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Related anecdote: a friend of mine left a 1-star review for a restaurant a few months back; I was there, and it was definitely worthy of a 1-star review. It do

Related anecdote: a friend of mine left a 1-star review for a restaurant a few months back; I was there, and it was definitely worthy of a 1-star review. It doesn't show on the Google reviews for me. He sees it, I don't. Another friend left a 1-star review as well, and that one does show (and he also doesn't see the "hidden" 1-star review). I don't know what's going on here, but it was a genuine reasonably written review detailing the problems we had. He never received any notification it was removed: just got kind of "shadow banned" or something.

jahnu 4y ago
Have they left plenty of reviews elsewhere? I wouldn’t be surprised if you have to reach some threshold of reviewing before your score counts.
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  I have left exactly one review in Google in my entire life, and it was a 1-star review of a car rental place that royally screwed up. A couple months later I was notified that "x users found this review helpful". So someone must have seen it despite me never reviewing anything else.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    Those interactions from other users can be totally fake to boost engagement.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      Possible, but it could also be that the reviewing system considers them a high-signal user: very few reviews most/all negative would be a person who doesn’t care for reviewing but had such horrendous experience they were pushed to warn others.
      - hgomersall 4y ago
        I operate like that, but the other way. I generally only leave very positive reviews when I've had a great experience. I guess I'm fortunate that I've yet to have an experience so bad that I was motivated to leave a 1 star review despite my apathy.
cyberpeach 4y ago
I had the exact same thing happen to me.
makeitdouble 4y ago
There's clearly reviewer tiers in Google Maps, with the lower ones getting shadow banning too negative reviews (I had some of my earlier ones appear after my rank got up) The higher tiers are more public, like for the 'local guides' for instance: https://maps.google.com/localguides/ https://maps.google.com/localguides/
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Interesting, because I think the people that leave 1 star reviews are typically pretty motivated to do so, especially when it is a single one. Possibly they want to see a balance between positive and negative reviews.
  - JackFr 4y ago
    Online restaurant reviews (and doctor reviews) always skew negative because those who have had bad experience are left frustrated and impotent and a scathing online review is one of the few avenues open to them, while those who have had a good experience are unmotivated to write anything. On a related note, I’ve been getting overwhelmed with “How’d we do?” after the fact online surveys lately - doctor visits, rental car, retail shopping - and I can’t help but wonder if along with actually trying to improve their services, these surveys act to manage the narrative. That if I can complain to them, I won’t complain to Google, yelp or TripAdvisor.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      > I can’t help but wonder if along with actually trying to improve their services, these surveys act to manage the narrative. Absolutely, that's precisely what they are for.
      - iudqnolq 4y ago
        And they direct you to Google/Yelp once the screen you as positive
  - WelcomeShorty 4y ago
abawany 4y ago
Same thing happened to a few of my reviews on Google Maps - not sure what those few vendors did to get my reviews shadow banned but it was frustrating. I no longer log reviews now since the motivation to contribute to a catch-and-kill operation is low.
gernb 4y ago
Wow, just checked a review I left, 1 star with video and phots of the issues, for an apartment complex. Yea, it's not visible unless I'm logged in. As for rep, it tells me i've left 174 reviews and am "level 6" whatever that means. Guess it's not high enough to leave 1 star
propogandist 4y ago
the merchant must be spending enough on Google Adwords to bury bad reviews, just like Yelp
planb 4y ago
I don’t even run a business, but I constantly get instagram ads for services that promise to delete bad reviews. I wonder if these services are spamming google so much that all flagged comments will get shadow banned until they are manually reviewed (which means never).
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I don’t even run a business, but I constantly get instagram ads for services that promise to delete bad reviews I hear ads for them on the radio all the time. Broadcast radio, so I know the ads aren't targeted at me.
Arnavion 4y ago
Google does some shadow filtering on their end. I had the same happen to a 1-star review - it showed fine to me when I was logged in but wouldn't show when searching for the business using an incognito tab in another browser. Had I not checked I would never have known that the review was invisible. The logged-in view faked the number of reviews (one higher than the incognito view), the aggregate score (0.1 lower) and showed my review in the info card. The reason I suspect it's something automatic (at least in my case), and not something targeted by the business I was reviewing, is that I removed half of the review and it did start showing after around 10 minutes of waiting. I edited the removed half back in and it vanished again. I was eventually able to narrow it down to a couple of paragraphs. One of them contained swearing ("fucking" and "assholes", which the management of the business were), which I guess makes sense. The other was very innocuous so I have no idea why Google disliked it. Anyway, by that time I'd gotten bored of having to wait ~10 mins after every step of this bizarro dystopian binary search so I left it at that. At this point it's received a handful of likes, and I received an email notification that a hundred people have seen it (and that I should register as a "local reviewer", yeah right). So I guess it's going to stay up for good now and don't need to check it daily out of paranoia any more. And yes, this was the first and only review I've ever written on Google, in case that's part of the equation. My biggest takeaways from this were that a) holy shit Google employees are a bunch of assholes and can go fuck themselves for writing code that shadow-filters a review instead of giving any indication that it violates their puritanical Christian policies, and b) Google is apparently not smart enough to fool me when I searched for the review from an incognito tab in a different browser but the same client IP, which almost seems like a mistake. Like, if you're going to make the effort to shadow-ban people, why not be thorough about it?
- esperent 4y ago
  Personally I'm quite happy if the app filters out reviews with profanity. Not because I care about seeing profanity, but because, more often than not, people who leave reviews with profanity are jerks and I'd rather not be exposed to their opinions.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
nxpnsv 4y ago
It seems the lesson here is that if you are unhappy with a place, leave a 2 star review...
jacobp100 4y ago
Happened to me too! I left a company a 5 star review - they were a small company and they deserved it. I even uploaded pictures. Never showed
MilaM 4y ago
Just guessing, but could it be, that Google is correlating location history with reviews? Would be a good way to weed out fake reviews in many cases.
papito 4y ago
In social media, we call this the "bozo mode". If you are bozoed, only you can see your content. A sneaky but very effective moderation technique to keep things civil.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
This is basically why I pine for the old web with very static code. It came with its own set of issues, but, in a sense, it was a lot easier. Now you have no idea what is happening. Only a big gate keeper does.

jahnu 4y ago

Have they left plenty of reviews elsewhere? I wouldn’t be surprised if you have to reach some threshold of reviewing before your score counts.

probably_wrong 4y ago
I have left exactly one review in Google in my entire life, and it was a 1-star review of a car rental place that royally screwed up. A couple months later I was notified that "x users found this review helpful". So someone must have seen it despite me never reviewing anything else.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Those interactions from other users can be totally fake to boost engagement.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Possible, but it could also be that the reviewing system considers them a high-signal user: very few reviews most/all negative would be a person who doesn’t care for reviewing but had such horrendous experience they were pushed to warn others.
    - hgomersall 4y ago
      I operate like that, but the other way. I generally only leave very positive reviews when I've had a great experience. I guess I'm fortunate that I've yet to have an experience so bad that I was motivated to leave a 1 star review despite my apathy.

cyberpeach 4y ago

I had the exact same thing happen to me.

makeitdouble 4y ago

There's clearly reviewer tiers in Google Maps, with the lower ones getting shadow banning too negative reviews (I had some of my earlier ones appear after my rank got up) The higher tiers are more public, like for the 'local guides' for instance: https://maps.google.com/localguides/ https://maps.google.com/localguides/

jacquesm 4y ago
Interesting, because I think the people that leave 1 star reviews are typically pretty motivated to do so, especially when it is a single one. Possibly they want to see a balance between positive and negative reviews.
- JackFr 4y ago
  Online restaurant reviews (and doctor reviews) always skew negative because those who have had bad experience are left frustrated and impotent and a scathing online review is one of the few avenues open to them, while those who have had a good experience are unmotivated to write anything. On a related note, I’ve been getting overwhelmed with “How’d we do?” after the fact online surveys lately - doctor visits, rental car, retail shopping - and I can’t help but wonder if along with actually trying to improve their services, these surveys act to manage the narrative. That if I can complain to them, I won’t complain to Google, yelp or TripAdvisor.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > I can’t help but wonder if along with actually trying to improve their services, these surveys act to manage the narrative. Absolutely, that's precisely what they are for.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      And they direct you to Google/Yelp once the screen you as positive
- WelcomeShorty 4y ago

abawany 4y ago

Same thing happened to a few of my reviews on Google Maps - not sure what those few vendors did to get my reviews shadow banned but it was frustrating. I no longer log reviews now since the motivation to contribute to a catch-and-kill operation is low.

gernb 4y ago

Wow, just checked a review I left, 1 star with video and phots of the issues, for an apartment complex. Yea, it's not visible unless I'm logged in. As for rep, it tells me i've left 174 reviews and am "level 6" whatever that means. Guess it's not high enough to leave 1 star

propogandist 4y ago

the merchant must be spending enough on Google Adwords to bury bad reviews, just like Yelp

planb 4y ago

I don’t even run a business, but I constantly get instagram ads for services that promise to delete bad reviews. I wonder if these services are spamming google so much that all flagged comments will get shadow banned until they are manually reviewed (which means never).

reaperducer 4y ago
I don’t even run a business, but I constantly get instagram ads for services that promise to delete bad reviews I hear ads for them on the radio all the time. Broadcast radio, so I know the ads aren't targeted at me.

Arnavion 4y ago

Google does some shadow filtering on their end. I had the same happen to a 1-star review - it showed fine to me when I was logged in but wouldn't show when searching for the business using an incognito tab in another browser. Had I not checked I would never have known that the review was invisible. The logged-in view faked the number of reviews (one higher than the incognito view), the aggregate score (0.1 lower) and showed my review in the info card. The reason I suspect it's something automatic (at least in my case), and not something targeted by the business I was reviewing, is that I removed half of the review and it did start showing after around 10 minutes of waiting. I edited the removed half back in and it vanished again. I was eventually able to narrow it down to a couple of paragraphs. One of them contained swearing ("fucking" and "assholes", which the management of the business were), which I guess makes sense. The other was very innocuous so I have no idea why Google disliked it. Anyway, by that time I'd gotten bored of having to wait ~10 mins after every step of this bizarro dystopian binary search so I left it at that. At this point it's received a handful of likes, and I received an email notification that a hundred people have seen it (and that I should register as a "local reviewer", yeah right). So I guess it's going to stay up for good now and don't need to check it daily out of paranoia any more. And yes, this was the first and only review I've ever written on Google, in case that's part of the equation. My biggest takeaways from this were that a) holy shit Google employees are a bunch of assholes and can go fuck themselves for writing code that shadow-filters a review instead of giving any indication that it violates their puritanical Christian policies, and b) Google is apparently not smart enough to fool me when I searched for the review from an incognito tab in a different browser but the same client IP, which almost seems like a mistake. Like, if you're going to make the effort to shadow-ban people, why not be thorough about it?

esperent 4y ago
Personally I'm quite happy if the app filters out reviews with profanity. Not because I care about seeing profanity, but because, more often than not, people who leave reviews with profanity are jerks and I'd rather not be exposed to their opinions.
- Arnavion 4y ago

nxpnsv 4y ago

It seems the lesson here is that if you are unhappy with a place, leave a 2 star review...

jacobp100 4y ago

Happened to me too! I left a company a 5 star review - they were a small company and they deserved it. I even uploaded pictures. Never showed

MilaM 4y ago

Just guessing, but could it be, that Google is correlating location history with reviews? Would be a good way to weed out fake reviews in many cases.

papito 4y ago

In social media, we call this the "bozo mode". If you are bozoed, only you can see your content. A sneaky but very effective moderation technique to keep things civil.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

This is basically why I pine for the old web with very static code. It came with its own set of issues, but, in a sense, it was a lot easier. Now you have no idea what is happening. Only a big gate keeper does.