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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

#91

Post by drcube »

bbrtyth wrote: post #64
pbreit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I can agree with that. Negative reviews are almost always far more helpful than positive reviews. Review sites should be careful about referencing positive reviews. The gold standard is Consumers Reports which is much more balanced than the average interent review site (where everything gets 4 stars) and thus much more helpful.

Speaking as an app developer, sometimes people get furious over things that are clearly stated before they download it. It really is easier to get complaints, I can see usage stats that show many more people using my apps daily.

So I read the complaint, and that thing that was clearly stated before is now reiterated. If it doesn't bother me, I go ahead and buy your app.

Good reviews are worthless to me as a consumer. What I want are details, good and/or bad, that I can use to evaluate my purchase ahead of time. "This is great!!!", "I would use it again!" are devoid of information.

If negative reviews are more informative, then I assure you, you should welcome them over a bunch of five-star "great!"s.

Besides being informative for me, the user, they should be valuable to you, the business owner. Nobody maintains an "attaboy" database, but you better keep track of bugs and fix them if you expect to grow or even survive in this economy.

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

#92

Post by joshu »

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.

we built the 1995 version, but online: jig.com ... everything old is new again?

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

#93

Post by droithomme »

The problem with the proposed solution of verifying ID is that people who leave honest bad reviews often enough get harassment sued by angry dishonest business owners, who it turns out are more likely to harass and sue companies than the honest companies are.

The main problem here is that Yelp is a racket as well, this has been known for some time. Those using it, well caveat emptor.

There are other review sites out there that are not as morally compromised as Yelp due to their business model being modeled on a mafia protection racket of "Pay us and we can help these bad reviews go away."

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

#94

Post by alanfalcon »

patricklynch wrote: post #39
jvm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm that they still do this, my barber shop says they get hassled all the time.

Well, there goes my ability to trust Yelp reviews as impartial. But if I don't trust the reviews, Yelp effectively degrades into a complicated remix of Google Maps.

Especially complicated when you realize that their mapping system is completely broken for numerous addresses. I used Yelp to try to find a good local cafe to eat at in Irvine. Drove right to the spot indicated on the map and found an industrial complex. Had to look up the business name on Google Maps to find that it was about five miles South of where Yelp told me the cafe was.

Same thing happened again in Vegas, looking for a nice place to eat, find something that looks interesting and then see that Yelp places it in an industrial complex nearby. This time I don't expect to find the place, but I drive by and find myself somewhere in a dark alley full of closed-for-the-evening auto shops.

I'll still use Yelp to find the name of a business, but then I have to switch to Google Maps and do a reality check to actually see if the business is near by and how to get there. A real PITA.

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

#95

Post by IanDrake »

Any review on Yelp that says "We" or mentions the name of the person that assisted them at company is most certainly fake.

Example:

"We were really worried about where to stay on Las Vegas, but then we called hotel X and Margo sounded so nice and welcoming on the phone that we just knew it was the right choice."

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

#96

Post by starpilot »

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…

> 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 soap box for ranting.

This is the risk we take listening to ANYTHING depending on voluntary responses. Burying negative reviews to attempt some intrinsic rating dismisses the value in actual user input, with the paternalistic view that the review aggregator somehow knows better. Who decides which and how many negative reviews to hide? You? How about letting the user figure it out, knowing that trusting any opinion is a risk and learning from experience to calibrate reviews he reads to himself? It's the best we can hope for without resorting to the review site, in effect, clobbering consensus views to get something it "knows to be more accurate." In that case the users no longer review, but the site, which is not a user, does.

> If you receive 2 bad reviews and 2 good ones, that does not mean 50% of people are dissatisfied.

You absolutely do not know this. It could be that 70% were dissatisfied. You can't assume this without taking the role of a reviewer, which you cannot legitimately do without experiencing the item being reviewed.

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

#97

Post by newbie12 »

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…

Yelp accused of extortion in Chicago:

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/02/27/2-investigators-busin...

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

#98

Post by shangrila »

roguecoder wrote: post #53

We've seen this result before, from Wikipedia: http://thedartmouth.com/2007/10/22/news/wiki 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…

This needs to be higher. This is exactly the reason why what the article calls "Assumption X" is flawed.

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

#99

Post by mrobataille »

bbrtyth wrote: post #60

Remember, everyone, if you aren't paying for it, you might be the product. In this case, a Yelp user is the product that Yelp sells to businesses by featuring 5-star reviews and burying the 1-star review. Featuring the 1-stars and burying the 5-stars would also be quite the incentive for a business to pay Yelp, but it would be cynical to assume they are doing that, too.

I agree with you completely.

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

#100

Post by robatsu »

Identity verification and such are only part of the problem. Even if it is a bona fide person writing the review (and ignoring the problems w/Yelp filtering practices), a truly valid review only comes from one who the readers can be assured really was a customer of Royal Movers in addition to some of the other, lower identity bars.

So how could that work?

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