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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

#131

Post by bbrtyth »

drcube wrote: post #91
bbrtyth wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are more willing to read than most, I guess.

Legitimate complaints are welcome, I never implied they were not.

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

#132

Post by Maxious »

hncommenter13 wrote: post #123
jv22222 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a valid, fully qualified, unique credit history for each new account. How is that easy to game? Are you assuming that the moving company will get all their employees to to signup to Yelp and certify their credit history against fake sock puppet accounts? They maybe able to do it for a few accounts but pretty soon they would run out of real people to use up... in the mean time real reviews will be submitted b…

Say what? Yelp is pulling credit histories of people who join the site? If they are, that is way out of bounds for what users typically expect when joining an online review site. As a simple reviewer, I'm not engaging in any business with them, they're not offering me credit, and pulling a credit report on some anonymous internet user would not only be expensive but would require some serious disclosure (as having cr…

Did you read the article before commenting? The article proposes that Yelp should provide people the option to use their credit rating to prove they are not a sockpuppet in return for Yelp displaying their review. It is only an option, credit ratings are only used because they are a pre-existing identification and authentication source and most importantly YELP IS NOT DOING THIS YET.

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

#133

Post by dcpdx »

Sivart13 wrote: post #125

What's most shocking at this point is that this story has been up for seven hours and Yelp hasn't bothered to fix the page in question, the wrongness of which could be observed by any human with eyes: http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor...

Wow, those 1-star reviews are pretty scathing too. I had no idea that negative reviews were filtered like that; that pretty much ruins my trust in the review component of the site. From now on, I'll be using Yelp for contact info. and price points...

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

#134

Post by dcpdx »

colomon wrote: post #61
pg_bot wrote: post #35

Honestly the author is over thinking his solution to the problem. The way to solve this problem is to give people the option of viewing reviews that Yelp believes are of dubious origin. Add another section to the reviews page, and let the users decide how to process the extra information but frame it as possibly being untrustworthy with an explanation of why it was tagged as untrustworthy.

They already allow you to click through to the reviews they have filtered out. How about having two average ratings, one for only "filtered in" reviews and one for all reviews?

And the font is about 10px and 30%K buried in the bottom corner. I can understand that would be desirable if the algorithm was more accurate in filtering bogus reviews, but that's clearly not the case so it just seems unscrupulous.

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

#135

Post by ryanbraganza »

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,…

"Oh, and all our apps are FREE."

Not for Nokia, they aren't. (AUD 6.60 each)

http://store.ovi.com/search?q=Fodor%27s+Avante

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

#136

Post by sliverstorm »

iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #37
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…

"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." EXTREMELY worth mentioning. If you've yelped Yelp, so to speak, you know to take their recommendations with a grain of salt and then some. Caveat emptor. While I'm on the topic, the idea of a single company managing reputation for any given space is silly bey…

It'd be great if we had multiple review sites. Problem is nobody has managed to get as many users to write as detailed of reviews as Yelp has.

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

#137

Post by notJim »

rpt wrote: post #101
epoxyhockey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

From what I've seen, the BBB is anything but modern.

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

#138

Post by benatkin »

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.

This point doesn't apply very well to this case. The problem is that there was a lack of verifiable people on Yelp posting negative reviews. Yelp has many more semi-verifiable people on it (i. e. people who've left multiple reviews) than the typical person has friends with experience with a given rarely-used service.

If in this case the problem were likely to be solved by acquaintances, it would also be likely to be solved by Yelp, under its assumption that people need to leave multiple reviews to be considered credible.

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

#139

Post by gdilla »

ryanbraganza wrote: post #135
gdilla wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"Oh, and all our apps are FREE." Not for Nokia, they aren't. (AUD 6.60 each) http://store.ovi.com/search?q=Fodor%27s+Avante

Right. iOS only for now.

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

#140

Post by suresk »

gzervas wrote: post #45
jv22222 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying it's Yelp's responsibility to protect unsophisticated users from themselves? Also, I am not quite sure "a lot of people" will behave as you describe.

If one has to become a sophisticated Yelp user and do a substantial amount of detective work in order to determine if Yelp reviews are legit in order to get any value out of it (or at least not get actively misled by it), then what value does Yelp provide?
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