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Yelp's main defense is "It's done by an algorithm". That's not a valid defense for a bad business practice. They are accused of hiding positive reviews for bus
by tlb 15y ago
Yelp's main defense is "It's done by an algorithm". That's not a valid defense for a bad business practice.
They are accused of hiding positive reviews for businesses that don't pay them. You can perfectly well write this logic in Python for an filtering algorithm:
def filter(review):
...
if review.business.contacted_by_sales_count >= 3 and
not review.business.paying_yelp and
review.stars >= 4 and
random() > 0.8: # 80% chance
return true # yes, filter it
...
Even if it's not written so explicitly they have to take responsibility for their algorithms.
- derwiki 15y agoThe sales org only has access to Salesforce copy of Yelp's internal data, and numbers like "contacted_by_sales" never ends up back in the main Yelp database. It's not something the algorithm could take into account because it doesn't know about the sales org at all. Disclaimer: I used to work on the Yelp engineering team, at one point on the Salesforce data refresh project.
- pbreit 15y agoI'm sure most already understand this but when Yelp says the filter algorithmic, it's implied that a reasonable algorithm is being used.