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Right, but presumably the owner can reply with "For the record we only use hand-cut fried cooked in duck fat" to that review? I am not insensitive to the point
by frossie 17y ago
Right, but presumably the owner can reply with "For the record we only use hand-cut fried cooked in duck fat" to that review?
I am not insensitive to the point, that an individual customer may be poorly placed to be a reliable critic, but I am not sure what the solution is besides somebody with a yelp-type service providing an infrastructure that lets everybody have their say. Not every sector in every town will have an editorially controlled forum for high-quality recommendations.
As a point of interest, do you for example object, say, to tripadvisor as well, or is it something that yelp does in particular?
- tptacek 17y agoYelp is a user-generated content company (meaning: unpaid contributors are doing the lion's share of the value creation) with heavy SEO optimization and little quality control, and a business model that extracts money from business owners. Their incentives are all out of whack. They profit by dragging eyeballs to non-authoritative content they didn't write, and then scaring businesses with it.
- tphyahoo 17y agoHear hear. I'm not a yelp user, but the other problem that occurs to me is the anonymity. Of course you have user profiles, but you can't (easily) track a review back to a human being, which is why this was such a shock to the reviewer in the magazine article when it actually happened. The businesses stand there naked and the reviewers can take little potshots at them behind the screen of anonymity. No wonder some people go a little crazy. If yelp made reviewers less anonymous, such as stating where you work, maybe this would be less of a problem. At least bad reviews would probably be polite and dignified rather than outright nasty.