Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

justinvincent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 166 posts

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

#101

Post by rpt »

epoxyhockey wrote: post #48
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…

The only thing that has changed from your experience 2 years ago is that it has gotten worse. Yelp is the modern day Better Business Bureau. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-m...

Well, I would argue that the Better Business Bureau is the modern-day Better Business Bureau. :)

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

#102

Post by glanch »

teen wrote: post #40

I have a friend that works as a veterinarian. Yelp called his business often to try to get an advertising deal. After he declined, many of his 5 star reviews disappeared from the site. After losing a lot of business, he signed up for the advertising. The next day all of the 5 star reviews returns. This was just a few months ago.

This has been confirmed from tons of people. How on earth has Yelp not been dismantled by the courts and their CEO put in jail? This is insane. Businesses now have to pay "protection" money to the Yelp mafia. WHY HAS YELP NOT BEEN SHUT DOWN? I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

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

#103

Post by pauljonas »

I stopped using Yelp after I noted that reviews I submitted were only visible to me, if I was logged into the site.

That defeats the purpose of an online review site -- if the review is only visible to me, why am I posting to Yelp, and giving them valuable data they just will sit on, as opposed to logging in my own local host `reviews.txt`?

I noticed also that a number of favorable reviews, seemingly written by authentic reviewers were also suppressed in like fashion.

See Amazon for a site that gets posting reviews mostly correct.

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

#104

Post by vbl »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #90
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.

Yea, but they were the first ones to restart advertising with Rush Limbaugh. And their system is just as game-able, albeit at a slight cost.

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

#106

Post by benhoyt »

gdilla wrote: post #68
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.

Maybe a shamless plug, but I work on mobile apps at Fodor's Travel. We've been doing print travel guides for 75 years. We now have apps, in addition to books. We're professional curators. That means every restaurant review (and shops, hotels, etc) has been written by an actual human professional who's opinion we hope you trust (we're a little more upscale than Lonely Planet, but we have our hip moments). So in a way,…

Huh, interesting, and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of Fodor's. I work at http://www.oyster.com/ -- we're kind of the anti-TripAdvisor as all hotels are visited and photographed by our pro photographers and reviewers. We've found the same thing with UGC in the hotel space. For the popular hotels on TripAdvisor, there are 1000s of reviews, and the aggregate rating is always 3-4 stars. In contrast, on Oyster.com there's one review written with the same guidelines as all the other hotel reviews (as well as 100s of high-quality, non-staged photos).

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

#107

Post by darkblob32 »

I use Yelp to get ideas about what places to eat, but recommendations and confirmations from friends is usually the final say. I really like Yelp, but things like this keep coming up and it's hard to trust that their heart is in the right place. Not to mention how slow they are at staying competitive with other services. Check-in feature seemed to take forever, and I still can't believe they haven't tried to implement customer appreciation cards a la Stampt.

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

#108

Post by eridius »

gdilla wrote: post #68
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.

Maybe a shamless plug, but I work on mobile apps at Fodor's Travel. We've been doing print travel guides for 75 years. We now have apps, in addition to books. We're professional curators. That means every restaurant review (and shops, hotels, etc) has been written by an actual human professional who's opinion we hope you trust (we're a little more upscale than Lonely Planet, but we have our hip moments). So in a way,…

I just want to say, my mother has been using Fodor's Forums for years now to help her with planning her trips. So thank you for creating such a useful resource!

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

#109

Post by twoodfin »

mistermann wrote: post #87
bkbleikamp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ...whereas there is ample evidence that Yelp directly targets individual businesses depending on whether or not they are paying customers.

Can you link to any of this "ample evidence"? Preferably not just allegations from business owners who don't like their reviews.

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

#110

Post by JohnnyFlash »

This isn't really Yelp's fault. Sites like this always have fake reviews mingled in with those that are real. The solution?

Assume people with a 4-5 star review are competent. GET MULTIPLE QUOTES. Doesn't matter if they have 5*, if you feel something is off with them they you avoid.

You also will find out when a quote is too cheap/too expensive and reduce your risk to getting conned.

Don't blame the internets or Yelp. Blame youself for not doing due diligence.

Post reply on HN