This is a pretty crummy article. If you read it carefully, you see: - a woman owns a shady company - she tries to get her friends to write five star reviews of her on Yelp - Yelp intentionally tries to filter out these reviews so the site isn't filled with spam opinions - the woman is upset The real question is why there's a news story taking her side in this.
Agreed. Not to say there isn't a problem with Yelp's practices (as have been documented elsewhere), but this article does not make a good case against them. From an algorithmic standpoint, filtering out reviews from new users makes sense. Otherwise you'll get the owner and friends stuffing in good reviews. Just look at what the data might look like for the 17 people. -They all sign up in a period of a few weeks. -The…
I don't think that really has been documented elsewhere. There have been lawsuits and allegations, but no proof, as far as I know, that Yelp has offered to compromise their reviews for cash. Yes, they give business owners willing to advertise some editorial control over their listing, but the extent of that control is fairly well-understood and not much more nefarious than Google's text ads. Correct me if there's documented evidence otherwise.
Instead, we get article after article of business owners complaining because their Yelp reviews suck and their obvious attempts to game them have been thwarted. But that's exactly what Yelp should be doing. They're useless if they can be gamed. They're also useless if it becomes well-known that they're pay-to-play, but again, I don't think there's actual evidence of that. They'd have to be pretty stupid to take that course.