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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 sear

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
  There's a difference between "Sorry, your review violates our guidelines point XYZ because of the sentence ABC and cannot be posted. Please edit it and try again." and "Your review was successfully posted. (haha not really loser, but imma set up a comically elaborate charade to make you think it was.)" Both of them keep the profanity out of your eyes, but only one of them makes you likely to get the honest review in the first place because it doesn't treat the reviewer like an outcast.
  - quietbritishjim 4y ago
    I'm not saying I agree with the parent commenter. But their point was not that they didn't want to see profanity, it was that they don't want to see anything at all from the type of people that use profanity. If that's you're position then shadow banning works well, whereas getting them to post reviews with profanity taken out does not.
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      And I'm saying that the profanity was not the only problem that caused the review to be shadow-filtered. Regardless of whether the system filters profanity or not, the fact that it filters them while pretending otherwise is the problem. If one supports the system that shadow-filters profanity, they're also supporting the system that shadow-filters "some other unidentified thing that seems perfectly fine", and thus leads to them not seeing reviews that contained useful information. You think I can't write a review without profanity? Of course I can. I can be extremely polite while pointing out the issues I had with the business. That's exactly what I did when I realized this was happening. I just didn't know I was going to be held to that standard when I posted the review, and the system lied to me that what I wrote was acceptable so I had no reason to believe otherwise. If you were relying on not reading reviews like mine because my use of profanity implied I was a jerk, well I'm sorry but your heuristic isn't going to work any more because I know now. It wasn't even hard for me to figure out, so I'm sure most of the jerks have figured it out too. So sorry if you were relying on that, but you probably can't any more.
rmbyrro 4y ago
> The other was very innocuous so I have no idea why Google disliked it. Beware of Google employees' agenda on language [1]. Something like "the restaurant service was insanely fast" can trigger a shadow banning. [1] https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  These are two disconnected things. Google has a style guide for documentation that suggests that people do not include certain kinds of words. This does not imply that users posting content with these words will trigger policy violations.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  For reference, this was the paragraph (the business in question is an apartment complex I was renting at): >Their "Courtesy Patrol" service is useless. I tried this service every night for a week but it made no difference; the noise still continued on that night and the following nights. Also, the people at the service told me that it takes them an hour to send someone over after you call them. So if you ever have a reason to call this service, you better be prepared that your problem won't get solved for at least an hour after you call.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    How long was the review? It might just be that reducing the length/number of clauses helped. Honestly, if I was naively writing a restaurant review filter, length would be in there; if you look at TripAdvisor or similar, as reviews get longer the probability of the reviewer being a weird crank approaches one.
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      The length may have been a factor, but it definitely wasn't the only factor. When I eventually narrowed it down to those two paragraphs being the only difference, the attempt with the first paragraph in its original form and the attempt with that paragraph sanitized of profanity were basically the same length.
ghufran_syed 4y ago
“puritanical Christian policies” Based on the people I know who work at Google mountain view, and more general descriptions of the google workforce, “christians” are rare (or in hiding), I don’t think you can really blame them for those policies :) But I agree with your overall point
- numpad0 4y ago
  I understand the word choice, it is rampant throughout the Web, and also coincidentally I cannot think of a better description. Maybe the corporate culture embeds it, or the behavior is used as a performance indicator.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Yeah obvious example is nudity rules which are enforced just fine by completely secular people even though they’re likely derivative of puritanical Christian culture in the US
- JackFr 4y ago
  Reviews can be measured on a number of relevant dimensions - positive/negative, useful/not useful, fair/unfair, etc. Vocabulary, grammar, spelling, typos are all information channels. Honestly I can’t believe I’m defending Google, but it’s possible that they’ve determined certain language makes the review less useful. Evidence of that might be the other portion of the review which seemed to trigger the shadow ban without any profanity.
tomohawk 4y ago
What does Christianity have to do with Google? Keep your prejudices to yourself.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  I don't have anything against Christians. Maybe you should read the word before that.
- ajvs 4y ago
  I find the most baffling part of it that Google is so anti-Christian as well.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
Wouldn't that warrant some form of anti-trust case?
RickJWagner 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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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
There's a difference between "Sorry, your review violates our guidelines point XYZ because of the sentence ABC and cannot be posted. Please edit it and try again." and "Your review was successfully posted. (haha not really loser, but imma set up a comically elaborate charade to make you think it was.)" Both of them keep the profanity out of your eyes, but only one of them makes you likely to get the honest review in the first place because it doesn't treat the reviewer like an outcast.
- quietbritishjim 4y ago
  I'm not saying I agree with the parent commenter. But their point was not that they didn't want to see profanity, it was that they don't want to see anything at all from the type of people that use profanity. If that's you're position then shadow banning works well, whereas getting them to post reviews with profanity taken out does not.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    And I'm saying that the profanity was not the only problem that caused the review to be shadow-filtered. Regardless of whether the system filters profanity or not, the fact that it filters them while pretending otherwise is the problem. If one supports the system that shadow-filters profanity, they're also supporting the system that shadow-filters "some other unidentified thing that seems perfectly fine", and thus leads to them not seeing reviews that contained useful information. You think I can't write a review without profanity? Of course I can. I can be extremely polite while pointing out the issues I had with the business. That's exactly what I did when I realized this was happening. I just didn't know I was going to be held to that standard when I posted the review, and the system lied to me that what I wrote was acceptable so I had no reason to believe otherwise. If you were relying on not reading reviews like mine because my use of profanity implied I was a jerk, well I'm sorry but your heuristic isn't going to work any more because I know now. It wasn't even hard for me to figure out, so I'm sure most of the jerks have figured it out too. So sorry if you were relying on that, but you probably can't any more.

rmbyrro 4y ago

> The other was very innocuous so I have no idea why Google disliked it. Beware of Google employees' agenda on language [1]. Something like "the restaurant service was insanely fast" can trigger a shadow banning. [1] https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

UncleMeat 4y ago
These are two disconnected things. Google has a style guide for documentation that suggests that people do not include certain kinds of words. This does not imply that users posting content with these words will trigger policy violations.
Arnavion 4y ago
For reference, this was the paragraph (the business in question is an apartment complex I was renting at): >Their "Courtesy Patrol" service is useless. I tried this service every night for a week but it made no difference; the noise still continued on that night and the following nights. Also, the people at the service told me that it takes them an hour to send someone over after you call them. So if you ever have a reason to call this service, you better be prepared that your problem won't get solved for at least an hour after you call.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  How long was the review? It might just be that reducing the length/number of clauses helped. Honestly, if I was naively writing a restaurant review filter, length would be in there; if you look at TripAdvisor or similar, as reviews get longer the probability of the reviewer being a weird crank approaches one.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    The length may have been a factor, but it definitely wasn't the only factor. When I eventually narrowed it down to those two paragraphs being the only difference, the attempt with the first paragraph in its original form and the attempt with that paragraph sanitized of profanity were basically the same length.

ghufran_syed 4y ago

“puritanical Christian policies” Based on the people I know who work at Google mountain view, and more general descriptions of the google workforce, “christians” are rare (or in hiding), I don’t think you can really blame them for those policies :) But I agree with your overall point

numpad0 4y ago
I understand the word choice, it is rampant throughout the Web, and also coincidentally I cannot think of a better description. Maybe the corporate culture embeds it, or the behavior is used as a performance indicator.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Yeah obvious example is nudity rules which are enforced just fine by completely secular people even though they’re likely derivative of puritanical Christian culture in the US
JackFr 4y ago
Reviews can be measured on a number of relevant dimensions - positive/negative, useful/not useful, fair/unfair, etc. Vocabulary, grammar, spelling, typos are all information channels. Honestly I can’t believe I’m defending Google, but it’s possible that they’ve determined certain language makes the review less useful. Evidence of that might be the other portion of the review which seemed to trigger the shadow ban without any profanity.

tomohawk 4y ago

What does Christianity have to do with Google? Keep your prejudices to yourself.

Arnavion 4y ago
I don't have anything against Christians. Maybe you should read the word before that.
ajvs 4y ago
I find the most baffling part of it that Google is so anti-Christian as well.

dzhiurgis 4y ago

Wouldn't that warrant some form of anti-trust case?

RickJWagner 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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