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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

by 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.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >I think he's saying that Yelp is bad because he should not have been trusted. Based on what? Magical intuition that the account belongs to the boyfriend of the business owner?
artursapek 11y ago
It's not uncommon for big community websites like Yelp to distrust brand new accounts. It sounds like Yelp could improve their "trust" algorithm, but this doesn't really surprise me.

by lbotos 11y ago

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.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I think he's saying that Yelp is bad because he should not have been trusted. Based on what? Magical intuition that the account belongs to the boyfriend of the business owner?

artursapek 11y ago

It's not uncommon for big community websites like Yelp to distrust brand new accounts. It sounds like Yelp could improve their "trust" algorithm, but this doesn't really surprise me.