more time and effort to leave a reviews, and while they might see some side benefit in improving your service, they now have to trust you won't screw them and sell them to the restaurant.

Do you see a third party willing to pay enough to keep you alive, outside of spam and ads ?

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

#269

Post by emeril »

I don't work at Yelp though I'm pretty sure that the reviews which stay on the website for any length of time are those posted by users who actively use the website to search for businesses (i.e., tracked via their cookie)

i.e., while there certainly can be paid/manipulated reviews, the barrier to doing so is higher here than elsewhere (e.g., google reviews, tripadvisor, etc.) and there's enough people who are happy to use other less controlled sites, I haven't witnessed any truly widespread fraudulent reviews like I have elsewhere)

Generally speaking, I'd say Yelp reviews are, generally speaking, comparatively the most reliable

I can't speak to how they sort/present search results - that does seem potentially shady

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

#270

Post by bschwindHN »

sjf wrote: post #227
el_benhameen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, this is a huge problem with maps search results. It's showing too many results and the ranking is rubbish. Searching for coffee shows tons of low quality results including ones for Target and McDonald's.

Search for "specialty coffee " and you'll be more likely to find a good place.

Google maps is still getting worse and worse though.

Post reply on HN