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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

#321

Post by onetokeoverthe »

karaterobot wrote: post #202
telchior wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise Google Maps for this. I can know that a restaurant exists, zoom in on its block, search 'restaurants' -- nothing. It'll zoom out the map and show other stuff. Worse, I can max my zoom and hunt for it on the map and it will outright show a blank space. Only searching for the restaurant's actual name will bring it up. But there's not really any alternative. Apple Maps can't show me things because it's missing…

> I feel like we're going back in time because the best way to find local restaurants has become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations. Let's face it, that never stopped being the best way. There have always been problems with internet reviews, if only the ones inherent in the 1-5 star mechanism. But, it is very inconvenient to ask around for recommend…

[dead]

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

#323

Post by eep_social »

moneywoes wrote: post #292
eep_social wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zagat was a decently good restaurant directory but Google bought it, didn’t do much with it, and then sold it to some shitty app maker.

What did they do good?

Founded pre-internet. Curated reviews behind a paywall :. clear incentives for quality. A quick glance over wikipedia gives the gist. In my lifetime Zagat-rated was a mark of honor particularly for mid to high-end restaurants.

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

#324

Post by ponkipo »

el_benhameen wrote: post #195
Guest9081239812 wrote: post #72

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…

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.

on the same topic - sometimes it's so frustrating when I put some shop name in Google Maps while I'm in Paris and looking on the map of my neighborhood, for example - and whoosh - it zooms so far out to show all the places which "suit" the search in all the Europe. Why would it do that?

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

#326

Post by fennecfoxy »

So many people see the brewing storm of AI as dystopian, but this is one of the tasks that it could be quite good at.

Humans are biased, deceptive creatures and whether intentional or not we can misrepresent ourselves, others and every...thing. AI would definitely help to drop a "badge of approval" on something in some cases.

Reviews for restaurants may be harder, but just simple fact checking it's going to be so amazing to have a trusted AI that can say "yep, this is most likely true" with a click-through to references/sources/reasons why.

Look at trending Twitter tags, I've been looking at #ukrainerussiawar etc a lot and sometimes like 90% of the tweets have _nothing_ to do with the topic, jsut shameless self-promotion spamming tags, or misinformation tweets from either Russia's information warfare team, or quite simply right wing morons parroting propaganda. Would be nice to make all of that go away...

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

#327

Post by emodendroket »

stronglikedan wrote: post #185
emodendroket wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sure, some will react that way. But some guy kept calling my wife and trying to intimidate her over my review. That probably works at least some of the time. And how many people want to go to court to defend themselves over a review? Seems like it’s not worth the effort.

Oh, I thought you were talking about anonymous reviews, where the the businesses can respond but not contact me directly. I wouldn't leave a review where they would be able to contact me. And even if they did, I'd handle that scenario a bit differently. Sorry that happened to you.

Yelp has a big sideline in helping to find contractors. So obviously if you then review them after finding them through Yelp they know who you are.

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

#328

Post by BizarroLand »

aci_12 wrote: post #244
m463 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think follow the money. Yelp makes 96% of its revenue on advertising. They probably make more money if reviews for a restaurant are in question. If someone spends 20 minutes clicking around on a list of restaurants to read the reviews and see if some seems genuine or fake... yelp makes lots of money. If yelp reviews were 100% trusted, everyone would just click once, and then go to the highest rated restaurant.

> Yelp makes 96% of its revenue on advertising. Think that's the root of the issue. A review system should not be in the business of advertisement or any kind which could change the review ranks

They should also not be allowed to make secret deals with companies to artificially boost said companies or to downrank non-paying competitors.

The problem is there's no accountability.

Sure, we can sue them, but for what damages? How do you account for the value of lost business opportunities caused by Yelp selling your honestly earned ranking spot on their website to your competitor?

The only way to prove they've done something wrong is to commit corporate espionage and get the proof yourself, which would then most likely invalidate the ability to use that evidence for revenge.

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

#329

Post by BizarroLand »

kelnos wrote: post #215
mtlynch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This comment is fairly dismissive of GP's experience and intelligence. I don't have the full text of that comment, as they've edited it our, so I don't know specifically what they said. But perhaps they just don't know everything about how Yelp operates; it's not a small company where everyone knows everything. I also know someone who previously worked at Yelp, and they've talked about some of Yelp's shady internal…

I'm willing to bet there are more people who could solve that problem working for yelp than you would fairly estimate there are, but the suits are actively preventing solving that problem because they know that shaking down businesses for Yelp support contracts is infinitely more profitable than being a reliable source of truth in the world will ever be.

Gold Plated Bugatti's do not buy themselves, after all.

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