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20% of Yelp reviews are fake

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Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#91

Post by gcb0 »

drakaal wrote: post #6

20% LOL! If only it were that low. I used to be a reputation management company, at one time we were responsible for 10% of the reviews in Silicon Valley. There were metro's where we were about 80% of the reviews. When you think that the majority of companies have less than 10 reviews, and most owners can't resist doing a review, and having a friend do a review you are at 20% really fast. When you combine that with o…

From first hand experience in 5 mechanic shops in socal, i can say that 100% of the reviews are fake. On all 5 shops i heard the same thing.

"If you give us 5 star on yelp i can give you $100 (3. 2 others offered 50) check back after your check/CC pass through"

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#92

Post by unclebucknasty »

sedev wrote: post #36
gzervas wrote: post #22

Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe review fraud, and we clearly spell this out in the paper. The 20% figure represents the percentage of filtered reviews on Yelp. These are reviews that Yelp finds suspicious enough to not publish. Some filtered reviews may be fake, and some mig…

Wow, that is dramatically different than what the headline suggests. The "20% are fake" headline implies "20% of visible reviews", but instead I'm hearing you say, "20% of reviews are killfiled before visibility."

That's exactly my read.

And, it's not just the headline. Consider the following:

>A Yelp spokeswoman says its software helps filter many fakes before most users get to read them.

When combined with the headline, that really makes it sound like two discrete groups: the fake 20% that make it to Yelp, vs. the "many" that are filtered before making it to Yelp.

The difference is so vast that the headline now feels like link-bait.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#93

Post by shpxnvz »

drakaal wrote: post #32
fotbr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, do those "reputation management" companies realize that in serving their clients by making fake reviews, they help destroy end-consumer trust? In many ways, it's the old SEO argument all over again - gaming a system to increase ratings eventually erodes trust in that system, making those increased ratings less valuable. At the same time, refusing to game the system means your business loses pot…

I don't do reputation management anymore. Now I build tools to do real reputation analysis, and fight the very things I used to do. I'm like Darth Vader in the last few moments of his life... Only I plan to live a long while. At Stremor.com we have technology that "breaks" SEO so we have better search results at http://www.samuru.com than you would have using link authority. We have tech that can detect writing style…

> Now I build tools to do real reputation analysis, and fight the very things I used to do. I'm like Darth Vader in the last few moments of his life...

Really this just reads like you figured out a way to get paid to play both sides against each other. Hey, I'm not judging, in fact I say more power to you for figuring out how to make a buck, but casting yourself as some sort of redeemed hero seems a bit over the top.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#94

Post by unclebucknasty »

twoodfin wrote: post #57
sedev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You would expect it to be in Yelp's interest to demonstrate its reviews are credible, though I haven't seen that. Competition and articles like this should motivate them in that direction. In the meantime, they benefit from charging businesses to allow positive reviews to appear and to suppress negative reviews (if they're doing that, it would explain why they don't focus on credibility)." I think that you haven't b…

And when Yelp does filter reviews, they routinely are accused in forums like this one of running a pay-to-play scheme. A business owner hears from a Yelp sales guy about the benefits of sponsoring their page (top placement for a good review of their choice) and hears it as a "threat" to hide all those one shot five star reviews they talked their regulars into writing last month.

>And when Yelp does filter reviews, they routinely are accused in forums like this one of running a pay-to-play scheme.

Exactly. And, as well they should be. No business should base its revenue on taking money from those it reviews. Period. I'm not sure why this is even a gray area. Even if it runs as clean an operation as possible, it invariably will come off as extortionate at some point.

The BBB has been running this scam for so long and it amazes me that the FTC hasn't put them out of business.

As a small business owner, I have been on the receiving end of their extortion. A single complaint in 5 years, and they extort you into responding through their system, thus adding value to their business. They literally threaten that if you do not respond, they will be "forced" to give you a negative rating. They know nothing about your business and could not assess the good faith validity of any response, yet have no problem making representations about you to the world, while asking you for money.

This whole third-party review service just lends itself to abuse all the way around.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#95

Post by kansface »

bapbap wrote: post #81
agilebyte wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it more expensive by having video reviews? I suspect people are better at detecting lies in people than they are in a block of text. I guess this is what YouTube is for...

Not a bad idea actually but even at that, there are plenty of video reviewers getting paid to review things and one could be none the wiser.

I would never sit around to watch one.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#97

Post by lfender6445 »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #92
sedev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is dramatically different than what the headline suggests. The "20% are fake" headline implies "20% of visible reviews", but instead I'm hearing you say, "20% of reviews are killfiled before visibility."

That's exactly my read. And, it's not just the headline. Consider the following: > A Yelp spokeswoman says its software helps filter many fakes before most users get to read them. When combined with the headline, that really makes it sound like two discrete groups: the fake 20% that make it to Yelp, vs. the "many" that are filtered before making it to Yelp. The difference is so vast that the headline now feels like l…

yelp!

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#98

Post by cpncrunch »

gzervas wrote: post #88
nkoren wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might want to re-think that exact assumption: http://justinvincent.com/page/1874/yelp-you-cost-me-2000-by-... I understand that this is one anecdote, but I've seen enough similar cases of misapplied filtering to take it seriously.

While I read such anecdotes, I cannot rely much on them for research. Instead, what we did for our paper was to collect thousands of filtered reviews, and check their characteristics against reviews Yelp publishes. We find that filtered reviews are shorter, more likely to be from one-time reviewers, more likely to be extreme (1- or 5-stars), and so on. I realize this does not constitute absolute proof but at least it…

From my own anecdotal experience, the filtering is crap. I just reviewed a local restaurant recently. It happens to be one of the best restaurants in town. It has only one review on yelp, a 1-star review, from someone who seemed to have unusual expectations. It also have 2 filtered 5-star reviews from people who loved it.

From what I can tell, all 3 reviews were kosher. Unfortunately because yelp incorrectly filtered the two 5-star reviews, the restaurant has an unfounded poor reputation on yelp. I left a 5-star review, and as far as I can see my review isn't filtered (at least, not when I view it). Perhaps that is because I'm a long-time yelp user.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#99

Post by joe_the_user »

"There is one site where users share opinions with greater transparency than Yelp or Google: Facebook. The world’s biggest social-networking site prohibits the use of fake names."

Uh, I don't really think Facebook's real name policy has any effect here (it's policy is actually a lot weaker than Google in practice afaik). I do think people share their real opinion on Facebook more often but I think that's because of Facebook's huge audience. People basically want to share their real opinions with their real friends (not necessarily their friends there under real name). And people don't really have that many opinions about just plain products. And when people do, they mostly feel kind of sleazy sharing those opinions with the world for commercial purposes. Facebook is always trying to get people to integrate their socializing with advertising/commercial-recommendations but it has been unsuccessful and would probably start to truly lose users if it really forced people's hands.

The problem is most people care so little about the products they buy that they'd rather not write a review. That's unlikely to change.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#100

Post by bo1024 »

jff wrote: post #40
bobf wrote: post #8

I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion here about the accuracy of the 20% figure, but that actually doesn't seem as important as the other findings from the research this article cites ("Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud", http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/FakeItTillYouMakeIt.pdf ). The interesting points from the research include: 1) Low ratings increase incentives for positive r…

I would call all of those points extremely obvious and hardly worth a whole study. If you have low ratings, of course you're tempted to get some fake positive reviews. If you have a lot of reviews, adding a few positive ones will not affect the overall score much--it's a drop in the bucket. Chain restaurants, well, everyone knows what McDonald's is, what would they gain from posting fake reviews? Businesses that clai…

It's nice that these points seem obvious to you, but until you have data and a sound statistical analysis, people won't have any reason to believe them. Lots of "obvious things" turn out to be true, but lots turn out to be false too.
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