Would it be possible to build a better YELP, maybe based on open standards like Nostr?
Is it possible to vote anonymously without being able to fake those votes/reviews?
Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
301–310 of 331 posts
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, th…
This doesn't work.
It's not that people are making up their restaurant visits.
It's that they are going to the restaurant, they had a good time, but they didn't disclose that they are close to the owner, and maybe they overlooked a few things here and there that an impartial reviewer would note.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually worked for a startup that did this, albeit it wasn't public-facing, rather we'd incentivize people to leave reviews in exchange for a coupon code or whatever Turns out a lot of restaurant owners would prefer to straight up own the reviews/influence it themselves rather than get legitimate, anonymized ones. There's just not that much of a reason to genuinely improve as a service when there's so much cutthro…
Did they pivot?
Not sure, I left quite a while ago, haven't really kept up with them. I doubt it though, the CEO didn't care too much about infinite growth and just wanted to build a helpful app for the handful of people who would appreciate a service like that
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Yeah must be Kajiken: https://maps.app.goo.gl/WvPQ115BfmSkJUGw8
I didn't want to buzz market the place but that's correct.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#305First and only Yelp review I ever left was three stars for an Indian restaurant in 2011. It was quickly hidden because "it didn't pass the bot filter" or something. I've never used it since as a reviewer or to find places. It lost all credibility on my first interaction with it.
My wife left a bad review for a restaurant and was stalked and harassed by the restaurant owner for years afterwards. Since she couldn't get Yelp to help with that, it makes every review suspect. It doesn't take much of that behavior to convince people to only leave good reviews, and then they're basically useless.
> My wife left a bad review for a restaurant and was stalked and harassed by the restaurant owner for years afterwards.
There are multiple comments like this and I wonder how does it work? Like, you can just tell they guy to f-off, block his number and warn him that you are calling police if he continues to "stalk" you, no?
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#306When I was on a trip in the US for vacation, I found out that most of the review services can’t be trusted. Despite good or bad reviews it was a complete lottery. Meanwhile in Poland when a restaurant has a good review online you can actually expect reasonable service and food quality.
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#307There are three kinds of review site:
1. The ones unable to effectively police shills and spam. I'd put Google in that bucket.
2. Those that turn a wilful blind eye to review fraud, as long as they boost sales, like Amazon
3. Those like Yelp or Glassdoor whose entire business model is built around extortion and a protection racket ("nice business you have here, it would be a shame if a bad review happened to it. Unless you buy ads with us, of course").
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps. But then why not just say “no results found”? Because that might give the impression to the “average” user that Google is broken and isn’t solving their problem. To the more sophisticated user, Google is just meddling where they shouldn’t. Google is proving the central limit theorem by catering to the average.
Google long ago decided that "No results found" is never an acceptable response. Same with regular Google search. It will just choose arbitrary things to show you instead. It's one of the things that has reduced the usefulness of these tools.
I miss googlewhacking. :(
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#309Earlier 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…
Weird thing is I began comparing things like Uber Eats reviews and Google Maps reviews for local Asian restaurants, and I see things in Google Maps are reviewed substantially lower. For example some of my favorite Asian restaurants in the city are rated 3.5ish while Uber Eats is rated like 4.7. It leads me to believe a lot of people are rating Google Maps restaurants also based on service. One in particular https://w…
One theory I have is that you're getting different rating for different experience. Some "Asian" food keeps well, so it could stand out from the competition. They don't have to deal with you being in the restaurant, complaining about the smell, the service, they hit on the waitress and she wasn't very friendly responding, ect.
You're correct. This is a problem with ratings. You really have to read into them to see what they're complaining about or praising. This is true even for individual reviews, written solo. Many are unhelpful, or stuff that doesn't concern you.
One of the best examples I can remember is a venue that had 2-3 stars. However, all the negative reviews were like: "They have massive parties going hard late into the night... but my kids go to bed at 9:30, so 1 star".
Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
#310Good 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…
> 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.
If only. Its more like "these are the businesses that have paid me. They don't match what you want, but tough cookies."
Same with the much vaunted Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines. They stopped recommending stuff that you would like a long time ago, around the time everyone was trying to copy their recommendation engines, and started recommending stuff that makes the company more money.