8 ms·

It is the same thing as any other companies in the reviews business. The same can be said of Glassdoor or Yelp for example. As long as a review as an impact on

by polote 6y ago

It is the same thing as any other companies in the reviews business. The same can be said of Glassdoor or Yelp for example. As long as a review as an impact on the finance of a company. You can be sure the reviews provider will give ways to remove those reviews.

istjohn 6y ago
Actually, Yelp doesn't remove legitimate reviews. Edit: I speak from personal experience as a small business owner, described in more detail below.
- polote 6y ago
  In theory the same can be said of glassdoor. In reality it is different
  - istjohn 6y ago
    In reality, Yelp doesn't play games with reviews. I became the top-rated business in my city for my niche while turning down their sales people over and over. I successfully got one review removed in that time because it was clearly a spam account based on their review history. I have several legitimate 5-star reviews from actual happy customers on my business profile that "are not currently recommended" due to Yelp's aggressive anti-cheat software. There are plenty of unhappy business owners who would have people believe their poor Yelp ratings are because the game is rigged, and I'm sure Yelp makes plenty of mistakes, but it is not pay-to-win.
    - Retric 6y ago
      That’s not a counter argument. I was once the top rated player on a pay to win game server without having paid anything. The issue with pay to win in games and online reviews is the distortion not the impossibility of success. Yelp etc needs the average review to be somewhat useful so people actually trusts the Star ratings. However, they can still accomplish that while distorting a significant number of reviews.
      - istjohn 6y ago
        This thread is full of people with no first-hand experience repeating rumors and suspicions. No, I cannot prove a negative, but I don't think speculation is compelling evidence either.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        Retric 6y ago
        Yelp has successfully defended it’s self from several such lawsuits, on the other hand it’s also been sued several times over this. So, it’s a little past just internet rumors. The simple fact Yelp lets companies pay to highlight a favorable review is IMO enough to destroy their credibility. Worse they directed customers through GrubHub for an unearned commission which is as far as I can tell simple fraud. But, that’s not what people are alleging here.
- nix0n 6y ago
  > Actually, Yelp doesn't remove legitimate reviews. They say that, but they decide which reviews are legitimate, and they're more likely to decide that positive reviews are legitimate, if a business is paying them. On the other hand, my experience pre-pandemic was that Yelp had the only reliable database of local USA businesses' hours of operation (there is probably now no way to know other than phone calls).
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Google rings small businesses up every week asking what their hours of operation are... In fact, I know a business who complained he got more calls from Google trying to update their maps database than he got from real customers!
    - oli-g 6y ago
      > Google rings small businesses up every week asking what their hours of operation are... So THAT'S what all the humans at Google are up to, while their bots are busy locking legitimate user and developer accounts!
      - sandworm101 6y ago
        >>So THAT'S what all the humans at Google are up to How cute. You think that these are humans calling from google. No biological human has represented google by phone since the 90s. It is all androids and chatbots.
      - tveita 6y ago
        Sounds like exactly what they trained Duplex for, so I doubt that would be a human calling. https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...
        softawre 6y ago
        Wow that is incredible.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  It's bizarre that the one person with actual experience in this thread is being downvoted... But I second this. Yelp won't remove legitimate reviews, even for paying businesses. You can pay for priority in search listings and to show up in the Similar and Nearby sections, but that won't help you get negative reviews removed. As I speak, there are 2.5 star restaurants being promoted in every search I do for nearby restaurants. If Yelp removed the negative reviews as people claimed, they wouldn't be at 2.5 stars right now. (It's true that some individual sales reps claim Yelp will do this if you pay them, but those are individual sales reps trying to hit a sales or bonus goal.)
  - mancerayder 6y ago
    .. and people are saying that Glassdoor reviews can easily be taken down, without evidence. It might be true, but a claim that undermines the entire business.. warrants at least a link or an anecdote.
  - aSockPuppeteer 6y ago
    Yelp removes any post legitimate or not if you have zero “friends” on Yelp and if you have no profile picture iirc. On the business side all I’ve heard from Yelp Business was that they will let more bad reviews slide thus lowering your rating if you do not pay for their protection racket. Also, paying them gives good reviews that would otherwise be rejected now allowed as acceptable. Maybe those businesses were not paying for the “premium” service tier that includes Yelp sending a photographer to your business to then create a video for you with an annual plan. I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps. It’s difficult to trust online reviews.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      Yelp removes any post legitimate or not if you have zero “friends” on Yelp and if you have no profile picture iirc. That's definitely wrong, as my Yelp profile has zero friends and no profile picture, and all of my reviews are still up, when viewing the businesses logged out, across multiple devices using different IP addresses. I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps. I have spoken to restaurants on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce investigating this issue, and found no evidence that these claims are true.
newsclues 6y ago
Reputation extortion business model
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure what's happening on Amazon, but I've noticed that most of my bad reviews never get published or disappear.
  - frongpik 6y ago
    The answer is to give a 5 star review, the first paragraph with usual blah blah, the next paragraph with the actual feedback. Even better if you use the coded ways to provide negative feedback. The goal is to make it expensive to distinguish true good reviews from fake good reviews.
  - specialist 6y ago
    About 1/3rd of my bad reviews are now flagged "sensitive" (belatedly), so no longer normally visible.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Reputation extortion as a service. I get the mental image that this is how the mob has evolved. No longer are knuckle dragging guidos with crooked noses walking door to door in the neighborhoods offering protection services. "It'd be a shame if something were to happen..." but online.
briffle 6y ago
at a previous company, HR (or a PR firm they hired) would stuff the ratings with tons of super positive reviews for the company.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  The small company my friend worked for just made all their employees put in a review. While the owners watched. They were pretty terrible people. Always talking about how they were going to "get rich and leave all of you behind".
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    Wow, that is some next level douchebaggery. That would probably trigger my creative justice instinct.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  at a previous company, HR (or a PR firm they hired) would stuff the ratings with tons of super positive reviews for the company. A company I once worked for required employees to post positive reviews of its app, as a condition of employment. This started shortly after I left, so I'm grateful I never had to deal with that.
duxup 6y ago
Better Business Bureau too. It's been documented a number of times that when a non member joins suddenly poor ratings will rise / complaints vanish.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  The BBB perfected this model long before the internet was around. I worked at a computer repair shop way-back-when and the owner called the BBB an extortion racket.
  - johng 6y ago
    This. 100%. If you don’t pay the BBB their extortion fee they will tell anyone who asks that “you are not a member in good standing” which is technically true since you are not a member. Because you didn’t pay the fee. Legalized extortion.
- wsinks 6y ago
  Interesting thing to note about the BBB is that it is a federation of independent businesses with loose national control. I understand that to the consumer they look the same, but this argument is a bit disingenuous to compare the BBB, a non-profit weak national entity, with these globally internet focused ratings businesses. Each BBB region has control over only their region.^1 The BBB you might be referencing about is the BBB of LA, which no longer exists and this 2015 article mentions: https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau... That BBB was then merged into the Silicon Valley BBB, a totally different set of people and operations. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau
vinay_ys 6y ago
This is as good an use-case for a decentralized blockchain as any.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  How would that fix the problem of spammy reviews?
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Agreed - it's a bad use-case for a decentralized block chain, like all of the other uses brought up so far.
gamblor956 6y ago
Definitely not the same as Yelp. On Yelp you can buy placement in search results (or on other restaurants' listings in the "Nearby" or "Similar" sections) but they won't remove negative listings for pay. It's certainly possible that individual sales reps will offer that service if they are desperate to hit sales or bonus goals, but Yelp won't actually do it, since the review review team is separate from the sales team. Source: Personally interviewed nearly a hundred local businesses on behalf of the local Chamber of Commerce.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 650REDHAIR 6y ago
  I have first-hand experience getting negative Yelp reviews removed. Nearly impossible if you're a non-paying business on Yelp.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    I didn't say that Yelp didn't remove negative reviews; I said they don't do it in exchange for pay as implied, and comments from actual business owners on this thread, and my first-person experience interviewing almost a hundred businesses as part of an investigation for the local Chamber of Commerce confirm that.
    - 650REDHAIR 6y ago
      I am a business owner and I’ve had reviews taken down solely because I was a paying Yelp customer. I’ve had other accounts that were non-paying that couldn’t get fraudulent reviews removed at all. Yelp is a scam, but you pay the piper because their local SEO is too good.

by polote 6y ago

istjohn 6y ago

Actually, Yelp doesn't remove legitimate reviews. Edit: I speak from personal experience as a small business owner, described in more detail below.

polote 6y ago
In theory the same can be said of glassdoor. In reality it is different
- istjohn 6y ago
  In reality, Yelp doesn't play games with reviews. I became the top-rated business in my city for my niche while turning down their sales people over and over. I successfully got one review removed in that time because it was clearly a spam account based on their review history. I have several legitimate 5-star reviews from actual happy customers on my business profile that "are not currently recommended" due to Yelp's aggressive anti-cheat software. There are plenty of unhappy business owners who would have people believe their poor Yelp ratings are because the game is rigged, and I'm sure Yelp makes plenty of mistakes, but it is not pay-to-win.
  - Retric 6y ago
    That’s not a counter argument. I was once the top rated player on a pay to win game server without having paid anything. The issue with pay to win in games and online reviews is the distortion not the impossibility of success. Yelp etc needs the average review to be somewhat useful so people actually trusts the Star ratings. However, they can still accomplish that while distorting a significant number of reviews.
    - istjohn 6y ago
      This thread is full of people with no first-hand experience repeating rumors and suspicions. No, I cannot prove a negative, but I don't think speculation is compelling evidence either.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - Retric 6y ago
        Yelp has successfully defended it’s self from several such lawsuits, on the other hand it’s also been sued several times over this. So, it’s a little past just internet rumors. The simple fact Yelp lets companies pay to highlight a favorable review is IMO enough to destroy their credibility. Worse they directed customers through GrubHub for an unearned commission which is as far as I can tell simple fraud. But, that’s not what people are alleging here.
nix0n 6y ago
> Actually, Yelp doesn't remove legitimate reviews. They say that, but they decide which reviews are legitimate, and they're more likely to decide that positive reviews are legitimate, if a business is paying them. On the other hand, my experience pre-pandemic was that Yelp had the only reliable database of local USA businesses' hours of operation (there is probably now no way to know other than phone calls).
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Google rings small businesses up every week asking what their hours of operation are... In fact, I know a business who complained he got more calls from Google trying to update their maps database than he got from real customers!
  - oli-g 6y ago
    > Google rings small businesses up every week asking what their hours of operation are... So THAT'S what all the humans at Google are up to, while their bots are busy locking legitimate user and developer accounts!
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      >>So THAT'S what all the humans at Google are up to How cute. You think that these are humans calling from google. No biological human has represented google by phone since the 90s. It is all androids and chatbots.
    - tveita 6y ago
      Sounds like exactly what they trained Duplex for, so I doubt that would be a human calling. https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...
      - softawre 6y ago
        Wow that is incredible.
gamblor956 6y ago
It's bizarre that the one person with actual experience in this thread is being downvoted... But I second this. Yelp won't remove legitimate reviews, even for paying businesses. You can pay for priority in search listings and to show up in the Similar and Nearby sections, but that won't help you get negative reviews removed. As I speak, there are 2.5 star restaurants being promoted in every search I do for nearby restaurants. If Yelp removed the negative reviews as people claimed, they wouldn't be at 2.5 stars right now. (It's true that some individual sales reps claim Yelp will do this if you pay them, but those are individual sales reps trying to hit a sales or bonus goal.)
- mancerayder 6y ago
  .. and people are saying that Glassdoor reviews can easily be taken down, without evidence. It might be true, but a claim that undermines the entire business.. warrants at least a link or an anecdote.
- aSockPuppeteer 6y ago
  Yelp removes any post legitimate or not if you have zero “friends” on Yelp and if you have no profile picture iirc. On the business side all I’ve heard from Yelp Business was that they will let more bad reviews slide thus lowering your rating if you do not pay for their protection racket. Also, paying them gives good reviews that would otherwise be rejected now allowed as acceptable. Maybe those businesses were not paying for the “premium” service tier that includes Yelp sending a photographer to your business to then create a video for you with an annual plan. I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps. It’s difficult to trust online reviews.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Yelp removes any post legitimate or not if you have zero “friends” on Yelp and if you have no profile picture iirc. That's definitely wrong, as my Yelp profile has zero friends and no profile picture, and all of my reviews are still up, when viewing the businesses logged out, across multiple devices using different IP addresses. I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps. I have spoken to restaurants on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce investigating this issue, and found no evidence that these claims are true.

newsclues 6y ago

Reputation extortion business model

koheripbal 6y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure what's happening on Amazon, but I've noticed that most of my bad reviews never get published or disappear.
- frongpik 6y ago
  The answer is to give a 5 star review, the first paragraph with usual blah blah, the next paragraph with the actual feedback. Even better if you use the coded ways to provide negative feedback. The goal is to make it expensive to distinguish true good reviews from fake good reviews.
- specialist 6y ago
  About 1/3rd of my bad reviews are now flagged "sensitive" (belatedly), so no longer normally visible.
dylan604 6y ago
Reputation extortion as a service. I get the mental image that this is how the mob has evolved. No longer are knuckle dragging guidos with crooked noses walking door to door in the neighborhoods offering protection services. "It'd be a shame if something were to happen..." but online.

briffle 6y ago

at a previous company, HR (or a PR firm they hired) would stuff the ratings with tons of super positive reviews for the company.

bcrosby95 6y ago
The small company my friend worked for just made all their employees put in a review. While the owners watched. They were pretty terrible people. Always talking about how they were going to "get rich and leave all of you behind".
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  Wow, that is some next level douchebaggery. That would probably trigger my creative justice instinct.
reaperducer 6y ago
at a previous company, HR (or a PR firm they hired) would stuff the ratings with tons of super positive reviews for the company. A company I once worked for required employees to post positive reviews of its app, as a condition of employment. This started shortly after I left, so I'm grateful I never had to deal with that.

duxup 6y ago

Better Business Bureau too. It's been documented a number of times that when a non member joins suddenly poor ratings will rise / complaints vanish.

mywittyname 6y ago
The BBB perfected this model long before the internet was around. I worked at a computer repair shop way-back-when and the owner called the BBB an extortion racket.
- johng 6y ago
  This. 100%. If you don’t pay the BBB their extortion fee they will tell anyone who asks that “you are not a member in good standing” which is technically true since you are not a member. Because you didn’t pay the fee. Legalized extortion.
wsinks 6y ago
Interesting thing to note about the BBB is that it is a federation of independent businesses with loose national control. I understand that to the consumer they look the same, but this argument is a bit disingenuous to compare the BBB, a non-profit weak national entity, with these globally internet focused ratings businesses. Each BBB region has control over only their region.^1 The BBB you might be referencing about is the BBB of LA, which no longer exists and this 2015 article mentions: https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau... That BBB was then merged into the Silicon Valley BBB, a totally different set of people and operations. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau

vinay_ys 6y ago

This is as good an use-case for a decentralized blockchain as any.

ForHackernews 6y ago
How would that fix the problem of spammy reviews?
tsimionescu 6y ago
Agreed - it's a bad use-case for a decentralized block chain, like all of the other uses brought up so far.

gamblor956 6y ago

Definitely not the same as Yelp. On Yelp you can buy placement in search results (or on other restaurants' listings in the "Nearby" or "Similar" sections) but they won't remove negative listings for pay. It's certainly possible that individual sales reps will offer that service if they are desperate to hit sales or bonus goals, but Yelp won't actually do it, since the review review team is separate from the sales team. Source: Personally interviewed nearly a hundred local businesses on behalf of the local Chamber of Commerce.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
650REDHAIR 6y ago
I have first-hand experience getting negative Yelp reviews removed. Nearly impossible if you're a non-paying business on Yelp.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  I didn't say that Yelp didn't remove negative reviews; I said they don't do it in exchange for pay as implied, and comments from actual business owners on this thread, and my first-person experience interviewing almost a hundred businesses as part of an investigation for the local Chamber of Commerce confirm that.
  - 650REDHAIR 6y ago
    I am a business owner and I’ve had reviews taken down solely because I was a paying Yelp customer. I’ve had other accounts that were non-paying that couldn’t get fraudulent reviews removed at all. Yelp is a scam, but you pay the piper because their local SEO is too good.