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Is that really a thing? Like you I also try to read the negative reviews. If they're for dumb complaints like "the waiter had an attitude" or "the food took too

Is that really a thing? Like you I also try to read the negative reviews. If they're for dumb complaints like "the waiter had an attitude" or "the food took too long to arrive" I ignore them. It's only when I see more serious problems arising in a pattern that I'll discount the restaurant.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Is that really a thing? Yes, businesses creating (or paying others to create) negative reviews of competitors on online sites is a thing.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Yup. This applies for every popular site with reviews. For other funny things with reviews, I have some experience with Polish eBay/Amazon equivalent, Allegro. The following things are regular occurrences there: - Employees of a seller creating fake accounts (and/or asking their friends and family to do this) and "buying" things with payment on delivery in order to leave 5-star reviews and positive comments. The things obviously never get sent, so it costs only as much as Allegro bills the seller per item sold. - Clueless people leaving negative reviews because they're clueless. Like e.g. a seller I know just got a 1-star review on quality and delivery time with a comment that said basically "I got the merchandise and it's fine, but I've been asking you for the invoice for two weeks and didn't get it". The guy bought the product only a week ago, and had the invoice sent twice already. - Sellers fucking up, getting negative reviews, then calling each of the reviewers asking them to delete the negative review, and usually bribing them with discounts or free items. Reviews on Allegro are very high-stakes thing for sellers; just a few negative ones can mean you lose a promoted spot or get your account suspended immediately. Such situations can literally make or break a small business seller. This leads to them reviews gamed to such absurd levels that you basically can't trust them at all, if the seller is a company. Now these are anecdotes for one site only, but given my experience on-line, I'm pretty confident they generalize to anything popular with a review system.
gambiting 9y ago
Lol, yep. And I'm 99% certain they are created by the review sites themselves. Our business went from having 1-3 negative reviews to literally over a 100 negative reviews(mostly couple sentences long at most) within 2 weeks, and suspiciously we got an email from the site saying "we noticed you have a large number of negative reviews - for just $3000/year you can remove all of them if you like!". We declined to pay, after which the number of negative reviews has doubled but then stayed relatively constant. This tells me two things: 1) the whole review site business is a huge scam 2) even if we assume some of these reviews are legitimate, they don't mean anything since you can just pay to have them removed

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Is that really a thing? Yes, businesses creating (or paying others to create) negative reviews of competitors on online sites is a thing.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Yup. This applies for every popular site with reviews. For other funny things with reviews, I have some experience with Polish eBay/Amazon equivalent, Allegro. The following things are regular occurrences there: - Employees of a seller creating fake accounts (and/or asking their friends and family to do this) and "buying" things with payment on delivery in order to leave 5-star reviews and positive comments. The things obviously never get sent, so it costs only as much as Allegro bills the seller per item sold. - Clueless people leaving negative reviews because they're clueless. Like e.g. a seller I know just got a 1-star review on quality and delivery time with a comment that said basically "I got the merchandise and it's fine, but I've been asking you for the invoice for two weeks and didn't get it". The guy bought the product only a week ago, and had the invoice sent twice already. - Sellers fucking up, getting negative reviews, then calling each of the reviewers asking them to delete the negative review, and usually bribing them with discounts or free items. Reviews on Allegro are very high-stakes thing for sellers; just a few negative ones can mean you lose a promoted spot or get your account suspended immediately. Such situations can literally make or break a small business seller. This leads to them reviews gamed to such absurd levels that you basically can't trust them at all, if the seller is a company. Now these are anecdotes for one site only, but given my experience on-line, I'm pretty confident they generalize to anything popular with a review system.

gambiting 9y ago

Lol, yep. And I'm 99% certain they are created by the review sites themselves. Our business went from having 1-3 negative reviews to literally over a 100 negative reviews(mostly couple sentences long at most) within 2 weeks, and suspiciously we got an email from the site saying "we noticed you have a large number of negative reviews - for just $3000/year you can remove all of them if you like!". We declined to pay, after which the number of negative reviews has doubled but then stayed relatively constant. This tells me two things: 1) the whole review site business is a huge scam 2) even if we assume some of these reviews are legitimate, they don't mean anything since you can just pay to have them removed