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Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

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Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#211

Post by awiejrliawjer »

majormajor wrote: post #7

Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick winners, which is unfortunate. If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see within a mile if I drive down the street. And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you have to…

I'm always amazed when I search for any generic term on Google Maps at how many places I know about don't show up in search results. What a shame. They clearly ran out of new ideas years ago.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#212

Post by Graziano_M »

Seeing the 'Moving company from Florida' triggered me. I was scammed by a moving company from Florida in 2020, and I did a deep dive to look into them and I found huge networks of moving companies, scammers, & reviewers, all in cahoots.

I actually managed to get one company's fake reviews removed from google maps, bringing them from a 4.8+ to a 1.x overnight. Within a few months they were back to > 4, but the owners had sold the company and started a new one.

It's insane how deep this goes. At best it's done by companies that want to cheat the system by getting an unfairly good review, but at its worst it's used to trick users into a false sense of confidence so that they can be scammed.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#214

Post by jiveturkey »

Solvency wrote: post #71
1024core wrote: post #24

> Dean began documenting her findings, starting with serial offenders from the Facebook groups. In a list of 17 people who reviewed SavantCare on Yelp, she found what she called “a suspicious pattern”: 10 of them had reviewed the same dentist’s office in Los Angeles, nine had raved about the same California wedding DJ company and five claimed to have visited the same Mountain View tattoo parlor. Five of the accounts,…

"I mean, how difficult is it for Yelp to catch this?!?" The mistake you're making is assuming Yelp: * Wants to "fix" this problem. * Isn't actually complicit in this problem as a means to incentivize small business owners to sign up and pay for Yelp to help "manage their business profile".

And the second mistake is (if they did care) thinking this wouldn't just result in an arms race. IMHO we want easy to spot fake reviews. I want flash to come back. It was so easy to block annoyances in that day. Now we have HTML5 popups.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#215

Post by kelnos »

mtlynch wrote: post #78
FireBeyond wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's amazing to me how many people have conspiracy theories about Yelp reviews, when in reality it's just really hard to determine good vs bad actors in review systems and it's possible to do a bad job as an engineer. When cards are cloned, it's exceptionally easy for a bank to determine which merchant is compromised by looking for common denominators. Take three actors. What are the odds that two of them have revi…

This comment is fairly dismissive of GP's experience and intelligence. If you think you can solve a problem just by spitballing it, and GP's team at yelp couldn't figure it out for years, either you're much smarter than everyone on their team or you're underestimating the problem. I worked on an anti-fraud team in a similar role, and I agree with GP that it's a harder problem than people realize. It's easy to come up…

> This comment is fairly dismissive of GP's experience and intelligence.

I don't have the full text of that comment, as they've edited it our, so I don't know specifically what they said. But perhaps they just don't know everything about how Yelp operates; it's not a small company where everyone knows everything.

I also know someone who previously worked at Yelp, and they've talked about some of Yelp's shady internal practices. Everything is not all above-board there.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#216

Post by kelnos »

pempem wrote: post #153
in_cahoots wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s the case shouldn’t there be at least one screenshot of this behavior happening? I’ve heard dozens of anecdotes over the years. You think that at least one restaurant owner would screenshot their rating and the number of reviews as soon as Yelp reaches out to ‘suggest’ advertising. The fact that this seems to be commonly-accepted knowledge without a single piece of evidence is strange to me.

In fairness running a restaurant is nearly a round the clock job. Running delivery and the online reservations is more. Managing reviews is even more. I agree that its hard to believe one restaurant hasn't tracked it yet but I think its more a confluence - are you good enough/ no dip in performance that you can claim this correlation or are you confident enough to go out saying that knowing you have to defend against…

Sure, that's all totally fair, but was there seriously not even one -- out of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of businesses -- business owner who managed to find the time to do this?

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#217

Post by datadeft »

2023throwawayy wrote: post #203
datadeft wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure that we can use clustering for that. As they said there was a clear pattern the restaurant recognized. If they had all the data it would be easy. The reviewer could also ask for a token from the restaurant before submitting the review or a signature, there are plenty of options.

And what exactly does a blockchain provide here that a plain ole' database does not?

Tamperproof history

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#218

Post by milesskorpen »

Guest9081239812 wrote: post #182
newah1 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hesitate to suggest that this may indicate there aren't that many 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants. Even great resaurants in my area struggle to break the 4.5 barrier.

Changing the zoom level will typically show these missing results. For example, I just checked my neighborhood. There are 5 restaurants within a few hundred feet of each other rated 4.5+ stars. With my filters set to 4.5+ stars, when I zoom out a bit, 4 of the 5 restaurants disappear, and I instead see a handful of 4.1 and 4.3 star restaurants. One of the 4.3 star restaurants is literally next door to a 5 star and 4.…

It could also be recent ratings; I think it is reasonable to weight old reviews lower than new ones given restaurants can change a lot over the months and years.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#219

Post by vkou »

dwater wrote: post #25

It sounds to me like Yelp is upset that other businesses are trying to do the same thing they do. My friend was GM of a new local restaurant here, and at first they were getting lots of 4 and 5 star reviews and almost none below that. But around the time they were contacted by a Yelp sales rep to start paying for promotion and advertising, the 4 and 5 star review stopped coming. My friend watched multiple people post…

> It's the kind of behavior that's impossible to prove for anyone outside of Yelp, and they of course claim they don't do it.

This kind of conspiracy would be trivially uncoverable in the discovery phase of a lawsuit.

I mean, I'm not saying that Yelp isn't doing this, but if it is, it would bust right open the moment anyone sued them for anything related to this.

Re: Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

#220

Post by kelnos »

gaucheries wrote: post #117

> Yelp, founded in San Francisco in 2004, is deeply entrenched in American consumer habits is it really? couldn't tell you the last time i loaded yelp.com on purpose.

Your experience may not be the general American experience. It is a bit ridiculous that I need to point this out.
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