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

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

#271

Post by rx_tx »

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…

I know which place you're talking about, and their stuff is actually sort of unique to me at least, in the sense that there's no broth in any of the ramen, but more of an oily sauce that you mix with the noodles. It's actually really amazing, and worth at least some wait to me. (and a Japanese opening a bay area branch tends to form lines).

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

#272

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

What astonishes me about both Yelp! and Trip Advisor is their complete inability to grow their share price, even with near-monopolies in Restaurants (Yelp!) and Hotels (TripAdvisor). Yelp! catalogs 205 Million reviews last year. 30 Million for Trip Advisor.

But even with such dominance, in the last 10 years, Yelp! is up about 38% and Trip Advisor is down 42%. What is it about their businesses that makes profitability growth so elusive?

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

#273

Post by fsckboy »

stevenwliao wrote: post #250
chasebank wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'm aware of. Reddit/HN has been compromised for years but I guess it's better than the alternatives. Whoever solves trustworthy, honest reviews will be a very, very rich person.

We will never have completely trustworthy user reviews. Reddit/HN quality is probably about as good as it gets. Many small businesses get their viral loop started from glowing reviews from family and friends. That sort of growth hack will never disappear, and the subtle cases will be undetectable. I decline to write such reviews, but others won't.

> > Whoever solves trustworthy, honest reviews will be a very, very rich person.

> We will never have completely trustworthy user reviews.

just reading these to comments helped me figure out how to solve this: since apps have location tracking, for restaurants at least, your reviews should be weighted by how much time you spend close to a restaurant. If you claim to like a restaurant, but you don't eat there much, that means your reviews are not reliable. This unreliability would transfer to reviews of places that are not close to your home/work.

bonus points to combine it with confirmed food expenditures on your credit card/applepay.

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

#275

Post by quantified »

bschwindHN wrote: post #270
sjf wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Search for "brew pub" and you'll get tons of non-brewpub results. I got a wholesale distributor while searching in south Indiana last night.

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

#276

Post by jstarfish »

mock-possum wrote: post #134
jstarfish wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about whistleblowers is that nobody actually likes them. "Whistleblower" is to white-collar crime as "snitching" is to anything street-level. We "appreciate" them when they call foul on others, but you appreciate them a hell of a lot less when you have such moral crusaders in your own ranks. They aren't loyal to anybody but their own sense of self-righteousness and can't be trusted to keep their mouth shut…

what? I like them. I don't get this automatic assumption that everyone is a hypocrite and no one is willing to face accusations of doing things wrong in their own life. I mean, is that how you operate? That's not how I do things. If I'm doing something wrong I love finding out about it - otherwise, how will I eve do things right? if your goal for relationships with other people is to prevent them from discovering dir…

> If I'm doing something wrong I love finding out about it - otherwise, how will I eve do things right?

We're talking about a few different things-- most of what I said applies to employer/employee relationships. If you hire a known whistleblower, you better make sure there are no skeletons in your closet because they've already proven what they're willing to do with such information.

> if your goal for relationships with other people is to prevent them from discovering dirt about you then... I dunno man, I'm not sure how it's possible to live happily around other human beings with that kind of attitude. what kind of person does that make you?

In both cases, it's just a matter of discretion. There is no prevention; discovery is inevitable.

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

#277

Post by berniedurfee »

bombcar wrote: post #255
majormajor wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Picking winners" here doesn't mean Yelp is doing the faking themselves. 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 increas…

You can have a system that acts like a conspiracy without any conspirators. Just everyone doing their own thing resulting in unwanted consequences.

Negligence

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

#278

Post by gnicholas »

78124781 wrote: post #125
arbuge wrote: post #33

While on the subject, are there any review sites anywhere, not just for locations but also of products, that can be trusted? It seems to me that all of them can be and actively are gamed. Googling using the extension site:reddit.com caught on for a reason.

I keep seeing people swear by the NY Times' Wirecutter and they do have a much more upfront set of standards for reviewing products, but I've actually been pretty underwhelmed by the recommended buys from them. Still, I respect that they're trying. Wish that Consumer Reports was more easily available now too.

The Wirecutter has been accused of only selecting products that can be purchased via affiliate links IIRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321923

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

#279

Post by Nextgrid »

ryandrake wrote: post #106

I hate to be dismissive, but this is kind of a "Water Is Wet" article. Does anyone really think online reviews are anything but totally gamed, bought, and paid for? It's kind of a Universal Law Of Spam: Any place on the Internet where users can add content and where content might be profitable to someone, will eventually end up full of spam and paid-for content.

There's huge money to be made pretending spam isn't a real problem. It used to be that spam was universally despised, fought and even prosecuted in some jurisdictions. But it turns out that it's cheaper (and actually profitable) to join the spammers than to fight them, especially if you have an endless supply of marks that will guzzle the spam without second thoughts.

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

#280

Post by Seattle3503 »

> She also reached out to Sasha Ganji, the lawyer whose signature was appended to the letter she’d received from the law firm appearing to represent SavantCare. Ganji never touched the document, he told Dean; apparently someone had used his name and signature without his knowledge.

That is a serious thing to do. This is criminal fraud right?

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