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Literally every local small business I know reports some type of shenanigans with Yelp. Some of it is surely false-correlation by emotional shop owners. But th

by tacos 11y ago

Literally every local small business I know reports some type of shenanigans with Yelp. Some of it is surely false-correlation by emotional shop owners. But there is, at best, a critical mass of unethical salespeople, because I've heard far too many reports of pressured selling. Either way, they've got a really big problem. Big picture, it's hard to imagine how a site like this can remain neutral or useful long-term. It's just a playground for mischief on all sides, and eventually consumers will catch on.

ahallock 11y ago
What does a useful local business review site look like? Not being snarky--genuinely interested to see if there's an opportunity here.
- lbotos 11y ago
  It's a great question. I think a lot of the problem is reviews get stale AND you don't know/trust the reviewer.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Yeah. I don't live in the boonies but I also don't live in a big city. Pretty much any restaurant or small business around where I live has, at best, a handful of reviews over the past few years. It's just not very useful. Biases baked into the platform are one problem for a review site. But you also just need critical mass.
- CodeWriter23 11y ago
  Zagat?
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Zagat is (still) pretty decent if you're interested in restaurants in one of the metropolitan areas that it covers and you're in their foddie-ish demographic. However, I don't think Zagat, which had a pretty long pre-Web history in what we now call crowdsourced restaurant reviews, offers a lot of insight for how we might do a small business review site today.
    - CodeWriter23 11y ago
      The question didn't qualify "useful" as being crowdsourced or not. And that gets to my point, a review site that has its own reviewers is pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful. Otherwise the system will be gamed by vendetta seekers and the business itself. And I believe it is inevitable that a crowdsourced site will ultimately end up gaming the system to try to offset those effects.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        >pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful IMO that's an overstatement. I find Zagat, Yelp, and Amazon reviews all useful--however imperfect. That said, however unpopular this opinion may be in our crowdsourced world, professional reviews/ratings tend to be more reliable than random ones on the Internet. The problem is that professional reviews don't scale, especially for local businesses. The New York Times restaurant reviews aren't bad but that's NYC and, even in that case, a lot of the reviews are going to be quite old. So, in an ideal world, there might be armies of professional evaluators of hotels, restaurants, and other businesses--but that's not the world that we live in. (Films are one of the few areas where you can get a pretty good pool of professional and semi-professional reviewers.)
        jacobr1 11y ago
        I think smart pay systems might help here. I'm not an avid reviewer - I just don't care enough for it to be worth my time. However, uber makes it part of the workflow. To get another ride I either need to make a rating or skip making a rating - so I make a rating. And it only takes one click. I suspect if Apple Pay or Google's equivalent had a similar process they would be able to generate some very sold scores for local businesses since they have both identify and proof of purchase.
        ghaff 11y ago
        Yeah but with Uber, the expectation isn't that you're going to leave a nuanced review about the comfort of the car seat and the smoothness of the ride, but to basically leave 5 stars so long as there was nothing horribly wrong. Which is fine. It's more or less a commodity service. With restaurants, on the other hand, there is a wide range of quality. Even if the average shopping mall restaurant delivers a hot meal in a reasonable timeframe, I'm probably not going to give it 5 stars.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  I think the biggest things working against Yelp are the reports from businesses that Yelp offered to censor bad reviews and/or promote/shill positive reviews in exchange for money. I've heard about it all N-th hand, so I'd imagine that Yelp's team is very careful about wording it such that it's some sort of legit promotion that they're offering.
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    ...and yet, despite what must be hundreds of thousands of calls or emails made by Yelp sales folk to businesses, nobody, to my knowledge, has ever produced a voicemail, telephone recording, or message containing a promise or threat to do anything other than what Yelp publicly offers to its paying customers[1]. I'm actually sure this has happened, since it's essentially impossible to prevent thousands of salespeople from deviating from an approved script when pushing hard for a sale, but surely it can't be commonplace. [1] https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising
    - 1024core 11y ago
      Exactly. I made the same comment above before reading yours. I also find it hard to believe that after all these years, not ONE person has solid proof of shenanigans.
- deepinsand 11y ago
  I think Yelp is missing proof of identity and proof of patronage. It was created before social media took off, and before you could reliably know if someone had been somewhere. I don't know if you need both, but proof of patronage alone might not be enough to trust a review (See Amazon verified purchases).
  - scarmig 11y ago
    Aren't Yelp "Check-ins" factored into the trustworthiness rating of a review, or whatever it's called? That's kind of an ersatz proof of patronage.
    - etjossem 11y ago
      Maybe. It still wouldn't be foolproof - after all, Yelp Check-ins are powered by an API that trusts the coordinates it receives. It might be possible to craft a request for that API. And even using a legitimate copy of the Yelp app to make requests, a jailbroken iPhone can change its coordinates to whatever you want. An Android doesn't even need that - just set it to developer mode and you're ready to fake check-ins all day.
  - tailgate 11y ago
    Would you ever trust an app that was linked to your identity and stored a list of places you visited? Be careful what you wish for.
    - rmxt 11y ago
      Is that much different than what Facebook or Google Maps are already doing behind the scenes? They might not make that data accessible to you, but it's undoubtedly being (or able to be) compiled behind the scenes. See this update: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you-when-local-businesses-are-busiest/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you... The average HN user might not care for such a system, but I think many people would find it reassuring for better or worse.
lbotos 11y ago
Fun Yelp story time: Dated a girl. Her father was an eye doctor in a small town. There were 2 eye doctors on main street. He was convinced the other doctor had someone leave a bad review (which out of his ~8 or so reviews) which made him a 2 star "offering". He was my eye doctor and I _did_ like his work, so we made an account, and left a review. My review was "untrusted" because my account didn't have any other activity. Now it became a game. Everywhere we went we'd leave a yelp review to try and get my account to be "trusted". This went on for about 3 months and we had about 10-15 reviews. My account was still untrusted. We decided to stop and just let it be. About 3 months after that, my user was trusted and he now has a 5 star rating. The woes of yelp in a small town.
- twoodfin 11y ago
  I'm missing how this story reflects poorly on Yelp. You did exactly what they want Yelpers to do: Review a series of places so they can (after a few months, apparently) calibrate your ratings and have some algorithmic confidence you're not a drive-by or paid reviewer.
  - greeneggs 11y ago
    I think he's saying that Yelp is bad because he should not have been trusted. The whole point of the exercise was for his girlfriend to write a review for her father's business. But it seems nearly impossible to stop people who are determined to write fake reviews. Yelp obviously isn't perfect, but what's the alternative?
    - VLM 11y ago
      "what's the alternative?" Live a post-online-review existence. That's where I'm at. The future is here just unevenly distributed. Take all the arguments people have against IQ as a measure of a person's meaning or value, turn them around and apply them to the number of online stars a company has purchased, err, uh, obtained via reviews from real customers LOL as if anyone believes that's really how it works. Or if you work for a big corporation you likely have extensive experience with people freaking out about utterly meaningless metrics... like number of online stars. Sucks to be an online review company, but if the providers hate the implied, rumored, or actual extortion racket, and the users find the data to be useless, when they go away, nothing of value will be lost.
ghaff 11y ago
There's always bias of various sorts though even if it's just the preferences of most of the people doing reviews. I liked Zagat in the pre-Google days, for example, because the demographic of the people willing to fill out a dead-tree mail-in survey about restaurants was probably pretty similar to me. (I still prefer Zagat to Yelp but it doesn't have as broad coverage.) For all its various biases, I find Yelp OK given some critical mass of reviews. And reading some reviews can be as useful as looking at the overall rating. It's not great but, in an area I don't know, it's better than throwing a dart at the wall.
ssharp 11y ago
There is a two-week span every couple months where a Yelp rep tries to contact me daily, sometimes even multiple times per day. I rarely take unsolicited calls since I tend to get a lot of them, so I'm not really sure what they want. What do they have to sell you on? The company I work for doesn't have a strong "untrusted" Yelp rating, but it's largely because it's not a local business and people predominantly give us bad reviews when something negative happens, even when it's outside of our control. There are better review sites in the niche we operate in and there are no parallels between those reviews and what ends up on Yelp. You get some of the same complaints, but there are also far more positive reviews and the reviews are higher quality and more informative than what's on Yelp. For trusted reviews on Yelp, we rate much better.
- tacos 11y ago
  They sell ads, including those that show up on your competitor's business page.

by tacos 11y ago

ahallock 11y ago

What does a useful local business review site look like? Not being snarky--genuinely interested to see if there's an opportunity here.

lbotos 11y ago
It's a great question. I think a lot of the problem is reviews get stale AND you don't know/trust the reviewer.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Yeah. I don't live in the boonies but I also don't live in a big city. Pretty much any restaurant or small business around where I live has, at best, a handful of reviews over the past few years. It's just not very useful. Biases baked into the platform are one problem for a review site. But you also just need critical mass.
CodeWriter23 11y ago
Zagat?
- ghaff 11y ago
  Zagat is (still) pretty decent if you're interested in restaurants in one of the metropolitan areas that it covers and you're in their foddie-ish demographic. However, I don't think Zagat, which had a pretty long pre-Web history in what we now call crowdsourced restaurant reviews, offers a lot of insight for how we might do a small business review site today.
  - CodeWriter23 11y ago
    The question didn't qualify "useful" as being crowdsourced or not. And that gets to my point, a review site that has its own reviewers is pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful. Otherwise the system will be gamed by vendetta seekers and the business itself. And I believe it is inevitable that a crowdsourced site will ultimately end up gaming the system to try to offset those effects.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      >pretty much the only thing that is going to be useful IMO that's an overstatement. I find Zagat, Yelp, and Amazon reviews all useful--however imperfect. That said, however unpopular this opinion may be in our crowdsourced world, professional reviews/ratings tend to be more reliable than random ones on the Internet. The problem is that professional reviews don't scale, especially for local businesses. The New York Times restaurant reviews aren't bad but that's NYC and, even in that case, a lot of the reviews are going to be quite old. So, in an ideal world, there might be armies of professional evaluators of hotels, restaurants, and other businesses--but that's not the world that we live in. (Films are one of the few areas where you can get a pretty good pool of professional and semi-professional reviewers.)
      - jacobr1 11y ago
        I think smart pay systems might help here. I'm not an avid reviewer - I just don't care enough for it to be worth my time. However, uber makes it part of the workflow. To get another ride I either need to make a rating or skip making a rating - so I make a rating. And it only takes one click. I suspect if Apple Pay or Google's equivalent had a similar process they would be able to generate some very sold scores for local businesses since they have both identify and proof of purchase.
        ghaff 11y ago
        Yeah but with Uber, the expectation isn't that you're going to leave a nuanced review about the comfort of the car seat and the smoothness of the ride, but to basically leave 5 stars so long as there was nothing horribly wrong. Which is fine. It's more or less a commodity service. With restaurants, on the other hand, there is a wide range of quality. Even if the average shopping mall restaurant delivers a hot meal in a reasonable timeframe, I'm probably not going to give it 5 stars.
wyldfire 11y ago
I think the biggest things working against Yelp are the reports from businesses that Yelp offered to censor bad reviews and/or promote/shill positive reviews in exchange for money. I've heard about it all N-th hand, so I'd imagine that Yelp's team is very careful about wording it such that it's some sort of legit promotion that they're offering.
- twoodfin 11y ago
  ...and yet, despite what must be hundreds of thousands of calls or emails made by Yelp sales folk to businesses, nobody, to my knowledge, has ever produced a voicemail, telephone recording, or message containing a promise or threat to do anything other than what Yelp publicly offers to its paying customers[1]. I'm actually sure this has happened, since it's essentially impossible to prevent thousands of salespeople from deviating from an approved script when pushing hard for a sale, but surely it can't be commonplace. [1] https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising https://biz.yelp.com/support/full_service_advertising
  - 1024core 11y ago
    Exactly. I made the same comment above before reading yours. I also find it hard to believe that after all these years, not ONE person has solid proof of shenanigans.
deepinsand 11y ago
I think Yelp is missing proof of identity and proof of patronage. It was created before social media took off, and before you could reliably know if someone had been somewhere. I don't know if you need both, but proof of patronage alone might not be enough to trust a review (See Amazon verified purchases).
- scarmig 11y ago
  Aren't Yelp "Check-ins" factored into the trustworthiness rating of a review, or whatever it's called? That's kind of an ersatz proof of patronage.
  - etjossem 11y ago
    Maybe. It still wouldn't be foolproof - after all, Yelp Check-ins are powered by an API that trusts the coordinates it receives. It might be possible to craft a request for that API. And even using a legitimate copy of the Yelp app to make requests, a jailbroken iPhone can change its coordinates to whatever you want. An Android doesn't even need that - just set it to developer mode and you're ready to fake check-ins all day.
- tailgate 11y ago
  Would you ever trust an app that was linked to your identity and stored a list of places you visited? Be careful what you wish for.
  - rmxt 11y ago
    Is that much different than what Facebook or Google Maps are already doing behind the scenes? They might not make that data accessible to you, but it's undoubtedly being (or able to be) compiled behind the scenes. See this update: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you-when-local-businesses-are-busiest/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/google-search-now-shows-you... The average HN user might not care for such a system, but I think many people would find it reassuring for better or worse.

lbotos 11y ago

Fun Yelp story time: Dated a girl. Her father was an eye doctor in a small town. There were 2 eye doctors on main street. He was convinced the other doctor had someone leave a bad review (which out of his ~8 or so reviews) which made him a 2 star "offering". He was my eye doctor and I _did_ like his work, so we made an account, and left a review. My review was "untrusted" because my account didn't have any other activity. Now it became a game. Everywhere we went we'd leave a yelp review to try and get my account to be "trusted". This went on for about 3 months and we had about 10-15 reviews. My account was still untrusted. We decided to stop and just let it be. About 3 months after that, my user was trusted and he now has a 5 star rating. The woes of yelp in a small town.

twoodfin 11y ago
I'm missing how this story reflects poorly on Yelp. You did exactly what they want Yelpers to do: Review a series of places so they can (after a few months, apparently) calibrate your ratings and have some algorithmic confidence you're not a drive-by or paid reviewer.
- greeneggs 11y ago
  I think he's saying that Yelp is bad because he should not have been trusted. The whole point of the exercise was for his girlfriend to write a review for her father's business. But it seems nearly impossible to stop people who are determined to write fake reviews. Yelp obviously isn't perfect, but what's the alternative?
  - VLM 11y ago
    "what's the alternative?" Live a post-online-review existence. That's where I'm at. The future is here just unevenly distributed. Take all the arguments people have against IQ as a measure of a person's meaning or value, turn them around and apply them to the number of online stars a company has purchased, err, uh, obtained via reviews from real customers LOL as if anyone believes that's really how it works. Or if you work for a big corporation you likely have extensive experience with people freaking out about utterly meaningless metrics... like number of online stars. Sucks to be an online review company, but if the providers hate the implied, rumored, or actual extortion racket, and the users find the data to be useless, when they go away, nothing of value will be lost.

ghaff 11y ago

There's always bias of various sorts though even if it's just the preferences of most of the people doing reviews. I liked Zagat in the pre-Google days, for example, because the demographic of the people willing to fill out a dead-tree mail-in survey about restaurants was probably pretty similar to me. (I still prefer Zagat to Yelp but it doesn't have as broad coverage.) For all its various biases, I find Yelp OK given some critical mass of reviews. And reading some reviews can be as useful as looking at the overall rating. It's not great but, in an area I don't know, it's better than throwing a dart at the wall.

ssharp 11y ago

There is a two-week span every couple months where a Yelp rep tries to contact me daily, sometimes even multiple times per day. I rarely take unsolicited calls since I tend to get a lot of them, so I'm not really sure what they want. What do they have to sell you on? The company I work for doesn't have a strong "untrusted" Yelp rating, but it's largely because it's not a local business and people predominantly give us bad reviews when something negative happens, even when it's outside of our control. There are better review sites in the niche we operate in and there are no parallels between those reviews and what ends up on Yelp. You get some of the same complaints, but there are also far more positive reviews and the reviews are higher quality and more informative than what's on Yelp. For trusted reviews on Yelp, we rate much better.

tacos 11y ago
They sell ads, including those that show up on your competitor's business page.