Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
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Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#2Wow. Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews.
The hard part is staying one step ahead of less-legitimate accounts. There's always somebody trying to cheat the system, and stopping these users often results in a tradeoff.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#3The proposed solution sounds incredibly easy to game - as a moving company, I could create a bunch of fake, one-off profiles with complaints about one of my competitors and destroy their Yelp reputation. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible for an algorithm to detect the difference between a bunch of angry one-time posters and a coordinated reputation attack.
This is why I've gone off sites like Yelp for recommendations, and instead stick to places like Foursquare which rely much more heavily on the behaviour of the people that I know. Seeing that several of my friends have been somewhere more than once is a much stronger recommendation signal than a bunch of strangers giving something five stars.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#4The hiding of reviews has made Yelp virtually useless. I like the identity verification idea. I implemented the Equifax version and it's very simple to code. I believe it cost us in the neighborhood of $1/verification. That may outweigh the value of a verified Yelp user though, but I have no idea of the Yelp economics.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#5Wow. Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews. The hard part is staying one step ahead of less-legitimate accounts. There's always somebody trying to cheat the system, and stopping these users often results in a tradeoff.
> Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews.
But a continuous, consistent pattern of one-shot negative reviews is also not particularly difficult for a competing business (or anyone with a grudge) to reproduce.
This is a hard problem, and I don't think the credit check-style identity verification questions suggested in the post are going to solve it. For one thing, I think an overwhelming number of people would find it creepy. They're trying to tell people about a bad moving company, not get a car loan.
Putting more of your "valuable" online identity at stake seems likely to help. I hate to say it, but "Log in using your Facebook account" suddenly gives Yelp a lot more data to exploit to decide just how much trust they should put in your reviews.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#6Yelp has been routinely hiding bad reviews and fixing good reviews to the top. It is a total scam and a total extortion scheme for local businesses.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#7The proposed solution sounds incredibly easy to game - as a moving company, I could create a bunch of fake, one-off profiles with complaints about one of my competitors and destroy their Yelp reputation. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible for an algorithm to detect the difference between a bunch of angry one-time posters and a coordinated reputation attack. This is why I've gone off sites like Yelp for recomm…
You need a valid, fully qualified, unique credit history for each new account. How is that easy to game? Are you assuming that the moving company will get all their employees to to signup to Yelp and certify their credit history against fake sock puppet accounts? They maybe able to do it for a few accounts but pretty soon they would run out of real people to use up... in the mean time real reviews will be submitted by an endless pool of real people with valid credit history.
It will be quite easy to tell which reviews are real and which are not. At the very least it will make the company look questionable because 50% of reviews will be 5 star and 50% will be one star. The main issue is we need to get valid reviews out of the filter so that Yelp users can more easily make their mind up.
As it stands a lot of real reviews are hidden and a lot of fake reviews are exposed. Simply by exposing real reviews you level the playing field.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#8[deleted]
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#9It would be interesting to see a crowd-sourced recommendation site based only on positive recommendations. Something like a Net Promoter score to tell me where is good. i.e. you can only leave feedback for a place if you would actually recommend it to someone.
Every business can have bad days, and a negative review can put a prospective customer off even if actually 99% of the time that's a good business.
This isn't really a comparative recommendation site like yelp, the scenario would be something like a user saying what they want to do (like eat burgers on friday) then people would only recommend place to go. Kind of like Quora for places.
Eventually you could build a decent picture of business that are recommended multiple times to start making suggestions beyond the crowd sourced suggestions.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#10Question based identity verification can be very painless.
For you, but not the vendor. See PayPal.
Question based identity verification processes are already used and supplied under the hood by agencies such as TransUnion, Equifax & Experian.
And that leads to friction. Yelp got it's massive user base from frictionless technology.
I don't like Yelp's business practices just as much as the next person, but this is a human interaction issue that isn't solved by a simple algorithm, nor is it solved purely by (mind you, costly) human being based committees.