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"A bakery that keeps track of its Yelp reputation and works hard to maintain a 5-star rating will attract customers.." Never used Yelp, but do you really need

by gizzlon 15y ago

"A bakery that keeps track of its Yelp reputation and works hard to maintain a 5-star rating will attract customers.." Never used Yelp, but do you really need a developer to do that? Would think the easiest way to get a good rating would be to hire some people to write good reviews for you and trash the competition. (OT, but I bet sites like that will get less and less useful as more companies start gaming them)

arctangent 15y ago
Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived repuation boost. However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will be found out and your repution ruined. Competitors will likely sue. It's probably cheaper and easier to hire a developer who can write tools to monitor reviews posted online, manage a website, run your facebook group/app, write an app to make it easy for customers to order bread from their mobiles, and so on. All of those things are legitimate activities and add genuine value to your business. They are also things that are impossible to achieve if you don't have technical knowledge.
- gnosis 15y ago
  > > Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the > > competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived > > repuation boost. > > However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will > be found out and your repution ruined. Short of your reviewers deliberately snitching on you, how exactly is anyone ever going to find out? I'd really, sincerely like to know -- as I can't tell which strongly positive or negative reviews on various sites like Amazon, IMDB, etc, are written by hired reviewers and which are real. Of course, I have my suspicions.. but no real proof. And I don't see any way to ever get real proof -- unless the reviewer confesses. So.. what's the secret?
  - arctangent 15y ago
    First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence. Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors. Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analysing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time.
    - gnosis 15y ago
      "First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence." Why would they go public? They're presumably making (what they consider to be) good money writing fake reviews. By going public they'd be 1 - losing their revenue from you, 2 - undermining the public's confidence in reviews, which would translate in to a less lucrative business for the provider of fake reviews. As for blackmail, I'm sure it happens from time to time. But I don't know how to estimate the frequency with which fake reviewers blackmail their clients. What is your basis for estimating the probability of such blackmail as "very likely"? Furthermore, blackmail is an obvious risk for any secret/illegal undertaking, and yet people attempt try to do things in secret and break the law all the time. Clearly, for them the risk seems worth it (at the time). "Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors." So, the fake positive reviews might be staggered over a reasonable period of time. But even the business receives many positive reviews in a short period of time, that's not proof the reviews were fake. "Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analyzing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time." Are there any such services which claim to be able to detect fake reviews? Or is this mere speculation on your part? Regardless, just because some service or algorithm claims a review is fake doesn't mean it is. Once again, their guess/estimate is not proof.
  - ranit8 15y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909196 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909196

by gizzlon 15y ago

arctangent 15y ago

Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived repuation boost. However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will be found out and your repution ruined. Competitors will likely sue. It's probably cheaper and easier to hire a developer who can write tools to monitor reviews posted online, manage a website, run your facebook group/app, write an app to make it easy for customers to order bread from their mobiles, and so on. All of those things are legitimate activities and add genuine value to your business. They are also things that are impossible to achieve if you don't have technical knowledge.

gnosis 15y ago
> > Hiring people to "write good reviews for you and trash the > > competition" is a quick way to establish a very short-lived > > repuation boost. > > However, it's inevitable (or at least hugely likely) that you will > be found out and your repution ruined. Short of your reviewers deliberately snitching on you, how exactly is anyone ever going to find out? I'd really, sincerely like to know -- as I can't tell which strongly positive or negative reviews on various sites like Amazon, IMDB, etc, are written by hired reviewers and which are real. Of course, I have my suspicions.. but no real proof. And I don't see any way to ever get real proof -- unless the reviewer confesses. So.. what's the secret?
- arctangent 15y ago
  First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence. Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors. Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analysing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    "First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence." Why would they go public? They're presumably making (what they consider to be) good money writing fake reviews. By going public they'd be 1 - losing their revenue from you, 2 - undermining the public's confidence in reviews, which would translate in to a less lucrative business for the provider of fake reviews. As for blackmail, I'm sure it happens from time to time. But I don't know how to estimate the frequency with which fake reviewers blackmail their clients. What is your basis for estimating the probability of such blackmail as "very likely"? Furthermore, blackmail is an obvious risk for any secret/illegal undertaking, and yet people attempt try to do things in secret and break the law all the time. Clearly, for them the risk seems worth it (at the time). "Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors." So, the fake positive reviews might be staggered over a reasonable period of time. But even the business receives many positive reviews in a short period of time, that's not proof the reviews were fake. "Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analyzing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time." Are there any such services which claim to be able to detect fake reviews? Or is this mere speculation on your part? Regardless, just because some service or algorithm claims a review is fake doesn't mean it is. Once again, their guess/estimate is not proof.
- ranit8 15y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909196 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909196