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Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

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Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#51

Post by pbreit »

ig1 wrote: post #11
cleverjake wrote: post #2

http://eater.com/archives/2011/07/20/yelp-accused-of-fivesta... http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-e... http://consumerist.com/2010/02/yelp-accused-of-more-negative... http://jonathanturley.org/2010/02/27/yelp-accused-of-extorti... http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/04/yelp-lawsuit-extortion/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/17/complaints-against-yelps-ex... http://www.pcworld.com/article/190231/yelp_…

The suit was dismissed because of lack of evidence of extortion.

Not only is there a lack of evidence from the plaintiffs, Yelp has mountains of evidence proving the opposite.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#52

Post by neovive »

lallysingh wrote: post #40
eevilspock wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying professionals are not prone to bias or influence?

Professionals have a reputation, which should reduce bias or influence. If Zagat was known to take bribes, they wouldn't be around for very long. It may happen, but is less likely to happen than non-professionals. You have a much larger issue with selection bias for reviews, and a much easier way for vendors to bias them. I've been in shops that insist, rather persistently, that I write a good review for their store…

Great points! The issue of selection bias is very real on many review sites. Especially with the volume of reviews being so low for most products and services.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#53

Post by timtadh »

yoda_sl wrote: post #32
timtadh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam filtering is hard? You are a programmer, imagine trying to find a way to objectively and fairly filter reviews. Unlike with emails you don't know whose labels to trust. There are good business owners who will only report spam reviews as spam. Then there are bad business owners who will report negative ham as spam to try and boost their reviews. Finally, there are bad business owners who will use shell accounts t…

They are various ways to solve the problem but again it is not in Yelp's interest. Yelp's business is about selling Ad and they don't really care about the underlying issues. One simple thing that could be added to their system was a way to verify that a reviewer did really have a business relation for posting a reviews. They are various ways for solving that. Even a simpler approach: why hide those reviews. Keep the…

There is no relationship between the sales calls and the filtering algorithm. That is what the dismissed class action lawsuit was about. All "evidence" people have is purely anecdotal.

Verifying a "business" relationship may work but it still won't solve all of the problems. You can still pay people to show up at your restaurant, pay with their credit card and write a five star review. You can still pay people to show up at a competitors restaurant, pay with their credit card and write a one star review. It simply increases the cost of the spam (which is a good thing). They should probably create a way to do this but it won't solve the fundamental problem: the reviewer pool is an unreliable source of information.

"X people found that review helpful"

A helpful review is not the same as an accurate review based on experience. I would find a well written review helpful. However, the review could still be inaccurate or fake just well written. This is simply another data point for spam detection and one with many confounders at that. One has to simply google around about the state of Amazon reviews to see the flaws in this approach.

Once again. I stand by my assertion, detecting spam reviews is extremely difficult because it is a human problem.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#54

Post by aneth3 »

"Yelp buries reviews by one-time posters" might be a more accurate title.

Yelp is trying to build a community of reliable reviewers, not display every review of an establishment, because this is a good way to avoid business owners soliciting reviews from friends and family. If those acquaintances are not part of the Yelp community, they don't understand the standards of the community or even what a five star review means. They are not useful reviews so they are filtered. Community members have a stake in their reputation as a reviewer.

This is something like the practice of hellbanning on Hacker News, except implemented with a well considered policy. (Yelp would likely fail quickly if they implemented HN's shamefully poor method.) Yelp could probably do a better job of explaining this to users - it should say "Yelp displays reviews by experienced reviewers more prominently. Until you establish yourself by writing frequent reviews, yours may be filtered."

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#55

Post by kaizenfury7 »

andrewcross wrote: post #26
aaronsw wrote: post #3

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…

>> Just look at what the data might look like for the 17 people. -They all sign up in a period of a few weeks. -They all review this one place and nothing else. -16 of the 17 never sign back in again.

Looking at the 17 filtered reviews, 16 of them are 5-star reviews from people with 0 friends and less than 5 reviews (mostly only have 1 review). There's also a 1-star review from a person with 0 friends and 1 review.

It seems like to me that their filtering algorithm is working pretty well.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#56

Post by tomkarlo »

ig1 wrote: post #7
irishloop wrote: post #5

I don't really see a good logistical way to deal with this kind of problem. Any algorithm is going to see a bunch of sudden reviews of extreme positive or negative opinions as possible spam, and for users who never review more than once, I'm not sure how the filter is supposed to know what is and is not legitimate. Yelp does seem to have a conflict of interest with advertisements, but considering the only alternative…

There's a well known solution for this and it's called a chinese wall. You segregate the ad team from the other teams and restrict the data flow between them. It's what Google and many others use to stop ad revenues biasing their product.

How does this in any way mitigate the issue of fly-by / socket puppet reviewers?

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#57

Post by dcotter »

yoda_sl wrote: post #13
crikli wrote: post #10

I keep seeing articles like this. I read the article, then I find the company on Yelp and read through the reviews. Every single time it's been very clear that Yelp is telling these businesses that they have a problem. But rather than acting on this extraordinarily valuable feedback the owners/managers react by blaming Yelp for the bad reviews or accusing Yelp of hiding the good reviews. This behavior frequently expo…

Clearly you have not been running a small business. Some reviews are posted from time to time by people that are not even customers or stopped by the business; for some dumb reason they post a 1 star review.. And that review usually stick and doesn't get filtered out...but other reviews from true customers posting 4 to 5 stars reviews disappear usually in less than 24 hours after they were posted. What kind of explan…

If their ranking algorithm is pushing reviews with high page-views to the top, then perhaps it's as simple as negative reviews getting more attention, either because negativity draws people in or because people are more interested in trying not to have an awful experience than in having a great one. On the other hand, if the algorithm is optimized around other values (credibility, for instance), then it wouldn't make sense for reviewers with no history to get their reviews pushed to the top. Hard to say, given that it's a trade secret.

Re: Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

#58

Post by aneth3 »

"Yelp buries reviews by one-time posters" might be a more accurate title.

Yelp is trying to build a community of reliable reviewers, not display every review of an establishment, because this is a good way to avoid business owners soliciting reviews from friends and family. If those acquaintances are not part of the Yelp community, they don't understand the standards of the community or even what a five star review means. They are not useful reviews so they are filtered. Community members have a stake in their reputation as a reviewer.

This is something like the practice of hellbanning on Hacker News, except that it allows users to progress from untrusted to trusted, rather than HN's "lightening" approach. Yelp could probably do a better job of explaining this to users - it should say "Yelp displays reviews by experienced reviewers more prominently. Until you establish yourself by writing frequent reviews, yours may be filtered."

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