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Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#71

Post by pbreit »

noduerme wrote: post #63
ma2rten wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I understand this is, that he was not asked to pay to have the negative review removed, just for advertising, which was totally unrelated to his reviews.

If there was a reasonable or non-negligible possibility that removal of the positive reviews resulted from his failure to pay the bribe, then the onus is on the company to provide records to the contrary. That's the point of subpoenaing the poster of the negative comment that survived; not to sue him directly, but to establish the mechanics of and facts arising from Yelp's algorithm, and to establish a pattern of ext…

Isn't the burden of proof typically assigned to the accuser?

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#72

Post by HaloZero »

mcantelon wrote: post #49
mikeleeorg wrote: post #34

In case you want to dig in deeper, Frank Brader's dog business on Yelp now has 4 stars from 5 reviews: http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini... Justin G, the negative reviewer, was a Yelp Elite member from 2006-2008: http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...

I'd get rid of the punitive filtering too if negative press came out. I wonder if "Elite" indicates paid? Yelp does pay, or has paid in the past, some reviewers.

I believe Yelp does pay reviewers for "seeding" a city when they launch in a new area in order for there to be content when they open in the city.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#73

Post by potatolicious »

ma2rten wrote: post #44
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…

Am I the only one who believes that yelp is prolly telling the truth and that it was just a coincidence? It sounds quite plausible to me that their algorithms work in the way, that are described in the article.

I want to believe Yelp is above board - but the sheer mountain of accusations leveled against them is not encouraging.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#74

Post by m0nastic »

I would hope that Yelp doesn't actually operate in the manner in which its detractors accuse it of (as it would seem to be pretty cut-and-dry extortion).

I assume Yelp operates in the way they say they do, but I still find it functionally useless as a review site.

Every once in a while I'll look up the reviews for a place that I frequent and like, and read the reviews. They inevitably show me that people's reviews might as well be random. If the reviews for places that I already like are this different from my own experiences, how useful can they be for places I'm thinking about going to?

It would be like if I read movie reviews from a reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse, is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their reviews useful.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#75

Post by stef25 »

When you search for this business's name, you see the 1 star review right there on Google.com along with "Don't be fooled by a nice site ...". But when you click through there's 7 reviews with a total of 4.5 stars.

Yelp must have caught on to this breaking story?

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#76

Post by jotr99 »

m0nastic wrote: post #74

I would hope that Yelp doesn't actually operate in the manner in which its detractors accuse it of (as it would seem to be pretty cut-and-dry extortion). I assume Yelp operates in the way they say they do, but I still find it functionally useless as a review site. Every once in a while I'll look up the reviews for a place that I frequent and like, and read the reviews. They inevitably show me that people's reviews mi…

  It would be like if I read movie reviews from a
  reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse,
  is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their
  reviews useful.
You could read the reviews, and then only go to movies that reviewer hates. Not a guarantee, but it does decrease the sample size. Unless the reviewer hates all movies.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#77

Post by imack »

kenjackson wrote: post #29

Given Yelp's size, why doesn't it employ some collaborative filtering options? In general I don't care about everyone's reviews (especially of restaurants). But it would be interesting to know -- for people who like White Castle, McDonald's, and Denny's, but not Applebees -- what would they recommend. This is not the type of thing you could typically get by reading reviews by themselves (and maybe those people wouldn…

I'm on it, I'm on it....(http://www.placeling.com).

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#78

Post by stef25 »

revorad wrote: post #21

Customer reviews and ratings can be one hell of a mess, not just for businesses but also for customers. As a customer, they are often useful in narrowing down one's choices, even with a margin of error from cheating or lack of enough data. But, they are still a heck of a lot of work! Ever tried choosing a wardrobe, washing machine or laptop based on reviews? You can spend hours reading wildly different accounts, whic…

Reviews can be pretty useful. If my mom needs a simple modem/wifi/router in her house, I'll just buy her whatever one has the most reviews on Amazon.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#79

Post by m0nastic »

jotr99 wrote: post #76
m0nastic wrote: post #74

I would hope that Yelp doesn't actually operate in the manner in which its detractors accuse it of (as it would seem to be pretty cut-and-dry extortion). I assume Yelp operates in the way they say they do, but I still find it functionally useless as a review site. Every once in a while I'll look up the reviews for a place that I frequent and like, and read the reviews. They inevitably show me that people's reviews mi…

It would be like if I read movie reviews from a reviewer who hates all the movies I like (or worse, is ambivalent). I wouldn't find reading their reviews useful. You could read the reviews, and then only go to movies that reviewer hates. Not a guarantee, but it does decrease the sample size. Unless the reviewer hates all movies.

Yeah, movie reviews might not have been the best analogy. My general take on movie reviews is that I only use them to discover movies that I might have otherwise missed (i.e.: a bad review will never dissuade me from seeing a movie, but a good review of a movie I hadn't planned on seeing might make me see it).

And to be fair to Yelp, I've only ever really looked up Restaurant reviews, which seem to be the category of reviews that are the least useful. I don't think anything in a Yelp restaurant review short of "Every time I go here, they drag me to the back room and harvest my organs", would make me take notice one way or the other.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#80

Post by Retric »

pbz wrote: post #27
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…

What Yelp does is a racket, similar to what BBB does. In Yelp's case they are being helped by Google and other search engines. The problem is that when people link to them that's an upvote in Google's eyes. After enough upvotes are gained, provided they don't spam, there's little anybody can do to downvote them. It's not like you can negatively link to them. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the like and…

I suspect Yelp is extremely venerable and could be successfully sued from several angles. However, the court system tends to protect such companies on free speech grounds etc. So, their downfall will probably come from leaked internal operations rather than any external source.
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