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Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

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Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#61

Post by colomon »

pg_bot wrote: post #35

Honestly the author is over thinking his solution to the problem. The way to solve this problem is to give people the option of viewing reviews that Yelp believes are of dubious origin. Add another section to the reviews page, and let the users decide how to process the extra information but frame it as possibly being untrustworthy with an explanation of why it was tagged as untrustworthy.

They already allow you to click through to the reviews they have filtered out. How about having two average ratings, one for only "filtered in" reviews and one for all reviews?

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#62

Post by Lewisham »

pitdesi wrote: post #51

Is there a startup opportunity for an identity verification service whereby you do the ID verification once and then each service that wants to use it gets charged a smaller amount? Example: consumer goes to idverificationsite.com, registers there for free- they ask out of wallet questions to verify identity, potentially do a minimal background check too. You then use this login with Yelp, AirBnB, Getaround, etc. Yel…

Google actually used to do verification on people with Knol; you'd type in a credit card number and it would look up your name on the CC and match it against the name in your profile. I think that functionality got retired.

It would be nice if this service was available more globally.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#63

Post by gergles »

jv22222 wrote: post #12
twoodfin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews. But a continuous, consistent pattern of one-shot negative reviews is also not particularly difficult for a competing business (or anyone with a grudge) to reproduce. This is a hard problem, and I don't think the credit check-style identity verification questions suggested in the post are going to solve it. For one thing, I think an ove…

Why would they find it creepy? You wouldn't need to say your using credit history. It would be as simple as asking the user a question "Please validate your a real person by answering these few questions". As far as the user is concerned it's just a few questions and answers.

"just a few questions and answers" that I would be, frankly, shocked, that Yelp knows out of nowhere without the explanation that they're hitting my credit file... and then with that explanation, it's equally creepy that they want to hit my credit file for me to leave a review of a pizza place on the Internet.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#64

Post by bbrtyth »

pbreit wrote: post #58
bobbydavid wrote: post #24

Disclaimer: I don't work for Yelp but I have created other user-ratings-based sites before. It's not entirely fair to criticize Yelp for under-emphasizing negative reviews. One of the big hurdles to overcome on a user ratings site is that people are most motivated to write reviews when they are outraged. There is a massive selection bias, and if nothing is done to alleviate this, your site runs the risk of becoming a…

I'm not sure I can agree with that. Negative reviews are almost always far more helpful than positive reviews. Review sites should be careful about referencing positive reviews. The gold standard is Consumers Reports which is much more balanced than the average interent review site (where everything gets 4 stars) and thus much more helpful.

Speaking as an app developer, sometimes people get furious over things that are clearly stated before they download it. It really is easier to get complaints, I can see usage stats that show many more people using my apps daily.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#65

Post by TylerE »

mcknz wrote: post #41
edw519 wrote: post #22

1995 Q: How can you verify the quality of a ? A: Ask your . 2009 Q: Same question. A: Don't need no stinkin' people. We have the internets! 2012 Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it? A: Use the 1995 solution.

1995 corollary: the is invariably a brother- or sister-in-law.

Not always a bad thing. All but the worst of the worst are going not want to screw over a relative, even a distant one.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#67

Post by underwater »

colomon wrote: post #57
underwater wrote: post #20

I don't know if he's just being coy by saying this is an accident on Yelp's part. The actual reviews are here: http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor... . It's pretty obvious there is something fishy about the unfiltered reviews. Each reviewer first left a one line review "Amazing!!! one of a kind..one of the best sushi place" and "the best of the best" before their very detailed, glowing review…

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I was unable to find the sushi reviews here... Is Yelp changing the reviews as we read them?

Click on Abigail and Bob's names for their review history.

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#68

Post by gdilla »

edw519 wrote: post #22

1995 Q: How can you verify the quality of a ? A: Ask your . 2009 Q: Same question. A: Don't need no stinkin' people. We have the internets! 2012 Q: Internet solution doesn't work. How do we fix it? A: Use the 1995 solution.

Maybe a shamless plug, but I work on mobile apps at Fodor's Travel. We've been doing print travel guides for 75 years. We now have apps, in addition to books.

We're professional curators. That means every restaurant review (and shops, hotels, etc) has been written by an actual human professional who's opinion we hope you trust (we're a little more upscale than Lonely Planet, but we have our hip moments). So in a way, we're the anti-UGC. When you have crowds of people, all the ratings become a noisey 3-4 stars. Including Burger King. That's why I think Fodor's content is a good alternative. We're in the travel space, not local, but, it's a refreshing alternative.

Oh, and all our apps are FREE.

http://www.fodors.com/mobile-apps/

Re: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

#70

Post by pushingbits »

lazerwalker wrote: post #17

Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services. A company I used to freelance for found that after they stopped paying Yelp for a premium account, they started seeing more negative reviews and a number of their positive reviews were filtered out. They got almost daily phone calls from Yelp marketing types es…

This is supposedly happening all the time, yet no one has managed to catch it on tape for some reason. I can't think of a credible explanation for the lack of hard evidence (and lawsuits).
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