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Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#111

Post by bkbleikamp »

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months.

It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate.

The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—it's not a trivial piece of software, it takes a full time team to maintain, edit, update, fix, improve, etc. Whether or not a business is an advertiser is never taken into account.

Yelp puts consumers first - that means sometimes they remove legitimate reviews. Everyone on the product and engineering teams knows this, realizes it sucks for businesses, but would rather err on the side of all reviews being legitimate. The reason they keep working on the algorithm is to improve this and make it more accurate.

The sales staff has strict rules on what they can and can't do, they do not have access to editing, managing, or deleting reviews and I never once saw an email come to product asking for a review to be removed or added.

Thousands of businesses work with Yelp, are happy with Yelp, and have happy customers. Even businesses with 5 stars get negative reviews sometimes. You cannot please everyone.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#112

Post by VladRussian »

noduerme wrote: post #13

Extortion. This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up. Google's running more or less the same racket. It's "soft"...there are no threats, exactly. But imagine if the Chicago Tribune called vendors and threatened to run a miserable review of them if they didn't pay? So why hasn't that happe…

>This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up.

"It's good to be the King."

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#113

Post by yoda_sl »

bkbleikamp wrote: post #111

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate. The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—i…

It's hard to believe that so many business are complaining about Yelp if nothing was wrong... If what you are saying is true then the only conclusion is that the algorithm used has a major flaw but Yelp doesn't want either to acknowledge it or fix it. I believe that they rather don't want to fix it so it help their true business of selling ads.

Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is flaky at best, and a scam at worst. "freedom of speech" has not the same meaning when you are at Yelp.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#114

Post by noduerme »

joezydeco wrote: post #94
noduerme wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider consumer advocacy columns to be a form of extortion... consider that the newspaper doesn't request money from the subject to "fix" the column.

The people that ask this Tribune reporter for help are people that can't get a problem solved by another means because the company is uncooperative or in denial about the problem. So when someone calls the business and says "Hi, I'm calling from the Chicago Tribune, where I'm going to write a story about you that will be read by half a million readers", do you think that will get a better outcome to the problem than…

Sure it will. But if the business had done nothing wrong, journalistic ethics (which play no role in the "moderating" position taken by Yelp between "customer reviews") would stipulate that the newspaper could not report anything other than verifiable fact.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#115

Post by [deleted] »

jeremymims wrote: post #109
akashs wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: You're wrong. And you sound like someone from Yelp trying to "game the system" and write positive reviews about yourself. Maybe PG's algorithms should censor you without any evidence? -------------- My parents had the exact same experience as in the article. - A few years ago, they didn't really know what yelp was, but a customer was surprised that the reviews up there were pretty bad, mostly just from custome…

Hi akashs, I have no affiliation with Yelp. Click on my username anytime if you want to read who I work with and some background. It's right out in the open. However, I had to look at your posts to learn that your new startup is in the local review/recommendation space which is something you should actually disclose when bashing a competitor. If what you're saying about Yelp's ad reps and software is truthful, then y…

[deleted]

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#116

Post by yoda_sl »

spaznode wrote: post #61

I don't really like to admit it, but anyone who thinks it's just the "poor old algorithm" doing what it thinks is fair is misinformed. Part of my core day job work involves identifying real vs not real people and also uses the same technology to drive everything - lucene. An algorithm that refuses to attempt identification beyond what data yelp itself stores is clearly in denial of the "mountain" of data available on…

Hi spaznode, I will be really curious to hear more about your approach for doing a better filtering. Feel free to contact me (contact info/web site on my profile).

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#117

Post by akashs »

jeremymims wrote: post #109
akashs wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: You're wrong. And you sound like someone from Yelp trying to "game the system" and write positive reviews about yourself. Maybe PG's algorithms should censor you without any evidence? -------------- My parents had the exact same experience as in the article. - A few years ago, they didn't really know what yelp was, but a customer was surprised that the reviews up there were pretty bad, mostly just from custome…

Hi akashs, I have no affiliation with Yelp. Click on my username anytime if you want to read who I work with and some background. It's right out in the open. However, I had to look at your posts to learn that your new startup is in the local review/recommendation space which is something you should actually disclose when bashing a competitor. If what you're saying about Yelp's ad reps and software is truthful, then y…

I didn't think you worked at Yelp, but you were defending them just like my parents' customers were defending them. And as you point out, it's wrong of me to accuse you of gaming the system without any evidence that you work for them. Doesn't feel that great, does it? You actually illustrated my point quite nicely.

Also, we're not really competing with Yelp at all, so I think it's all fair game. In fact, we're integrating with Yelp's API, since we do recognize that despite how screwed up I may think their business is, people still trust them.

And my father did it because the few hundred dollars he spent is paid back if it prevents a couple customers from leaving, or even if he doesn't have to spend another hour on the phone with them. Doesn't mean what they did is fair, though.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#118

Post by Guillaumedm »

jclemenson wrote: post #56
cletus wrote: post #4

This raises several important issues. The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes. This has several important implications. - It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both…

I question the value of social search in general. It doesn't matter what your friends like. What matters is what others with similar tastes like. The only good thing about social search is the context informed by the relationships.

Following you 100% on this vision.

There's been a lot of hype around social recommendation lately; it was fresh and new because only [somewhat] lately has 'Social' itself been made possible through Facebook.

But as I see things, we don't make friends because they have our tastes or because they can correctly recommend us stuff we'd like; we simply feel really good with friends, no matter what they like. Only the people who have our tastes can help us finding what we should like, or at least be able to do it better than most of our friends.

Basing recommendation solely on our social circle's tastes is like thinking our friends are the ones with the closest tastes to ours. And I think that's wrong.

Unless I got it wrong, Rex.ly for example, is taking a much better approach by letting you select specific friends to influence your recommendations.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#119

Post by johnny22 »

veyron wrote: post #57
cowkingdeluxe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Yelp is a scam business which extorts. I'm more surprised to see people defending Yelp on this site.

Maybe yelp paid a firm to generate positive reviews of yelp?

or maybe the opposite. maybe yelp's competitors paid to have negative reviews. hah :)

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#120

Post by huhtenberg »

pbreit wrote: post #55
huhtenberg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong too. The note goes on guy's website, not on Yelp's. "We noticed you came here from Yelp. Yadda-yadda..."

Wrong. "Where your Public Comment will appear Your comment will appear directly following the review that you've commented on." https://biz.yelp.com/support/responding_to_reviews

"Wrong?"

GP's comment said "The obvious thing to do for the guy is to post a note ... on his website" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959702 - that's the context.

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