4 ms·
I would love to know how they intend on filtering reviews successfully while exposing the process behind the filter. It would seem any transparent filter syst
by pak 17y ago
I would love to know how they intend on filtering reviews successfully while exposing the process behind the filter. It would seem any transparent filter system would invite people to find reliable ways of bypassing and subverting the things that get you flagged.
There's a reason Google won't give you a full look at a page's spamminess rating, and a reason reddit is open source except for the spam filtering bits. With any blacklist filtering routine, transparency puts you at an inherent disadvantage. Instead of a million trials to see what passes and what doesn't, the answers are already there.
...or they aren't really, and this is just a PR scheme by Yelp to claim more transparency with the illusion of fairness for review visibility. To me this is the only real possibility here.
- mattj 17y agoIf a spammer wanted to see what a site took down, all they'd have to do would be to keep track of all the comments (including ones not by their accounts). Then they'd have some idea how the filter worked. If you make the list open then honest people can see too. The only reason you'd keep the list of what's spam private would be to maintain (perceived) infallibility. Every filter makes mistakes, only some filters let you see them.
- timdorr 17y agoThey don't tell you why things get flagged, just that they were. So, it's not that transparent. And I would be willing to bet that if you spent some time trying to learn the system through brute force, they have a system to watch for that level of activity and ban your account for tampering.
- newhouseb 17y agoThe filtered reviews are put behind captchas and thus are (relatively) hard for people to scrape and reverse engineer at a large scale.