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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

#81

Post by asmithmd1 »

pushingbits wrote: post #70
lazerwalker wrote: post #17

Worth 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 es…

This is supposedly happening all the time, yet no one has managed to catch it on tape for some reason. I can't think of a credible explanation for the lack of hard evidence (and lawsuits).

Hey CamperBob it looks to me like you have been hell banned. All your comments are listed as dead

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

#82

Post by colomon »

underwater wrote: post #67
colomon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I was unable to find the sushi reviews here... Is Yelp changing the reviews as we read them?

Click on Abigail and Bob's names for their review history.

Gotcha. Damn, I see what you mean. If that's all it takes to game the system, it's amazing that their system isn't completely overwhelmed by fake reviews...

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

#83

Post by JeffBlauser »

TylerE wrote: post #65
mcknz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1995 corollary: the is invariably a brother- or sister-in-law.

Not always a bad thing. All but the worst of the worst are going not want to screw over a relative, even a distant one.

That's why they say, "Always do business with family."

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

#84

Post by steve8918 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #47
timdorr wrote: post #13

So, the solution is replacing the CAPTCHA with my SSN? All to post a review? Yeah, that doesn't seem reasonable to me...

Yelp wouldn't get your SSN; they'd only get a boolean response as to whether you're an actual human being or not.

Unless, of course, Yelp or whoever else used the service also ran a man-in-the-middle and captured the information being passed back and forth.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

pushingbits wrote: post #70
lazerwalker wrote: post #17

Worth 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 es…

This is supposedly happening all the time, yet no one has managed to catch it on tape for some reason. I can't think of a credible explanation for the lack of hard evidence (and lawsuits).

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by int3rnaut »

Would anyone be interested in disrupting this space? My friend and I have been working on something we quite like that deals with subjectivity/ethics concerns, but it's a tough space to be in, and we'd love some help. If you want to get in touch, email us at questionasker[at]liveDotCA

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

#87

Post by mistermann »

bkbleikamp wrote: post #75
lazerwalker wrote: post #17

Worth 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 es…

It's not worth mentioning. Almost every case has been a coincidence and they've gone out of their way to explain the review filter (which functions similarly to Google's PageRank algorithm and attempts to filter out spammy reviews using various factors). Each court case related to this has been thrown out. If you trust Google to be fair with PageRank then there hasn't been any evidence that should make you more conce…

I'm very suspicious of your review of Yelp.

> Business owners complain about getting demoted in Google's PageRank algorithm quite a bit, too.

Google rankings fluctuate over time, but it is never the result of a direct targeting of an individual company or URL by google, whereas there is ample evidence that Yelp directly targets individual businesses depending on whether or not they are paying customers.

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

#88

Post by praptak »

edw519 wrote: post #22

1995 Q: How can you verify the quality of a ? A: Ask your . 2009 Q: Same question. A: Don't need no stinkin' people. We have the internets! 2012 Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it? A: Use the 1995 solution.

> A: Use the 1995 solution.

But not in the "back to square one" meaning, it is rather "next level of a spiral staircase". I believe there's still room for improvement (definitely there is over the '95 low tech and probably over what we have now) in the way we can combine internet and the '95 solution to find good

Time will tell - lots of money goes into social, someone will do it right or at least we'll know what obstacles prevent this from happening.

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

#89

Post by steve8918 »

bobbydavid wrote: post #24

Disclaimer: I don't work for Yelp but I have created other user-ratings-based sites before. It's not entirely fair to criticize Yelp for under-emphasizing negative reviews. One of the big hurdles to overcome on a user ratings site is that people are most motivated to write reviews when they are outraged. There is a massive selection bias, and if nothing is done to alleviate this, your site runs the risk of becoming a…

I do agree that a lot of valid reviews are being thrown out with the bathwater. There should be a better mechanism to show all unfiltered reviews.

The thing that Yelp that makes it stand above other review sites is that they incentive positive reviews. Like Yelp or not, the idea of "Yelp Elite" is actually a great idea, because it is able to draw out a lot of medium to great reviews, stuff you would rarely see on other sites. When you incentive reviews, either good or bad, then you do tend to eliminate this "one-and-done" bias that tends to focus on the negative.

That being said, my wife is/was a Yelp Elite for several years with over 800 reviews, but quit this year because she thinks that Yelp as a whole has started to go downhill, and doesn't like the pretentiousness of most people on there now.

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

#90

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #59

Yelp is the poster child of the disingenuous Internet problem. 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 ga…

I swear by AngiesList for services like moving companies.

They just called us up a couple weeks ago and sat on the phone for over a half hour (because we were willing) taking reviews from us on a bunch of companies that we had used.

This is why it costs money; they actually provide a service. If they don't have enough reviews, they hire people to call you up and write up the reviews for you.

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