4 ms·
Why former English majors shouldn’t write Yelp reviews
- wisty 15y agoThe problem is, a single review is more or less worthless. Unless you give a variety of reviews (1 through to 5 stars), you are a pretty useless signal. There's no way they can see if you are a discerning critic who only gives 5 stars if it's the best meal you've had in years, or a Homer Simpson type who'd give 5 stars to Burger King the time they accidentally upsized your fries. Or that the restaurant in question requested people review it if they loved the experience. The disadvantage to this approach is that only the pretentious wankers who review every meal they have get any real pull. Funky places that cater to people with strange tases will lose out, because OMG the garlic was almost RARE!
- raganwald 15y agoYelp are not in the review business. People who read and write reviews are not their customers. Yelp are in the "Convincing businesses to pay Yelp to game reviews" business. Businesses are their customrs. Under the circumstances, a "false negative" like this is irrelevant to Yelp's business. In fact, false negatives are good for Yelp: They have an incentive to present mixed reviews to businesses who can then pay to filter the negatives out.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoOptimization-by-proxy rears its ugly head once again.