11–20 of 153 posts
Earlier this summer, a Yelp salesman called Brader's house to ask if he wanted to advertise on the Yelp site. Yelp will never make it as a public company, which means that it should technically fizzle and die sooner rather than later. What they do isn't illegal, but it should be; its revenue model is unethical, sleazy, blackmailing, extortion.
So why hasn't that happened? Because of libel laws, for one thing. RICO for another. Best answer would be a class action to subpoena Yelp for the IP & personal info of the posters of questionable negative reviews that had survived the removal of legitimate positive reviews, and file a lawsuit against the authors and Yelp for libel. A few thousand of those and they'll be pushed back into their corner.
2+2 Poker Forum has been doing this in the online casino industry for awhile... but they're real criminals anyway: http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/poker-complaints/45662-2...
The one and only time I wrote a review on Yelp, I gave a restaurant a one star rating because the customer service was truly terrible and I left with a horrible taste in my mouth (figuratively). The review wasn't riddled with spelling/grammatical errors and it extremely close to the word limit Yelp has in place. Anyone reading it could tell it wasn't a fake review. Heck, in the few days the review was up, it got voted up to most useful review. But I got hit by the filter anyways. I suspect the algorithm really is flawed and not being manipulated like some people claim, but maybe I'm an optimist.
I'm surprised people believe that Yelp would be so clumsy and unethical to simply penalize non-advertisers.
The problem Yelp has is that they don't allow unfiltered reviews to be contested. So even if Brader or his customers wanted to contact Yelp and say "Hey, our reviews aren't spam or for gaming the system" and explain what happened, there's no easy/official way to do it. The one and only time I wrote a review on Yelp, I gave a restaurant a one star rating because the customer service was truly terrible and I left with…
Mix in a bit of "lazy" and you've got yourself a situation that sucks for the small people unable to fix the big system.
How can a computer evaluate the 'realness' of a review? The idea of Yelp, crowdsourced business reviews, is great, but do we really prefer trusting super active web content contributors, seeking cyberspace attention, over experts (eg Zagats)?
From the perspective of a large advertising firm, consistently replicating that at scale gives you a lot more inventory to sell.
One could say something similar regarding content farms and big daddy G.
Earlier this summer, a Yelp salesman called Brader's house to ask if he wanted to advertise on the Yelp site. Yelp will never make it as a public company, which means that it should technically fizzle and die sooner rather than later. What they do isn't illegal, but it should be; its revenue model is unethical, sleazy, blackmailing, extortion.
A competitor of the dog training business hires an SEO Search Engine Optimiser to increase his business. To do that they post negative reviews of all the competitors. They post fake positive reviews of their client.
I have tracked this down before. The positive reviews all looked suspiciously similar and over-glowing. I have seen the same review, the same day, by the same guy, in multiple nearby neighborhoods.
This also can happen when an SEO marketer calls and you turn him down. He then spites your site and calls back again later to see if your more agreeable....