I only use Yelp to see whats nearby.
Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
11–20 of 166 posts
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#12Wow. 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 ove…
Why would they find it creepy? You wouldn't need to say your using credit history. It would be as simple as asking the user a question "Please validate your a real person by answering these few questions".
As far as the user is concerned it's just a few questions and answers.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#13So, the solution is replacing the CAPTCHA with my SSN? All to post a review? Yeah, that doesn't seem reasonable to me...
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#14Wow. 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.
The problem is, a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews can just as easily come from someone who has it out for a business.
I have a friend who is currently a target of such a vendetta. He got into an edit dispute with someone who was trying to censor stuff on a wiki. This other person responded by flooding listings of my friend's previous employer (which has been out of business for a few months) on nearly every review site out there with a continuous stream of utterly fabricated reviews. These reviews range from calling him a pedophile (easy enough to get deleted) to pretending to be a client who was screwed by his incompetence. I'm not sure there is any way to differentiate the latter kind of reviews from genuine negative experiences.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#15This sounds terrible. I wonder if this space is ripe for a new startup to gradaully take over?
If you guys made a competitor to Yelp, how would you improve on it?
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#16True, Yelp got the filtering completely backwards in this instance. But, do you base any economic decision on two 5-star reviews from two Yelpers with 0 friends and 4 reviews combined?
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#17Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services.
A company I used to freelance for found that after they stopped paying Yelp for a premium account, they started seeing more negative reviews and a number of their positive reviews were filtered out. They got almost daily phone calls from Yelp marketing types essentially suggesting that if they renewed their subscription, the negative reviews would 'disappear'.
This was a few years ago, so maybe things have changed since then. Either way, I wouldn't hold your breath for a better review verification system.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#18True, Yelp got the filtering completely backwards in this instance. But, do you base any economic decision on two 5-star reviews from two Yelpers with 0 friends and 4 reviews combined?
Not everyone is a sophisticated Yelp user with an understanding of social networks. A lot of people will simply see two 5-star reviews, zero negative reviews, and think that looks like a safe bet.
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#19There's no technical workaround for having good references from trusted source for something as important as movers, a dentist, a skilled tradesperson, a doctor, et al. (edit: I don't care, it's true. Even Angie's List isn't great)
Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It
#20I don't know if he's just being coy by saying this is an accident on Yelp's part.
The actual reviews are here: http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor.... It's pretty obvious there is something fishy about the unfiltered reviews. Each reviewer first left a one line review "Amazing!!! one of a kind..one of the best sushi place" and "the best of the best" before their very detailed, glowing review of the movers. If that's what it takes to fool the spam filter then something is very wrong. By contrast one of the filtered reviewers has ten measured, thorough reviews but his review has been banned for ToS violations.
Yelp really needs to disclose which vendors have a business relationship with them. They should also make the filtered reviews easier to see (place the link next to the unfiltered review count) and remove the damn CAPTCHA. I regularly try to check the filtered reviews but can't because the CAPTCHA is too difficult to read.