24 ms·

I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

• brianmcc 11y ago
  I actually don't know whether to be annoyed/dismayed or impressed. There's something really quite accomplished about this bizarre, entirely abstract, virtual enterprise.
  • kaeluka 11y ago
    This could pass as art ;)
• mintplant 11y ago
  There's a whole seedy world under the surface of Fiverr, and I'm surprised no one seems to have done an in-depth "Inside Fiverr" piece yet. Vectorization services that present as individuals in the US but are actually farmed out to workshops in non-English speaking countries. Voice actors whose work samples consist mainly of dubious get-rich-quick ads. And as this article points out, "SEO" and "reputation building" services as far as the eye can see. (For $5, you can have your yoga "article" featured on this woman's website, complete with up to "three... dofollow links": https://www.fiverr.com/maigent/post-your-content-on-my-yoga-fitness-and-health-site https://www.fiverr.com/maigent/post-your-content-on-my-yoga-...)
  • elcct 11y ago
    Really, even yoga?
• WA 11y ago
  That was a good write-up. Thing is, this works. Even (or especially) for startups. Only if to kickstart the hype a bit. Real followers and likes will follow, but let's be honest here: Who doesn't automatically trust a business that has 19K Twitter followers and a few good reviews out there? From the article: And these days, which is more real: a fake business with a real website or a brick and mortar business with no online presence?
  • orng 11y ago
    > Real followers and likes will follow, but let's be honest here: Who doesn't automatically trust a business that has 19K Twitter followers and a few good reviews out there? For now. As more companies cheat the system, people will be less likely to trust them based on things like followers and reviews.
    • JupiterMoon 11y ago
      Currently I don't trust the reviews of lots of physical businesses in my area. In my experience places with few reviews tend to be more reliable than those with many. My theory is that customers of physical businesses are more likely to leave reviews of negative experiences and that businesses respond with fake reviews. This is because there is a high 'activation energy' to making an online review of a place that you normally walk into and that only really angry customer bother. I tend to trust e.g. App store reviews more because the barrier to entry to leaving a review is lower so real positive reviews seem to happen more. I find this sad.
  • UK-AL 11y ago
    Reminds me of reddit, and their fake users to start it off. The thing is that the internet is so biased towards incumbents, you need to cheat a little to get the initial pull.
    • kissickas 11y ago
      To me there's a big difference between real activity under multiple "fake" names, where content is still being submitted, and artificially raising the profile of one's company by just buying fake reviews (or followers or likes, which are basically micro-reviews of approval). Just like there's a difference between paying to have Facebook promote your page to real users, who can then decide whether or not they would like your page or status on their own, from just paying directly for the likes.
  • tP5n 11y ago
    As an example, reddit kickstarted the hype quite well, and see, now they're worth 500 million ;)
• idonthaveaname 11y ago
  I'd have read that but I didn't get more than two lines in before an overlay appeared in front of the content. So I gave up.
  • zeeZ 11y ago
    I made it to the second overlay halfway through.
  • nhebb 11y ago
    Right-click, inspect, then delete a node or two.
    • Mahn 11y ago
      Speaking of which, it would be nice if chrome or firefox had a developer keyboard shortcut to delete the node the mouse is currently hovering on without having to inspect or open the dev tools. That'd make dealing with intrusive content on the web much easier/faster.
• galenko 11y ago
  CBS Canada, did this about a year ago, very interesting watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y0pYUdfGiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y0pYUdfGiw
• dvh 11y ago
  In 2004, two czech graduate created massive campain for fake hypermarket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Dream
  • silverbax88 11y ago
    The thing about that hoax, is that they put together a massive PR and ad campaign, with billboards and other media ads. That's not quite the same as doing everything for a couple hundred bucks.
  • hackerboos 11y ago
    I remember seeing that when researching The Yes Men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men
• matthewmacleod 11y ago
  This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article. Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?
  • steaminghacker 11y ago
    Telerik Fiddler2. I use the autoresponder to block patterns.
  • mintplant 11y ago
    uBlock? Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ublock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ublock/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... Safari: https://www.ublock.org/newdl/safari/0.9.5.2 https://www.ublock.org/newdl/safari/0.9.5.2 Alternatively: Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" button in the address bar that extracts just the text and formats it for easy reading.
    • iaskwhy 11y ago
      uBlock didn't fix it for me. Also, because the second overlay was huge, I couldn't close it down so I closed the tab instead...
      • Ntrails 11y ago
        Maybe it's time to NoScript?
        • iaskwhy 11y ago
          I get the feeling having NoScript can be more annoying that not having it so I have been procrastinating installing it...
          • 11y ago
• m12k 11y ago
  "Facebook says it uses pattern recognition to find and eliminate click farms and accounts that exist solely to like pages. Since March, says Facebook, it’s “notified 200,000 Pages that we’ve protected their accounts from fake likes.” I love the way they put this: “Protected,” as if the companies hadn’t paid for them." This may be more accurate than the author of this article believes. I've read elsewhere that precisely because FB is using pattern recognition to combat this, the cleverest of the fake accounts spend a certain amount of their time doing random/normal stuff to avoid detection. And this includes liking random businesses. And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts (so it is shown to a bigger percentage of their followers), then the more fake followers they have, the more real money they are wasting to advertise to bots. So if a business is actually using FB to engage with their userbase, then the fake likes are in fact detrimental to them.
  • IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    Great points > And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts The same applies to non-paid content. Facebook will only expose your content to a portion of your users, obviously the more fake users you have the fewer real people you'll reach. Engagement levels have shown to decrease when adding fake users in previous experiments.
  • stingraycharles 11y ago
    I would like to add that if they would punish the businesses, this could of course be abused: if I have to pay $50 to have my competitor have serious spam issues with Facebook, possibly resulting in a penalty, that is some serious damage I could do.
    • deathhand 11y ago
      This is a valid SEO tactic as well. You can have crummy back links to your competitor and google will penalize them...
      • monknomo 11y ago
• chinathrow 11y ago
  "He claimed he’d created 5 million Twitter accounts using scripts, and had completed 10,000 Fiverr orders for Twitter followers. He’d been banned from Fiverr three times before but says he doesn’t know why." Duh...
• marwann 11y ago
  In France, an agency created a fake company selling kebap sandwich on Mars. They had 105.000 views on their video, 46k followers, 20k facebook fans...and orders. What's scary isn't the fact people buy fake reviews/followers/etc. but the fact people actually believe in these vanity metrics and want to order afterwards.
  • Retra 11y ago
    To be fair, almost the entire advertising industry is built around trying to effectively lie to people.
    • marwann 11y ago
      True that :( I've worked in the industry during 3 years before figuring that out! The problem is mostly for platforms to find a way of identifying which reviews are real or fake, depending on IP, rate of reviews, recency of the user, etc.
  • tim333 11y ago
    Reviews aren't actually a bad source of information if you are ordering on line. If you can't check it out directly what else can you go on that is better? I tend to look at the negative reviews which probably have not been paid for and see if they seem that bad or not.
  • hiou 11y ago
    Anecdotal, but I've been aware of this fake review industry for probably about 6 years and I am amazed that almost everyone I talk to does not believe the scale and the scope. They think there might be one or two fake reviews on an Amazon product when in reality it can be closer to 15 out of 18. Or in some cases every single one. People who are seriously doing this aren't paying $5 a review. They are paying $100-$500. At this point I just assume almost all reviews are fake. Especially on Amazon and to a slightly lesser extent Yelp.
• swalsh 11y ago
  A karaoke truck kind of sounds like a good idea. Shame it's fake.
  • wodenokoto 11y ago
    I think it even hit the front page of reddit. I remember seeing something about a karaoke truck recently. So maybe somebody should make it real.
    • caskance 11y ago
      Maybe that was part of the marketing this author bought, just not explicitly listed in the article. If you can buy all those other things, why not reddit upvotes too?
• skrebbel 11y ago
  > A Lincoln could get me a Facebook review, a Google review, an Amazon review, or, less easily, a Yelp review. Mostly off topic, but what's "A Lincoln"?
  • techstrategist 11y ago
    A 5 USD bill.
    • Retra 11y ago
      I was thinking a penny, but that makes so much more sense.
      • wpietri 11y ago
        As far as I know, it's not something people say in real life, just a funny turn of phrase; "a Benjamin" is the only common use of a president's name for the denomination.
        • johnward 11y ago
          I'd be willing to bet a Washington that no one in real life uses the term Lincoln.
        • savanaly 11y ago
          Friendly correction that Benjamin Franklin was not a president, your point stands though.
          • wpietri 11y ago
            Hah! Something I even knew. Thanks for the correction. I guess we need to stop calling cash "dead presidents" [1] now. [1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dead+presidents http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dead+presiden...
        • quadrangle 11y ago
• rcarrigan87 11y ago
  This is particularly bad in the moving industry. Not only are movers notorious for bribing customers to post good reviews but there are also several well ranking "Moving Specific" review sites that are completely fake. The industry also happens to have some of the most horrific scams...
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    The less frequently someone needs a given service, the more confusing (in the best case) and scammy (in the normal to worse case), the sales process is. Look at weddings, funerals, residential remodels, residential HVAC, and the like as other examples. Some of those make used car sales look pleasant and transparent...
    • mrfusion 11y ago
      I've noticed this phenomenom too. I think mattresses is another good example. Is there a name for this?
    • rcarrigan87 11y ago
      Good point. Anything with low repeat buying is going to run into these problems. That's why verified reviews are so critical in these verticals.
• pnevmatico 11y ago
  It's not faking, it's just doing things that don't scale /s
• deleted 11y ago
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• deleted 11y ago
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• rajadigopula 11y ago
  I have been on Fiverr for few weeks and ordered two articles for $5 from some guy claiming from the US. The result was hilarious; a kindergarten kid can use much better grammar. Also found some gigs encouraging piracy, found a guy who claims to give 3 ebooks ( you name it) for $5 ?! Another one who can give you any 3 Udemy courses download for $5 - https://uk.fiverr.com/udemy_guru/give-you-any-4-u-demy-courses?context=advanced_search&context_type=auto&pos=34&funnel=cddb1796-5f30-4230-a8f9-c4127e8c40e0 https://uk.fiverr.com/udemy_guru/give-you-any-4-u-demy-cours... I think Fiverr should hire a team to monitor the activity and authenticity of its sellers.
  • nkrisc 11y ago
    > I think Fiverr should hire a team to monitor the activity and authenticity of its sellers. That would cause most of their revenue to evaporate.
    • degenerate 11y ago
      They also don't have a "report this post" button anywhere to allow people to flag spam or illegal activity. That would at least be something they could do...
      • rajadigopula 11y ago
        Could't agree more. That's the least they can do.
      • nkrisc 11y ago
        Great point. If they won't actively police their sellers at least they could let visitors volunteer to do so through such a feature.
        • throwaway1967 11y ago
          Yes, and if the police won't actively police every square foot where there are people, they could at least let citizens do so through concealed carry of a weapon. And yet, somehow, there's a large group of people that is always for people meddling in other people's business by telling on them (including calling the police when they see a citizen legally open-carrying!). It must be because laissez faire is not easy to spell.
• gorhill 11y ago
  A personal observation in the Chrome store. I created an extension which I published in the Chrome store. I did notice a curious statistics with another similar purpose extension, which is also quite popular -- both are over 1 million users: The ratings-per-user ratio for the other extension is almost 5 times that of my extension.[1] I can't figure any other convincing explanation for this other than the other extension is buying ratings. If there is an alternative explanation I would like to hear it, but I can't think of one -- five times is way beyond one would expect IMO. [1] number of ratings / number of users.
  • SalmoShalazar 11y ago
    Perhaps the other extension is prompting the user for a rating like you see so often in Android/iOS apps. This tactic genuinely works. If not, then yes, it's plausible that they're buying ratings.
    • gorhill 11y ago
      Good point, I didn't think of this... I looked and it does indeed invite users to rate it in at the top of its options page. So as far as I am concerned this explains the difference. I could probably quantify how much this works by adding the same sort of invitation to rate but this would go counter to the spirit of the project, so I will pass on the experimentation.
• logicallee 11y ago
  As an entrepreneur, I became so disappointed with this article about 60% of the way through, that I had to stop reading. When the author started getting phone calls on his burner phone from people wanting to hire his van, he should have manned up, stuck with this damn business, and written instead about bootstrapping. With stats like the ones he reported, he should have stuck with Freakin' Awesome Karaoke Express even if it meant moonlighting as a KJ and eventually backing into a seed round he never anticipated. Seriously. Those facebook reviews sound authentic because those are real user stories just waiting to really happen. The real user queries prove it. I'm so disappointed at those unfielded phone calls that I can't even bring myself to read any more. A business was born three months premature, and instead of nurturing it in neonatal intensive care, the author just let this beautiful creature die. :*(
  • wanderfowl 11y ago
    There it is, folks. The first "Pro-Life" argument to emerge from the "corporate personhood" metaphor. All downhill from here. Grab your popcorn.
    • 811639047892938 11y ago
      This comment is the best thing I've read on HN
  • greggarious 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, why do you assume the author is male?
    • logicallee 11y ago
      I'm not going to update my comment because it would look like I made the premature birth analogy due to the author's gender, which I literally had incorrectly assumed was male (so my comment and choice of analogy was absolutely not due to the author's gender). Sorry about the mistake/assumption. You asked why I made the mistake - no particular reason. (Though anecdotally I've heard males talk about these kinds of actions, while women business owners I know don't, in fact are principled about not buying fake reviews, likes, or twitter followers. The first paragraph also says "You might have seen a review on Yelp that said it’s perfect for a girl’s night out" which I read as a male stating it. Anyway I shouldn't have made the assumption.)
• kevindeasis 11y ago
  Paul Graham said that if there is alot of potential energy from a broken system there must be a way to monetize it. Really, it seems like someone can make a startup to verify the company and reviews. In fact, why dont we all open source this thing.
  • kevindeasis 11y ago
    refering to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc
  • dceddia 11y ago
    That sounds a lot like Dun & Bradstreet[0], no? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun_%26_Bradstreet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun_%26_Bradstreet
    • kevindeasis 11y ago
      Sounds like Dun & Bradstreet, yes. But, I'm not sure if they can verify the identity of an amazon/ebay seller [0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3l1epw/how_to_scam_amazon_customers_out_of_100k_a_year/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3l1epw/how_to_scam_a...
  • logn 11y ago
    I've thought this would be a good new feature for Stripe. After payment, allow user to leave a review. Then you know the person bought the product.
    • kevindeasis 11y ago
      That would def be a good feature for stripe.
• downandout 11y ago
  "He claimed he’d created 5 million Twitter accounts...." Anyone still wondering if Twitter is overvalued at ~$19 billion, wonder no more.
• lighthawk 11y ago
  You don't have to pay for it, btw. There are sites you can post to in order to attract people that will just like/follow your stuff for free. It doesn't take much searching to find them. You won't get the same numbers, but if you're on a budget, it works.
  • throwaway23545 11y ago
    FB's own advertising is as cheap than fiverr. $5 can get you a thousand or two likes if you geo locate the campaign to certain parts of the world. Some parts of the world seem to like everything! Seems to be all legit accounts, so presumably far safer from any FB fake detection algorithms. Just don't expect them to buy your service!
• throwaway23545 11y ago
  But who, in this day and age, would trust or hire a new online business that had a page with 0-100 likes? The apparent presumption on seeing under 1k likes or under a few thousand twitter followers is the business is defective. Or forgotten, or no good. The incorrect wisdom of the crowd is that a legit business has a certain number of likes, followers etc, or it looks suspicious For a new local business who is never going to get a HN or /. effect, or get some "viral buzz" from the cool kids, buying a few thousand can be a way to get to perceived neutrality. Enough likes or followers that they're no longer clicked away from for being "suspiciously" unloved. Fake reviews on the other hand are much more directly fraudulent. Mind I'm surprised anyone at all still trusts online reviews, apart from negative ones!
  • ryandrake 11y ago
    As someone who does not use Facebook or Twitter, I don't give a hoot about how many "likes" or "followers" a business has, any more than I believe in any other marketing campaign. These measurements measure nothing meaningful to me as a potential customer, as this article clearly demonstrates. I've always found it baffling that people even remotely believe online "reviews" written by strangers. I'll turn it around: Who is stupid enough to think, "Wow, this business's carefully curated Facebook marketing page has 10,000 likes.. That must mean they are truly reputable!"
    • throwaway23545 11y ago
      Personally I agree completely. As someone in tech I find it very difficult to ascribe meaning to a meaningless number. Especially when people "like" things they hate for comedy or irony purposes, or clicked accidentally a few years ago. Reading online reviews is a case of trying to glean a little truth from something everyone should know is being heavily gamed. But they don't. Amongst the non-tech population there is trust taken from these numbers. People believe those reviews. People seem to believe that a lot of likes is indicative of trust. People used to believe that clicking blue links was good, and so the web used to be a cesspool of adsense sites providing no real information. Sad fact is it works. Both with the algorithms - more likes gets more random likes from nowhere over time, and with the visitor perceptions. probably only the non-technical ones. If it's on the web it must be true, right? /s
• wanderfowl 11y ago
  If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!"). I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic about being the first Twitter follower, or the 6th "Like", and something scary, particularly for a local business, about vouching for something you're not really 100% sure on. Writing the 4th 5 star review is a lot easier than the 1st one, and it's easy, and more anonymous, to be the 45th Like. I don't support these services, and think we need good heuristics to stop them, but I can totally see why even an early influx of a few fake followers and reviews would "seed the pot", and be worth way more to a business's eventual health than $20-40.
  • dethstar 11y ago
    Homeless do the opposite of the musician really, throw a coin/bill into their glass and they will take it out and save it somewhere else. "Nobody has donated, have some compassion" works for some.
    • ska 11y ago
      They often (usually?) will leave some small change though. Panhandlers are common targets of theft, which may explain stashing most of what they get in various places less exposed.
      • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        Yeah, there are a lot of factors into how much you leave in the pot. Grandparent's post was just one of the pressures to leave more money, though one that most people aren't aware of.
      • wanderfowl 11y ago
        Yep. You don't want to be the guy with $100 in a cup held out in front of you. Remember, it's almost as easy to dip a bill out as it is to dip one in.
• philbarr 11y ago
  "My sudden surge in popularity raised no flags at Twitter headquarters as far as I could tell, even though many of the followers had egg avatars who hadn’t tweeted in years." I'm not sure that Twitter could use how often you tweet as a metric. I haven't tweeted anything in years either but I still use the service to see what my favourite people are saying. I'm sure there are plenty of lurkers like me.
• TomGullen 11y ago
  A lot of this problem seems to come from Facebook/Twitter showing: "You have 3 followers" Perhaps it would be better if they showed publicly facing ranges: - < 1,000 followers - < 2,500 followers - < 5,000 followers - < 10,000 followers Then above 10,000 (or whatever) it shows the actual number. I see these fake like paid services losing a ton of business if social platforms took this approach.
  • puranjay 11y ago
    Then you'd just spend $20 extra and buy 10k+ followers :)
    • TomGullen 11y ago
      Facebook et al would be able to spot 10,000+ like purchases a lot easier than a few hundred.
      • puranjay 11y ago
        Then you buy them in batches of 2k/week. In all seriousness, I've actually purchased 10k Twitter followers for $10. Twitter did not care one bit.
• vijayr 11y ago
  Yes, writing fake reviews is illegal. False advertising is a misdemeanor crime Does this mean those Amazon affiliate sites are illegal too? A lot of these sites review products as if they have used the them, but there is no way they could've paid real money for the dozens of products they review? Also, how is this different from celebrities endorsing products and appearing in ads? How do we know they bothered to use the product even once, other than the time they were shooting for the ad?
  • wpietri 11y ago
    My guess is that most celebrity endorsements happen after at least some examination of the product. After all, celebrities have brands to protect too. And I imagine their endorsements are carefully worded; it's only false advertising when somebody says something that isn't true. Of course, as you demonstrate here, there's at least some public understanding that celebrity endorsements aren't actually reviews, so a good lawyer would argue that since you don't expect celebrity endorsements to be factually true, they couldn't possibly be false advertising.
  • icebraining 11y ago
    Does this mean those Amazon affiliate sites are illegal too? A lot of these sites review products as if they have used the them, but there is no way they could've paid real money for the dozens of products they review? There are probably plenty of fakes, but if you're successful, brands will send you their products for you to review.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    Some people are given free product in return for a good review. In England you must make it very clear if content is your regular content of if it's sponsored content. This is hard for YouTubers to comply with because a big pre-roll splash probably isn't enough. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30203816 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30203816 http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/26/vloggers-must-tell-fans-paid-adverts-asa-rules http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/26/vloggers-must-t... https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Media-Centre/2014/Making-ads-Clear-The-challenge-for-advertisers-and-vloggers.aspx#.VfrjVk-CPTo https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Media-Centre/2014/Maki...
• icedchai 11y ago
  This puts most corporate marketing departments to shame.
  • gk1 11y ago
    Why?
    • icedchai 11y ago
      I mean, if it wasn't all fake traffic... if he did this "for real", it would put them to shame... heh
• 811639047892938 11y ago
  When it comes to Twitter, these services are necessary, if a business is to EVER get any followers. There's a fact that not many people talk about, that real (actual human) Twitter users are following less and less people. Joe Mande is a comedian who has been on Twitter since 2009, and his follower count went up to 80,000 steadily, but then it stalled at some point. In 2013, he did a funny project where he VERY publicly bought 920,000 followers (if I recall, he paid $500 to a Moldovan guy who added the followers over a matter of months). It was partly comedy (or perhaps performance art??), but he gave an interview at the time saying that there was a point where it just became very tough to get (legitimate) new followers, and it's true. I myself have a follower count that's been at around 7000 for years now, and even when I have someone huge retweet something I said, I get maybe 3 new followers for every 500 retweets. I have discussed this with friends in similar positions, and I think the problem is that everyone already just follows too damn many people,and nobody wants to add more. So to me, this is why Fiverr is important for new businesses - go ahead and launch a brand new business and see how long it takes to get to even 100 followers, much less the multiple thousands that make you look "legitimate" to many users, it will take you years. For a local business in meatspace, even 100 REAL customers following you is a herculean task. Fiverr is the only way to make it look like you are not just some random fly by night company that nobody uses. Adding to this trouble is the fact that Twitter is incentivized NOT to remove all the old fake followers that they KNOW are there. Every Twitter user has a lot of fake followers, just because Twitter used to be completely apathetic and terrible at removing them. All the old bots goosed Twitter's numbers GREATLY, so why would they have removed them? So now, they can't go back and take hundreds of followers away from random people who only have 300 followers, because those people will go CRAZY and hate Twitter. But when you look around Twitter now, SO many people have 500 followers, if you're a new restaurant with 7 followers, you look PATHETIC. Note: Joe Mande still has his 1 Million bots and it's worth googling "joe mande bots" to find funny articles about his quest.
• roymurdock 11y ago
  Yelp was the only company that caught us, hiding both of the reviews I bought behind their “not recommended” click wall and not counting them in F.A.K.E.’s rating. It has software that screens out suspicious reviews, not including them in a company’s star-rating. If they see too many of them, they will penalize a business’s page, putting a “consumer alert” on the profile for 90 days warning visitors that they think the business is buying fake reviews. People on Fiverr who were selling reviews would often say “No Yelp” in their descriptions, saying it was hard to make those “stick.” This is why Yelp almost never disappoints. Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service.
  • shampine 11y ago
    > Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service. Well that's not something you hear (read) everyday.
    • dopamean 11y ago
      I think people looking for reviews generally find Yelp to be useful but business owners often hate them.
      • wuliwong 11y ago
        I make the same observation. My friends that own restaurants often talk about Yelp messing with their reviews and not showing the good ones. Myself, as someone that usually just uses Yelp to find a place to eat, I find it very useful and have no real complaints with the reviews.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  • irq-1 11y ago
    I draw the exact opposite conclusion: Yelp is selling reviews and need to control their product. Twitter and Facebook aren't selling followers or friends, so they fight fakes... but not too hard, because that isn't their product. Isn't the conventional wisdom that Yelp is a protection racket?
• deleted 11y ago
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• juped 11y ago
  How can we be sure that this article isn't a deep-cover "fake review" for Yelp? It tells a convincing story and manages to throw in Yelp's huge music selection - I mean, its effectiveness at removing fake reviews.
• Animats 11y ago
  I'm very aware of this problem. I set up Sitetruth.com to try to combat it. Here's what Sitetruth has on Launchrock.[1] Is there an street address on the web site? No. Anything we can tie to a list of US businesses? No. Better Business Bureau link? No. SEC filings? No. Rating: Do Not Enter. SiteTruth takes the position, "when in doubt, rate it down". We'd use D&B data if it wasn't so expensive; this is just the demo version. There's a whole industry out there tracking business info, and the search industry isn't plugged into it. (Why? Google gets about a third of its revenue from AdSense ads on other sites. If Google really cracked down on clickbait sites, Google's own revenue would drop. We once calculated it would drop 14-17%.) Back in 2011, I wrote "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social".[2] That's when Google had started using social signals for search ranking, and the black-hat SEO industry had discovered how easy it was to manipulate Google via social. Old-style link farming, setting up lots of fake web sites to create links, is expensive, with servers to run and sites to fill. With social spamming, the social network hosts the spam for you, for free! You can still buy "bulk likes" for Facebook.[3][4] The price has gone up a little, indicating that Facebook is having some success in getting rid of fake accounts, but not much. [1] http://www.sitetruth.com/rating/freakinawesomekaraoke.launchrock.com?format=popup http://www.sitetruth.com/rating/freakinawesomekaraoke.launch... [2] http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf [3] http://www.buylikesandfollowers.net/buy-facebook-likes-cheap.html http://www.buylikesandfollowers.net/buy-facebook-likes-cheap... [4] https://boostlikes.com/ https://boostlikes.com/
  • digisth 11y ago
    I really like this idea, but it seems fairly punishing for new / all remote / self-funded businesses. If you're running a company out of your own pocket (no SEC filings), aren't anywhere near big or old enough to have a BBB entry, and are remote (what street address should someone use? their apartment?) I'd like to know what signals you'd recommend bootstrappers use to engender trust for a service like yours, because I don't think "person is known on HN, posts on medium / Twitter about their service" is necessarily amenable to automated analysis.
    • Animats 11y ago