Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

Example: consumer goes to idverificationsite.com, registers there for free- they ask out of wallet questions to verify identity, potentially do a minimal background check too.

You then use this login with Yelp, AirBnB, Getaround, etc.

Yelp, Getaround, Airbnb pay idverificationsite.com some small amount per verified person. Removes some of the friction of ID verification/spreads cost around.

Sidenote: the BBB is the worst offender of these protection rackets - http://feefighters.com/blog/bbb-accreditation/

Also - I've just decided to start posting reviews to Google rather than Yelp, they lost me as a product after reading this thread.

They found that there were two patterns of content contribution: people who wrote one review and people who wrote lots. For people who wrote one review, anonymous contributions were higher quality than signed, and those single reviews were higher quality than people who contributed multiple reviews.

Chances are good your most valuable reviews are coming from the long tail and your least accurate reviews are coming from people who are posting lots, but potentially with sockpuppet accounts. Tossing out your most accurate reviews in an attempt to suppress the latter seems counterproductive.

If the questions were about my credit history then this is a deal breaker.

There is no way a site like yelp can get me to authenticate by answering questions about my credit history and I suspect that the vast majority of people would agree.

Now, facebook credentials, that's a different story.

In a nutshell the problem is that people who are not verifiable by "the service" provide information or data which is essential to the operation of the "the service." Further the beneficiaries of the service (customers) are not paying for the service, and the people who can be harmed or benefit from the service (establishments) have every motivation to game the system to increase business and little downside.

So your business which has modestly thin margins to begin with, grows slowly, and the more popular it gets the more it tries to get gamed and the more margins are squeezed if you're paying people to filter those reviews.

There aren't really any 'good' answers. But there are other examples of businesses like this that have done well. The ones that do well however use the 'review' portal to push more customers to the 'value' area where higher rates of returns are to be had.

I hope someone writes up Yelp, Ripoffreport, TripAdvisor, Expedia, and AngiesList up for a Harvard Business Review group study. There have been a lot of experiments in this space taking different tacks and it would be interesting to compare their effectiveness.