23 ms·

A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

402 points by hardtke 15y ago

ericd 15y ago
Interesting view from the restauranteur. I don't think Yelp would be wise to use his advice directly, though. Allowing businesses to opt out of Yelp would be a terrible idea, because Yelp is much more useful when it has everything. Also, there is doubtless a substantial amount of attempted gaming with the reviews, so attempting to catch this and filtering it out is very important if Yelp is to maintain a reputation of being a trustworthy source of reviews. They should try to reduce false positives, but saying they shouldn't filter anything is silly. The implications of only being able to help the restauranteur with his bad reviews for money are really terrible, though. I wonder if they still do this after all the bad press surrounding that a while back.
- Duff 15y ago
  Trip Advisor seems to successfully do what Yelp does, minus the extortion and general suckage.
- gergles 15y ago
  I think he meant "opt out of having reviews filtered", not "opt out of being listed on Yelp". I think that would be a more valuable thing.
  - ericd 15y ago
    Perhaps. But the filtering isn't just to protect the restaurants from fake bad reviews, but also to protect the viewers from fake good ones by the restaurant.
unoti 15y ago
Yelp has really let me down. I'm new to San Francisco, and initially used Yelp to help me figure out where to eat and hang out. Over time I learned that some of its 4.5 star places are dirty Taquerias that really suck, and some of my favorite places to be are poorly rated. (Note: I've got nothing against dirty taquerias, but the food better be good if it's a dirty run down taqueria with 5 stars.) I'm not sure what services are better than Yelp. I've heard people say in casual conversation that Yelp is "over" and all the people in the know have gone elsewhere. What services should I be using to know where the best places to eat are in San Francisco and Marin? Sol Food in Marin county, for example, is just worshiped on Yelp with 5 star reviews. But I go there, I wait in line for 30 minutes, get crammed in on a bench with 5 strangers, and get served a steak sandwich that's too tough to chew. What's up with that? I feel like I'm better off using Google Maps and just guessing than looking to Yelp for advice. Anyway, are there better services than Yelp to help me figure out what's actually worth going to?
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  Problem is if it gets five star reviews then suddenly more people will go there before they have time to adapt , hence the queuing. Could also explain the lower food quality too since they may either have overworked staff who will make more mistakes or they have had to hire new staff quickly who they did not have time to select or train properly.
  - pkulak 15y ago
    Exactly. You really are better off just trying out random places until you find the good places yourself. It's a fun process, at least! Then, when you find a great place, give it a 1-star review to keep the hoards away. ;) (Just kidding, of course.)
    - freehunter 15y ago
      A problem with that (a problem Yelp was meant to solve) is that I don't have the time or money to spend going place to place hoping they have good food, especially when I am visiting a town for a short period. If I'm on vacation, I likely have a set and limited food budget. Vacations are spoiled by bad restaurant experiences. I think this is the opposite reason why there are no high-profile craft beer review sites (yes, small sites exist but they're not going public anytime soon). Beer is a luxury, and there's not much in the way of truly disappointing beer to the point where I've ruined 1/3 of my taste experience for the day by consuming it. If you're going to a brewery to try a beer and don't like it, you can get up and walk out a few bucks lighter and travel to another taphouse. You can't easily do that with a meal.
    - dagw 15y ago
      That might work for your home town, but if I'm only around for 2 days chances are I'm going to have two very disappointing meals. Also paying a lot of money for shit food is not my idea of fun, and mainly just leaves me bitter and angry at the world. Doubly so now that I have a kid and going out to eat is a twice a year occurrence (if I'm lucky).
      - 15y ago
syeren 15y ago
I'm really looking forward to the day that this 'business practice' of Yelp's comes to a broader audience. While I agree that you can say this is a business model, I can't agree that it is morally correct in anyway, even in a world of capitalism.
dminor 15y ago
I think his worry for the investors is misplaced - the BBB has been running a similar racket for years and seems to be doing just fine.
- ebbv 15y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. And the BBB has been doing this so well for so long that lots of (stupid) people think that it's an actual government agency with power to get businesses in trouble.
  - learc83 15y ago
    Back when I used to work retail, we constantly had customers who thought that the BBB was a government agency that would force us to do what they wanted.
jambo 15y ago
One of the problems with Yelp in my city is the "Yelp elite". To bootstrap in my city, Yelp hired a community manager (part of their job is also writing reviews), and enlisted a bunch of people to become "Yelp Elite", earning access to parties in exchange for posting (it seems) daily reviews. The result has been a high quantity of lengthy, some-times entertaining, low-information reviews posted by people whose advice I wouldn't likely take if I met them in person. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_business/t/yelps-elite-epicurean-force-totally-free-labor/#.T1fFD5H5wng http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_busin...
- dlikhten 15y ago
  funny thing is that complaining about it is doing nothing. People use it, and don't care for how schemy it is.
jpdoctor 15y ago
Consumer Reports was way ahead of their time. Any site that accepts advertising is automatically tainted. (CR never takes advertising.) Yelp wants its reviews to be believed and for establishments to pay for advertising. Maybe they're good at balancing the two, but when it comes time to close the quarterly report, you know which one is going to win out.
- ericb 15y ago
  This is very interesting. Perhaps this is Yelp's Achilles heal. A non-advertising based review site could be far more credible. Maybe some sort of freemium model could take them down by virtue of being more credible...
  - twoodfin 15y ago
    Isn't that what you'd call Zagat's? (Bought by Google a while back, somewhat surprisingly.)
damncabbage 15y ago
Yelp really is the cool-startup version of the Better Business Bureau.
tatsuke95 15y ago
I've never used Yelp, beyond stumbling on the site when looking for restaurant reviews through Google. But as a follower of technology news, I have read much about it and its controversies. Add this one to the pile. It definitely calls into question their slogan, "Real People. Real Reviews." But even if the controversies are unfounded...$1.5BB blows my &!%#ing mind. My personal perception is that I'm not even sure I trust the reviews.
localhost3000 15y ago
I have a product in the local restaurant space. As a result I talk to lots of restaurant people - staff, primarily. It is overwhelming the vitriol I hear from them toward Yelp. Many people downright despise it.
arscan 15y ago
The lack of transparency isn't surprising to me, as that's basically industry practice when it comes to the "special sauce" algorithms that power these recommendation engines (google, tripadvisor, whoever). But the extortion part does surprise (horrify?) me. I'd love to see some more concrete proof that advertising on yelp results in a friendlier filter function for that business. I assume that there is enough publicly available information (just by scraping their site) to establish some kind of correlation between advertising and filter-friendliness, if one exists. Any of you up for the challenge? I'd settle for seeing those communications w/the sales team referenced in the article, though.
- jaylevitt 15y ago
  You don't actually need to make the filter friendlier to advertising. Rankings change every time they re-run the algorithm. You hint that things will be better if I advertise; 50% of the time, that's true. http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html
- aamar 15y ago
  If that correlation existed, it wouldn't still indicate causation, i.e. that advertising causes the filter bias to change. Maybe the companies who eschew planting fake reviews are also the ones who are willing to pay for advertising. Yelp has repeatedly, strenuously denied the extortion claims, yet the accusations continue to come. I think a phone recording by one of these accusers would be an excellent smoking gun. Or if someone here calls on behalf of a restaurant or other business (that they have a stake in and has filtered reviews), they could report back to us on what happened. In the meantime, I'm inclined to apply the "innocent until proven guilty" principle in favor of Yelp.
  - arscan 15y ago
    Very true! Thanks for gently pointing out that hole in my logic. The leap from correlation to causation is a very big one. Anyhow, like you, until I see something other than restaurateurs complaining, I'll give Yelp the benefit of the doubt here.
18pfsmt 15y ago
I lived in roughly the same place for the last 20 years, so yelp is very interesting to me. I often notice poor ratings where I believe high ratings are deserved, but also low ratings where high ratings are deserved.
danso 15y ago
I've been a Yelp user for years, and I was even an "Elite User" for awhile...and I had never heard of "filtered reviews" until now. In fact, if you go to the page of the OP's business, once you actually find the "Filtered Reviews" link (which is in very light gray), clicking on it brings a CAPTCHA... http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco What the hell?? Even as a user determined to see what the fuss is about, I don't even jump through this hoop. So I'm guessing nobody actually clicks through to the filtered reviews, whatever they actually are. I love that Yelp helps me find interesting places in a dense area like NYC, but their business model is appalling.
- NameNickHN 15y ago
  > Even as a user determined to see what the fuss > is about, I don't even jump through this hoop. I just did and I'm astounded that this filter even exists. From what I saw I got the feeling that the filter mechanism is broken.
mLewisLogic 15y ago
So... I might be a bit biased (co-founder at Fondu http://fondu.com http://fondu.com), but this really is a major problem. Most restaurant owners we've talked to are afraid of Yelp and the power that it wields. From an investor standpoint it does a great job monetizing it's community. The problem is that Yelp essentially weights the scales, depending upon who is paying them ad money. Whereas Google did a great job by separating church and state (search and ads), Yelp happily blends the two together. The end result is a little bit of fact and a little bit of fiction. YMMV, but we think discovering through trusted friends rather than group averages is how the future looks.
parfe 15y ago
A single helpful Yelp review lays out what happened with this establishment: It ain't what is used to be. They've moved from North Beach to a new location closer to Fisherman Wharf. They probably get alot of tourists. The food is okay...but not as delicious as it was when the other "Italian" owners had it. Where are the Italian waiters who brought so much harm and courtesy to their customers. Instead of acknowledging these changes as the source of discontent, he blames customers and the review site for pointing issues out. Instead of penning op-eds he should be training his staff, buying higher quality ingredients, and listening to customer complaints. Owners who hate Yelp ignore the near real time feedback they would never get in person. Complaints posted Fri - Sun more often than Mon - Thur: maybe it you need to look at who works what shifts? Calamari rubbery: Did someone properly train the line cooks? Food called bland, mediocre, bad, or unremarkable: Maybe you should go back to the higher quality ingredients you decided to skimp on to "make more money"? Yelp looks to be a great way to avoid the death spiral restaurants commonly find themselves in. Not making enough money? Buy lower quality ingredients. Still not making enough money? Raise prices. Repeat until you lose all regular business and rely on unsuspecting first timers who begrudgingly pay and never return. Eventually close it down.
- ericb 15y ago
  Really? Is it possible that an analogous review exists on a competitor who advertises with Yelp, but on that page the "review" is filtered? It is entirely possible that the food is exactly the same, but this person's perception is entirely colored by the ethnicity of the staff.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    That could be the case. Customers are unpredictable and you will have to work very hard to please them all. But if all your reviews are negative, it's possible you are doing something wrong. Restaurants are one of those professions where you have to be good at more than one thing; you have to design great menus, you have to buy good food, and you have to hire and manage good staff. As a chef, you may consider your ability to make a great menu the only thing that matters. Unfortunately, your customers disagree, thus causing the restaurant to fail. Sorry, that's life. (Same goes for great doctors that hire incompetent staff. I've had to stop going to a doctor I liked for that reason.)
sedev 15y ago
I wish the article headline had said that the piece was by a restauranteur. Most of what they have to say about Yelp falls under the heading of "more of the same." I think that restaurant and venue owners are wrong to hate Yelp - but it's understandable that they do. The reasons that they do are interesting. My take on it is that Yelp is disruptive to a lot of the traditional restaurant practices. Restaurant owners resent Yelp because it feels like they're adding more work to what is already a job that requires 80-hour weeks. Previously, restaurant owners had more message control about their venue's location, because social information like "is the Foo Pizzeria any good?" had more friction, it spread more slowly, and it degraded over time. A Yelp review has low friction because it gets automatically ingested into Yelp's data set, it spreads quickly, and it doesn't degrade over time - it stays around on the site. If you're a business with a small number of reviews, it doesn't take many one-stars to make you look unappealing, and Yelp's attempts to be user-friendly mean that you're presented among a crowd of your competitors unless you earn a clickthrough. Like being on a crowded shelf at the supermarket, you're at the mercy of the visitor. One interpretation of this would be to say that restauranteurs' reaction is "Hey! Shouldn't my success be tied to what I do, not to what a stranger on the Internet inflicts on me?" That's a reasonable objection - and that's why Yelp has invested a shit-ton of engineer-hours into filtering reviews. Filtering reviews is something that benefits both restauranteurs and users - it's just that the former tend to be ungrateful pricks about it because "filtering" includes "removing algorithmically detectable friends-and-family five-star reviews." Which leads to the other big interpretation - that restauranteurs are reacting badly to their customers' newfound ability to hold them accountable. We humans are dumb monkeys with a truckload of cognitive biases: we hate being held accountable. I look at articles like this one and I see big parallels to other whiny people who suddenly are brought into accountability and are resisting it. The thing is that the restauranteurs, like the MPAA or the newspaper industry, cannot win this one in the long term (at least not on the terms that they now use to define "winning"). There's no way to keep people from talking about your business. There's no way to keep people from talking about the things they enjoy. There's no way to keep people from taking the easy way - "I feel like pizza, I'll look it up on Yelp" - instead of a harder way - "I feel like pizza, let's see which of my friends knows where the pizzerias are around here, which of them are available, what their phone numbers and/or locations are, or I know, I could go get the huge inconvenient yellow pages and make a choice based on how much they spent on advertising!" Computing devices will get more convenient to use, not less, knowledge will get easier to share, not less, and the cost of querying the Internet's collective opinion will be cheaper, not more expensive. The restaurant and venue owners are never, ever going to win this the way they want to - again like the MPAA and newspapers, the cat is entirely out of the bag. Basically what I think they should do about it is * Stop whining * Read Seth Godin * Compete instead of sue As an aside, I've found Yelp very useful over time with the addition of a few mental filters. * Judge places by the review histogram, not by individual reviews * Trust the collective opinion far more than individual reviews, especially for places with 100+ reviews * Assume that anything at 3.5 stars or above is Good Enough, and use other sources when you want to have rarefied tastes catered to (Yelp started out as being mostly for foodies - I think it's moved out of that, and that if you are or desire to become a serious foodie, you should release yourself from caring about Yelp)
lhnn 15y ago
Yelp apparently does what the BBB does: Extort people by offering "brand cleanup" in exchange for advertising dollars. A disgusting business practice, and I'm sure to pass this along to my "social network".
gphil 15y ago
This is not the first time this has come up on HN: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yelp+extortion&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yel...
jrockway 15y ago
I disagree with all of his points. You shouldn't be able to opt out; if I want to post a review of your business on the Internet, that's my decision to make, not yours. (What's next, politicians opting out of news coverage? Yeah right.) Review filtering is similar; Yelp is allowed to express editorial oversight over their website. Specifically, they try to reduce fraud. Your credit card company doesn't discuss their fraud detection algorithms, so why should Yelp? All I see here is, "I like my own restaurant, but other people don't. Shut down the review site so nobody can tell anyone else!"
- Steko 15y ago
  So you're cool with the "we're going to filter primarily good reviews" and "advertise with us at just about the worst rates in the free world and we'll clean up the bad reviews?" extortion angle?
  - jrockway 15y ago
    Convince me it's extortion and I might agree with you, but I've read many filtered and unfiltered reviews and it seems that Yelp does a fine job filtering. The filtered reviews sound like morons or shills; the unfiltered reviews sound like customers sharing an experience. Paying Yelp to advertise doesn't seem to be a factor. I'm just not feeling the hate. My main problem with Yelp is that the star ratings are useless because everyone else's standards are different from mine. I don't care if something is expensive; I'm happy to pay money for good food and good service. But for other people, that's an automatic negative eight billion star rating. So Yelp becomes essentially useless unless I read every review. (I understand Zagat has controls for this, but I've never actually used it.) And now for the statement that's going to get me in trouble: whenever I see an ad like a Yelp ad or an Adsense ad, it implies a certain amount of shadiness to me. The businesses that are good don't need to buy ads, leaving most ads to be from businesses with some problem.
    - deleted 15y ago
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jeremymims 15y ago
This issue comes up quite a bit. Since OwnLocal works with a number of small businesses, we've heard many so-called "horror" stories. What it boils down to is Yelp filters positive reviews for effusiveness (and ALL CAPS), personal connections with the business owner or employees, rapid review acceleration from first-time Yelp users, or users from the same IP address. What this article doesn't mention is that many small business owners understand how important Yelp is and actively try to game the system in blatant and unsophisticated ways. Their friends write five star reviews about how wonderful the owner is and how they always have their anniversary dinner there. They create multiple fake accounts and complain loudly that their positive reviews have been filtered. We've also noticed a certain tone businesses and their friends use. They don't typically describe a particular experience, they describe a business in generalities and will often refer back to what other reviewers are saying. They also appear to take what other people think very personally. The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends. A common looking filtered review (notice effusiveness, caps wording, and referencing other reviews): "This is a NICE restaurant - one that you go to when you want a quiet meal away from the kids - it's definitely not family-oriented, but then again, not every restaurant needs to be. If you're used to Olive Garden as your Italian "go-to place", then you will probably be disappointed in Fior d'Italia. If you want REAL Italian food, then ignore the naysayers and come here." Yelp itself has rough stats for the breakdown of reviews: 5 stars: 38% 4 stars: 29% 3 stars: 14% 2 stars: 8% 1 star: 11% Yelp's little secret is actually that the star ratings don't provide very much granularity for the casual review reader to make a decision and that most restaurants average out to ~3.75 or in Yelp parlance ~3.5 - 4 stars.
- dbcfd 15y ago
  > The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends. Or they actually really like the business? It's not staffed by 30 different no names, and you never get the same server? The owner will actually be present and greet customers? That's not gaming the system, that's providing great service in a fast food lifestyle.
sheraz 15y ago
Mr. Larive is spot on in his opinion, and I think he offers good solutions to the dilemmas of business response and participation. Yelp is representative of a fundamental problem with so many review sites, and our society at large -- namely that it attempts to coalesce many dimensions of data (a person) into a single score. And, just like FICO, and the SAT/LSAT/etc, Yelp and its predecessors (BBB) attempt to do the same for businesses. Worse still, they rely on the "Wisdom of Crowds" when it comes to qualitative measure and taste. An average 2.5 stars tells me nothing, especially because I'm an elitist prick and think the average Yelp commenter is an idiot. I fear that people substitute a Yelp rating for their own critical-thinking, and that is wrong. It is just as wrong that schools judge students largely based on a single test score. It is wrong that lending happens based on a opaque algorithm. I fear that Yelp is just another symptom that our society is sick. Our brains have atrophied to the point where we only look for one number that determines the succes or failure of our education, our lives and our livelihood. Or is that a touch melodramatic?
danbmil99 15y ago
Funny story. I recently was going to order out from a Chinese restaurant that I had recently ordered from before and recall enjoying. I had to google the number, and in so doing came up with a couple terrible Yelp reviews. For some reason I decided to listen to the toobz instead of relying on my own judgement. Ended up ordering horrible greasy food from a better-rated, well-known jaunt. TL; DR: I let Yelp override my own experience, what's up with that?
crikli 15y ago
Nobody gives a crap that the restaurant has been there 125 years, but that's what the owner leads with in defense of his enterprise. Looking at the reviews for Fior d' Italia, it looks like service leaves quite a bit to be desired and the food isn't that good. Maybe Yelp is polluted and biased...or maybe Fior d' Italia just sucks. Occam's razor says it's the latter. My wife and I travel all over the country on business, often finding ourselves in cities where we've never been. Yelp finds us a great place to eat every single time.
cft 15y ago
I find that the star rating of places/reviews in Google maps in Android is more reliable. Presumably, it does not suffer from the extortion bias either.
peterwwillis 15y ago
When I want to find a good place to eat, first I 1. ask somebody where a good place is and what they liked that they ate 2. figure out what kind of food i want and look for the best rated places near me 3. compare the menu with what i know about the cuisine, pictures of the place and any details i can scrounge up 4. then I just go and try to pick something I think i'll like. Food isn't rocket science. Good places are open for a while and have lots of people and you avoid chains and franchises. Don't complain about the service, nobody cares. Don't complain about the prices, nobody cares. Don't complain about the clientele or the ambiance, nobody cares. It's about the food, stupid.
matan_a 15y ago
This is my rule for Yelp: 1. Listen to bad reviews. 2. Ignore good reviews.
jadc 15y ago
Even though the article mentioned restaurants specifically, I believe the point about Yelp being fundamentally flawed extends much beyond food. I have heard similar reports from doctors saying that Yelp is filtering out their 5 star reviews unless they advertise with them.
msg 15y ago
I found this response elsewhere in the thread so interesting that I had to say something. PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching on :( If you're trying to keep a taqueria to yourself, do you have incentive to leave a bad review? After all, your interests are not aligned with the rest of Yelp's customers. Or even, necessarily aligned with the taqueria's success. Maybe it's to your codependent advantage that they always stay small and delicious and hidden and yours... preciouss. This is the problem Yelp hasn't solved yet: how to align the interests of Yelp, Yelp reviewers, Yelp readers, and restaurants. Yelp succeeds if reviewers leave bad reviews because they are upselling bad review protection (they say they aren't several times in the FAQ, but they protesteth too much for me), or if restaurants buy ads. Yelp readers succeed if reviewers are honest and they can use reviews to optimize their personal quality/dollar equation. Restaurants succeed if Yelp drives Yelp readers to them, if reviewers leave good reviews. Reviewers have many incentives to game reviews. One of the Yelp FAQs is about payola. If they review enough they gain community prominence through badges/titles. If they review too much, their reviews look suspicious (because they could be making them up instead of actually attending). If they become untrustworthy due to a secret Yelp algorithm, their reviews are obscured from prominent view. If they have a bad experience at a place everyone thinks is great, they run a risk writing a contrarian review and being labeled untrustworthy. And on and on.
cletus 15y ago
Yelp is fundamentally flawed. Firstly, they have a clear conflict of interest, which has been discussed many times, when it comes to selling advertising. Buying advertising (anecdotally) seems to make bad reviews magically disappear. Secondly, and this has always been the problem with "local", is you need a certain critical mass for it to be usable. You can argue that Yelp has reached this point in many cases (although see the next two points) but there are many businesses with <5 reviews. Third, there is too much friction in asking people to review (and even rate things). Most people simply don't and probably never will. This exacerbates the "critical mass" problem but also introduces a selection bias. The people who comment and rate aren't necessarily representative of general opinions or you (the personalization problem). I've gone to eat at some places in NYC that are 3.5+ stars that have varied from average to terrible. In some cases I've gone with someone who shared this positive review but--and I realize the counterargument to this is that it's subjective--they're just wrong. Fourth, there is a clear fraud problem with reviews and ratings. People are clearly paid to give positive reviews (eg you see someone rate a given car dealership in the Bay area on one day and then another in Maine the next day and so on). Of any of the companies in "local", IMHO Google is in the best position to deal with this particular problem (disclaimer: I work for Google). Lastly, as such reviews become increasingly important, there is the issue of extortion. If this hasn't happened already it will. Criminals already target websites with DDoS attacks that go away if the site in question pays what amounts to "protection money". There's nothing really to stop such criminal enterprises shaking down businesses with the threat of a bad slew of reviews. It's worth making extra mention of personalization. Many (Google included) seem to view "social search" and "social recommendations" as some kind of panacea to some or even all of these problems. I disagree. I know a couple of people who, say, like Adam Sandler movies. I do not. Not even remotely. Their movie recommendations are so diametrically opposed to mine that I can pretty much take the opposite of what they recommend. The way forward with this will be something like the Netflix model (IMHO) where these great data mining systems will attempt to find people who are like me and have similar tastes whose recommendations will likely coincide with mine.
- ed209 15y ago
  Friction on posting a review is a huge problem. On the flip side, you ask any of your friends "where's a good place to eat tonight?" no doubt they'll have a few reviews in them and promptly let you know some places you should try. I think this industry needs more of a q&a (quora type) approach where I can ask the same question that I would ask my friends. That way I'm only recommending places (take that as a 4+ star review) and not criticising businesses. This benefits both customers by show places that have been recommended multiple times as an indicator of quality and business that don't suffer as a result of a bad night or rouge staff member. This approach makes it easier to actually find what you too because by virtue of the way that place is suggested ("where is a good spot for breakfast?") we already get a ton of meta data.
tmchow 15y ago
Shameless plug: We just launched Chewsy (http://chewsy.com http://chewsy.com) last year after years of frustration with these aggregate business review sites. We're focused on rating what you ate and sharing recommendations with friends. It's similar to other food apps on the market but different in significant ways. For example, it's not like a vertical instagram like some of those other popular food apps. We're very much in growth mode, but San Francisco is getting some good traction and our hometown of Seattle is thriving. I encourage you to try it out and perhaps it can help you find your next best meal (and help you recommend something to your friends).
zephyrnh 15y ago
I think this makes sense. Filtered reviews are reviews that yelp considers to be fraudulent. They may be reviews created by multiple accounts from the same computer to inflate a restaurant's rating. Or they may all be negative reviews created by one person with multiple accounts to try to hurt a business they weren't happy with. Either way, I think it's perfectly reasonable that such a system of filtering should and does exist. Now maybe their filtering system is so horrendous that it makes a 4-star restaurant seem like a 2.5 star restaurant, but I find this hard to believe. As for asking people to advertise with them to make "bad reviews disappear", that would be terrible, so I can't speak to that, since all we have to go on is this particular owner's word vs Yelp's. Is there any proof of this happening?
bumbledraven 15y ago
Filtering legitimate reviews is a big problem. Once I discovered that Yelp filtered most of my reviews, I stopped writing them. It's not even like I'm some anonymous coward (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course): I have had a photo of myself on Yelp for a long time, my account is linked to a few friends of mine on Yelp, and I even went to a Yelp event. I wonder how many other people like me stopped writing reviews for the same reason?
RayJR 15y ago
I cannot believe the coincidence! My father owns a small pizza business (small as in 1 store, 22 years) and yesterday a yelp power user got upset because I didn't give her free jalepenos. She knew we charge extra for things like ranch but still expected jalepenos for free. She got so mad she changed her review and said there was a "hair" in her pizza "months ago." She is obviously saying this to damage us because she was treated the same as all customers and expects special treatment. Extortion? That's how it felt but I don't care because our true customers know better and are great people. See the whole thing here: http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine. Sort by date, most recent review. This was yelps response when I reported this user: Hi there, Thank you for inquiring about the reviews of Ray's Pizza on Yelp. We've looked at Jayne L's review, and since it appears to reflect the personal experience and opinions of the reviewer, we are leaving it intact. Unfortunately, we don't take sides on factual disputes, and suggest instead that you contact the reviewer again to clarify any misunderstandings. We think it's important for businesses to be part of the conversation, and have created a suite of free tools to help business owners get the most out of Yelp. It looks like you've already unlocked your business page. As a reminder, you can: - Communicate with your customers via private message or public comment - Track how many people view your business page - Add photos and a detailed description of your business - Convert Yelp users into customers by posting a Yelp Deal to your listing You can login to your account here: https://biz.yelp.com/ https://biz.yelp.com/ Regards, Summer Yelp User Support San Francisco, California I am a yelp user and it was great but for businesses its getting out of hand when there is no transparency. What if people are paid to yelp a lot and then use their influence to sell reviews? It could happen.
- dbcfd 15y ago
  Good luck getting a power user (or god forbid, a community moderator) review removed. A number of them feel they deserve preferential treatment because of their Yelp status, and will go out of their way to bash you when that doesn't happen.
deleted 15y ago
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b0o 15y ago
Main flaws from his conclusion: 1. "Don't filter reviews. If the site is supposed to be "Yelper" driven and democratic, so be it. Post them all!" The reviews are for Fior D'italia ARE posted, a handful are removed (10 out of 218+115 filtered reviews). The other 300 reviews are still there, which should be more than sufficient for someone to decide if they want to eat at that place. Of the 115 filtered reviews, ~50 of them were 4-5 star reviews made by reviewers with less than 3 reviews, it seems logical to filter those out. 2. "Allow businesses to opt out". Yelp shouldn't let them. It's the internet. There is some truth in this, but yelp exists to filter out the good and bad restaurants. I can see some lawsuits coming out of this. 3. "Give businesses a chance to post comments or respond at the top of their Yelp page where the public can read it before going to the reviews". If yelp were to do that, then businesses could just stall the bad reviews and only keep the good ones, rendering the review system useless. 4. "Post the filtered reviews where they are easy to find and review. Many customers of ours have had their reviews of the Fior filtered out, and they are livid." Filtered reviews are at the bottom, and they are pretty easy to find. As I said, the filtered reviews, have reasoning to be filtered in the first place. 5. Continued from above: "They don't understand why this is done, nor do we". I understand why those reviews were filtered perfectly. Of the 115 reviews, ~50 were 5 or 4 star reviews made by reviewers with less than 3 reviews, I can see why they would be filtered because they're probably bots. Yelp's system is decent. If you only take the 23 Elite members' reviews, they give this place an average rating of ~3-stars, which is a bit better than the overall review. But the owner should really read his reviews, especially the 1-star reviews. If for some reason, the guy who wrote this article reads this: 1. Read your 1-star reviews, half of them are saying your food is too salty. The other half is saying your service sucks ass, either because your waiters take too long, bad vouchers(?), bad pricing and bad environment. Price, I get for a $$$ restaurant people should be prepared to fork ~$100 for the meal, but I guess the quality wasn't worth the price. If this guy wanted to take an objective opinion of a yelp review, why not take Ike's place's yelp review with 4,128 reviews. 2. Instead of complaining about it online, why don't you just ask your customers to write reviews. Provide them a link to your yelp review, ask them to review for 10% off or something, put computers with internet browsers with your yelp page as the home page. Make them scream how good or bad your place is. If I'm ever in the area, I might check this place out, if my wallet can handle it. But yeah, I've been seeing increasing reviews on how yelp is putting down positive reviews because they don't advertise with them.
dbcfd 15y ago
As a business owner, I have also seen the extortion for advertising model. Businesses that advertise with Yelp have low star reviews filtered, while businesses like mine that do not, have reviews from valid customers (often with friends and other reviews) filtered, to lower star ratings. I have also seen reviews that are blatantly fake (e.g. reviews from Santa Claus, comical reviews, etc.) persist, until a significant amount of time passes. This indicates manual removal, and no actual Yelp filter.
micheljansen 15y ago
I first read about Yelp's extortion practices in 2009 [1]. I thought that now they have grown so big, the extortion would have stopped. Apparently not :( [1] http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-e...

402 points by hardtke 15y ago

ericd 15y ago

Interesting view from the restauranteur. I don't think Yelp would be wise to use his advice directly, though. Allowing businesses to opt out of Yelp would be a terrible idea, because Yelp is much more useful when it has everything. Also, there is doubtless a substantial amount of attempted gaming with the reviews, so attempting to catch this and filtering it out is very important if Yelp is to maintain a reputation of being a trustworthy source of reviews. They should try to reduce false positives, but saying they shouldn't filter anything is silly. The implications of only being able to help the restauranteur with his bad reviews for money are really terrible, though. I wonder if they still do this after all the bad press surrounding that a while back.

Duff 15y ago
Trip Advisor seems to successfully do what Yelp does, minus the extortion and general suckage.
gergles 15y ago
I think he meant "opt out of having reviews filtered", not "opt out of being listed on Yelp". I think that would be a more valuable thing.
- ericd 15y ago
  Perhaps. But the filtering isn't just to protect the restaurants from fake bad reviews, but also to protect the viewers from fake good ones by the restaurant.

unoti 15y ago

Yelp has really let me down. I'm new to San Francisco, and initially used Yelp to help me figure out where to eat and hang out. Over time I learned that some of its 4.5 star places are dirty Taquerias that really suck, and some of my favorite places to be are poorly rated. (Note: I've got nothing against dirty taquerias, but the food better be good if it's a dirty run down taqueria with 5 stars.) I'm not sure what services are better than Yelp. I've heard people say in casual conversation that Yelp is "over" and all the people in the know have gone elsewhere. What services should I be using to know where the best places to eat are in San Francisco and Marin? Sol Food in Marin county, for example, is just worshiped on Yelp with 5 star reviews. But I go there, I wait in line for 30 minutes, get crammed in on a bench with 5 strangers, and get served a steak sandwich that's too tough to chew. What's up with that? I feel like I'm better off using Google Maps and just guessing than looking to Yelp for advice. Anyway, are there better services than Yelp to help me figure out what's actually worth going to?

jiggy2011 15y ago
Problem is if it gets five star reviews then suddenly more people will go there before they have time to adapt , hence the queuing. Could also explain the lower food quality too since they may either have overworked staff who will make more mistakes or they have had to hire new staff quickly who they did not have time to select or train properly.
- pkulak 15y ago
  Exactly. You really are better off just trying out random places until you find the good places yourself. It's a fun process, at least! Then, when you find a great place, give it a 1-star review to keep the hoards away. ;) (Just kidding, of course.)
  - freehunter 15y ago
    A problem with that (a problem Yelp was meant to solve) is that I don't have the time or money to spend going place to place hoping they have good food, especially when I am visiting a town for a short period. If I'm on vacation, I likely have a set and limited food budget. Vacations are spoiled by bad restaurant experiences. I think this is the opposite reason why there are no high-profile craft beer review sites (yes, small sites exist but they're not going public anytime soon). Beer is a luxury, and there's not much in the way of truly disappointing beer to the point where I've ruined 1/3 of my taste experience for the day by consuming it. If you're going to a brewery to try a beer and don't like it, you can get up and walk out a few bucks lighter and travel to another taphouse. You can't easily do that with a meal.
  - dagw 15y ago
    That might work for your home town, but if I'm only around for 2 days chances are I'm going to have two very disappointing meals. Also paying a lot of money for shit food is not my idea of fun, and mainly just leaves me bitter and angry at the world. Doubly so now that I have a kid and going out to eat is a twice a year occurrence (if I'm lucky).
    - 15y ago

syeren 15y ago

I'm really looking forward to the day that this 'business practice' of Yelp's comes to a broader audience. While I agree that you can say this is a business model, I can't agree that it is morally correct in anyway, even in a world of capitalism.

dminor 15y ago

I think his worry for the investors is misplaced - the BBB has been running a similar racket for years and seems to be doing just fine.

ebbv 15y ago
Exactly what I was thinking. And the BBB has been doing this so well for so long that lots of (stupid) people think that it's an actual government agency with power to get businesses in trouble.
- learc83 15y ago
  Back when I used to work retail, we constantly had customers who thought that the BBB was a government agency that would force us to do what they wanted.

jambo 15y ago

One of the problems with Yelp in my city is the "Yelp elite". To bootstrap in my city, Yelp hired a community manager (part of their job is also writing reviews), and enlisted a bunch of people to become "Yelp Elite", earning access to parties in exchange for posting (it seems) daily reviews. The result has been a high quantity of lengthy, some-times entertaining, low-information reviews posted by people whose advice I wouldn't likely take if I met them in person. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_business/t/yelps-elite-epicurean-force-totally-free-labor/#.T1fFD5H5wng http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_busin...

dlikhten 15y ago
funny thing is that complaining about it is doing nothing. People use it, and don't care for how schemy it is.

jpdoctor 15y ago

Consumer Reports was way ahead of their time. Any site that accepts advertising is automatically tainted. (CR never takes advertising.) Yelp wants its reviews to be believed and for establishments to pay for advertising. Maybe they're good at balancing the two, but when it comes time to close the quarterly report, you know which one is going to win out.

ericb 15y ago
This is very interesting. Perhaps this is Yelp's Achilles heal. A non-advertising based review site could be far more credible. Maybe some sort of freemium model could take them down by virtue of being more credible...
- twoodfin 15y ago
  Isn't that what you'd call Zagat's? (Bought by Google a while back, somewhat surprisingly.)

damncabbage 15y ago

Yelp really is the cool-startup version of the Better Business Bureau.

tatsuke95 15y ago

I've never used Yelp, beyond stumbling on the site when looking for restaurant reviews through Google. But as a follower of technology news, I have read much about it and its controversies. Add this one to the pile. It definitely calls into question their slogan, "Real People. Real Reviews." But even if the controversies are unfounded...$1.5BB blows my &!%#ing mind. My personal perception is that I'm not even sure I trust the reviews.

localhost3000 15y ago

I have a product in the local restaurant space. As a result I talk to lots of restaurant people - staff, primarily. It is overwhelming the vitriol I hear from them toward Yelp. Many people downright despise it.

arscan 15y ago

The lack of transparency isn't surprising to me, as that's basically industry practice when it comes to the "special sauce" algorithms that power these recommendation engines (google, tripadvisor, whoever). But the extortion part does surprise (horrify?) me. I'd love to see some more concrete proof that advertising on yelp results in a friendlier filter function for that business. I assume that there is enough publicly available information (just by scraping their site) to establish some kind of correlation between advertising and filter-friendliness, if one exists. Any of you up for the challenge? I'd settle for seeing those communications w/the sales team referenced in the article, though.

jaylevitt 15y ago
You don't actually need to make the filter friendlier to advertising. Rankings change every time they re-run the algorithm. You hint that things will be better if I advertise; 50% of the time, that's true. http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html
aamar 15y ago
If that correlation existed, it wouldn't still indicate causation, i.e. that advertising causes the filter bias to change. Maybe the companies who eschew planting fake reviews are also the ones who are willing to pay for advertising. Yelp has repeatedly, strenuously denied the extortion claims, yet the accusations continue to come. I think a phone recording by one of these accusers would be an excellent smoking gun. Or if someone here calls on behalf of a restaurant or other business (that they have a stake in and has filtered reviews), they could report back to us on what happened. In the meantime, I'm inclined to apply the "innocent until proven guilty" principle in favor of Yelp.
- arscan 15y ago
  Very true! Thanks for gently pointing out that hole in my logic. The leap from correlation to causation is a very big one. Anyhow, like you, until I see something other than restaurateurs complaining, I'll give Yelp the benefit of the doubt here.

18pfsmt 15y ago

I lived in roughly the same place for the last 20 years, so yelp is very interesting to me. I often notice poor ratings where I believe high ratings are deserved, but also low ratings where high ratings are deserved.

danso 15y ago

I've been a Yelp user for years, and I was even an "Elite User" for awhile...and I had never heard of "filtered reviews" until now. In fact, if you go to the page of the OP's business, once you actually find the "Filtered Reviews" link (which is in very light gray), clicking on it brings a CAPTCHA... http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco What the hell?? Even as a user determined to see what the fuss is about, I don't even jump through this hoop. So I'm guessing nobody actually clicks through to the filtered reviews, whatever they actually are. I love that Yelp helps me find interesting places in a dense area like NYC, but their business model is appalling.

NameNickHN 15y ago
> Even as a user determined to see what the fuss > is about, I don't even jump through this hoop. I just did and I'm astounded that this filter even exists. From what I saw I got the feeling that the filter mechanism is broken.

mLewisLogic 15y ago

So... I might be a bit biased (co-founder at Fondu http://fondu.com http://fondu.com), but this really is a major problem. Most restaurant owners we've talked to are afraid of Yelp and the power that it wields. From an investor standpoint it does a great job monetizing it's community. The problem is that Yelp essentially weights the scales, depending upon who is paying them ad money. Whereas Google did a great job by separating church and state (search and ads), Yelp happily blends the two together. The end result is a little bit of fact and a little bit of fiction. YMMV, but we think discovering through trusted friends rather than group averages is how the future looks.

parfe 15y ago

A single helpful Yelp review lays out what happened with this establishment: It ain't what is used to be. They've moved from North Beach to a new location closer to Fisherman Wharf. They probably get alot of tourists. The food is okay...but not as delicious as it was when the other "Italian" owners had it. Where are the Italian waiters who brought so much harm and courtesy to their customers. Instead of acknowledging these changes as the source of discontent, he blames customers and the review site for pointing issues out. Instead of penning op-eds he should be training his staff, buying higher quality ingredients, and listening to customer complaints. Owners who hate Yelp ignore the near real time feedback they would never get in person. Complaints posted Fri - Sun more often than Mon - Thur: maybe it you need to look at who works what shifts? Calamari rubbery: Did someone properly train the line cooks? Food called bland, mediocre, bad, or unremarkable: Maybe you should go back to the higher quality ingredients you decided to skimp on to "make more money"? Yelp looks to be a great way to avoid the death spiral restaurants commonly find themselves in. Not making enough money? Buy lower quality ingredients. Still not making enough money? Raise prices. Repeat until you lose all regular business and rely on unsuspecting first timers who begrudgingly pay and never return. Eventually close it down.

ericb 15y ago
Really? Is it possible that an analogous review exists on a competitor who advertises with Yelp, but on that page the "review" is filtered? It is entirely possible that the food is exactly the same, but this person's perception is entirely colored by the ethnicity of the staff.
- jrockway 15y ago
  That could be the case. Customers are unpredictable and you will have to work very hard to please them all. But if all your reviews are negative, it's possible you are doing something wrong. Restaurants are one of those professions where you have to be good at more than one thing; you have to design great menus, you have to buy good food, and you have to hire and manage good staff. As a chef, you may consider your ability to make a great menu the only thing that matters. Unfortunately, your customers disagree, thus causing the restaurant to fail. Sorry, that's life. (Same goes for great doctors that hire incompetent staff. I've had to stop going to a doctor I liked for that reason.)

sedev 15y ago

I wish the article headline had said that the piece was by a restauranteur. Most of what they have to say about Yelp falls under the heading of "more of the same." I think that restaurant and venue owners are wrong to hate Yelp - but it's understandable that they do. The reasons that they do are interesting. My take on it is that Yelp is disruptive to a lot of the traditional restaurant practices. Restaurant owners resent Yelp because it feels like they're adding more work to what is already a job that requires 80-hour weeks. Previously, restaurant owners had more message control about their venue's location, because social information like "is the Foo Pizzeria any good?" had more friction, it spread more slowly, and it degraded over time. A Yelp review has low friction because it gets automatically ingested into Yelp's data set, it spreads quickly, and it doesn't degrade over time - it stays around on the site. If you're a business with a small number of reviews, it doesn't take many one-stars to make you look unappealing, and Yelp's attempts to be user-friendly mean that you're presented among a crowd of your competitors unless you earn a clickthrough. Like being on a crowded shelf at the supermarket, you're at the mercy of the visitor. One interpretation of this would be to say that restauranteurs' reaction is "Hey! Shouldn't my success be tied to what I do, not to what a stranger on the Internet inflicts on me?" That's a reasonable objection - and that's why Yelp has invested a shit-ton of engineer-hours into filtering reviews. Filtering reviews is something that benefits both restauranteurs and users - it's just that the former tend to be ungrateful pricks about it because "filtering" includes "removing algorithmically detectable friends-and-family five-star reviews." Which leads to the other big interpretation - that restauranteurs are reacting badly to their customers' newfound ability to hold them accountable. We humans are dumb monkeys with a truckload of cognitive biases: we hate being held accountable. I look at articles like this one and I see big parallels to other whiny people who suddenly are brought into accountability and are resisting it. The thing is that the restauranteurs, like the MPAA or the newspaper industry, cannot win this one in the long term (at least not on the terms that they now use to define "winning"). There's no way to keep people from talking about your business. There's no way to keep people from talking about the things they enjoy. There's no way to keep people from taking the easy way - "I feel like pizza, I'll look it up on Yelp" - instead of a harder way - "I feel like pizza, let's see which of my friends knows where the pizzerias are around here, which of them are available, what their phone numbers and/or locations are, or I know, I could go get the huge inconvenient yellow pages and make a choice based on how much they spent on advertising!" Computing devices will get more convenient to use, not less, knowledge will get easier to share, not less, and the cost of querying the Internet's collective opinion will be cheaper, not more expensive. The restaurant and venue owners are never, ever going to win this the way they want to - again like the MPAA and newspapers, the cat is entirely out of the bag. Basically what I think they should do about it is * Stop whining * Read Seth Godin * Compete instead of sue As an aside, I've found Yelp very useful over time with the addition of a few mental filters. * Judge places by the review histogram, not by individual reviews * Trust the collective opinion far more than individual reviews, especially for places with 100+ reviews * Assume that anything at 3.5 stars or above is Good Enough, and use other sources when you want to have rarefied tastes catered to (Yelp started out as being mostly for foodies - I think it's moved out of that, and that if you are or desire to become a serious foodie, you should release yourself from caring about Yelp)

lhnn 15y ago

Yelp apparently does what the BBB does: Extort people by offering "brand cleanup" in exchange for advertising dollars. A disgusting business practice, and I'm sure to pass this along to my "social network".

gphil 15y ago

This is not the first time this has come up on HN: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yelp+extortion&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yel...

jrockway 15y ago

I disagree with all of his points. You shouldn't be able to opt out; if I want to post a review of your business on the Internet, that's my decision to make, not yours. (What's next, politicians opting out of news coverage? Yeah right.) Review filtering is similar; Yelp is allowed to express editorial oversight over their website. Specifically, they try to reduce fraud. Your credit card company doesn't discuss their fraud detection algorithms, so why should Yelp? All I see here is, "I like my own restaurant, but other people don't. Shut down the review site so nobody can tell anyone else!"

Steko 15y ago
So you're cool with the "we're going to filter primarily good reviews" and "advertise with us at just about the worst rates in the free world and we'll clean up the bad reviews?" extortion angle?
- jrockway 15y ago
  Convince me it's extortion and I might agree with you, but I've read many filtered and unfiltered reviews and it seems that Yelp does a fine job filtering. The filtered reviews sound like morons or shills; the unfiltered reviews sound like customers sharing an experience. Paying Yelp to advertise doesn't seem to be a factor. I'm just not feeling the hate. My main problem with Yelp is that the star ratings are useless because everyone else's standards are different from mine. I don't care if something is expensive; I'm happy to pay money for good food and good service. But for other people, that's an automatic negative eight billion star rating. So Yelp becomes essentially useless unless I read every review. (I understand Zagat has controls for this, but I've never actually used it.) And now for the statement that's going to get me in trouble: whenever I see an ad like a Yelp ad or an Adsense ad, it implies a certain amount of shadiness to me. The businesses that are good don't need to buy ads, leaving most ads to be from businesses with some problem.
  - deleted 15y ago
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jeremymims 15y ago

This issue comes up quite a bit. Since OwnLocal works with a number of small businesses, we've heard many so-called "horror" stories. What it boils down to is Yelp filters positive reviews for effusiveness (and ALL CAPS), personal connections with the business owner or employees, rapid review acceleration from first-time Yelp users, or users from the same IP address. What this article doesn't mention is that many small business owners understand how important Yelp is and actively try to game the system in blatant and unsophisticated ways. Their friends write five star reviews about how wonderful the owner is and how they always have their anniversary dinner there. They create multiple fake accounts and complain loudly that their positive reviews have been filtered. We've also noticed a certain tone businesses and their friends use. They don't typically describe a particular experience, they describe a business in generalities and will often refer back to what other reviewers are saying. They also appear to take what other people think very personally. The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends. A common looking filtered review (notice effusiveness, caps wording, and referencing other reviews): "This is a NICE restaurant - one that you go to when you want a quiet meal away from the kids - it's definitely not family-oriented, but then again, not every restaurant needs to be. If you're used to Olive Garden as your Italian "go-to place", then you will probably be disappointed in Fior d'Italia. If you want REAL Italian food, then ignore the naysayers and come here." Yelp itself has rough stats for the breakdown of reviews: 5 stars: 38% 4 stars: 29% 3 stars: 14% 2 stars: 8% 1 star: 11% Yelp's little secret is actually that the star ratings don't provide very much granularity for the casual review reader to make a decision and that most restaurants average out to ~3.75 or in Yelp parlance ~3.5 - 4 stars.

dbcfd 15y ago
> The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends. Or they actually really like the business? It's not staffed by 30 different no names, and you never get the same server? The owner will actually be present and greet customers? That's not gaming the system, that's providing great service in a fast food lifestyle.

sheraz 15y ago

Mr. Larive is spot on in his opinion, and I think he offers good solutions to the dilemmas of business response and participation. Yelp is representative of a fundamental problem with so many review sites, and our society at large -- namely that it attempts to coalesce many dimensions of data (a person) into a single score. And, just like FICO, and the SAT/LSAT/etc, Yelp and its predecessors (BBB) attempt to do the same for businesses. Worse still, they rely on the "Wisdom of Crowds" when it comes to qualitative measure and taste. An average 2.5 stars tells me nothing, especially because I'm an elitist prick and think the average Yelp commenter is an idiot. I fear that people substitute a Yelp rating for their own critical-thinking, and that is wrong. It is just as wrong that schools judge students largely based on a single test score. It is wrong that lending happens based on a opaque algorithm. I fear that Yelp is just another symptom that our society is sick. Our brains have atrophied to the point where we only look for one number that determines the succes or failure of our education, our lives and our livelihood. Or is that a touch melodramatic?

danbmil99 15y ago

Funny story. I recently was going to order out from a Chinese restaurant that I had recently ordered from before and recall enjoying. I had to google the number, and in so doing came up with a couple terrible Yelp reviews. For some reason I decided to listen to the toobz instead of relying on my own judgement. Ended up ordering horrible greasy food from a better-rated, well-known jaunt. TL; DR: I let Yelp override my own experience, what's up with that?

crikli 15y ago

Nobody gives a crap that the restaurant has been there 125 years, but that's what the owner leads with in defense of his enterprise. Looking at the reviews for Fior d' Italia, it looks like service leaves quite a bit to be desired and the food isn't that good. Maybe Yelp is polluted and biased...or maybe Fior d' Italia just sucks. Occam's razor says it's the latter. My wife and I travel all over the country on business, often finding ourselves in cities where we've never been. Yelp finds us a great place to eat every single time.

cft 15y ago

I find that the star rating of places/reviews in Google maps in Android is more reliable. Presumably, it does not suffer from the extortion bias either.

peterwwillis 15y ago

When I want to find a good place to eat, first I 1. ask somebody where a good place is and what they liked that they ate 2. figure out what kind of food i want and look for the best rated places near me 3. compare the menu with what i know about the cuisine, pictures of the place and any details i can scrounge up 4. then I just go and try to pick something I think i'll like. Food isn't rocket science. Good places are open for a while and have lots of people and you avoid chains and franchises. Don't complain about the service, nobody cares. Don't complain about the prices, nobody cares. Don't complain about the clientele or the ambiance, nobody cares. It's about the food, stupid.

matan_a 15y ago

This is my rule for Yelp: 1. Listen to bad reviews. 2. Ignore good reviews.

jadc 15y ago

Even though the article mentioned restaurants specifically, I believe the point about Yelp being fundamentally flawed extends much beyond food. I have heard similar reports from doctors saying that Yelp is filtering out their 5 star reviews unless they advertise with them.

msg 15y ago

I found this response elsewhere in the thread so interesting that I had to say something. PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching on :( If you're trying to keep a taqueria to yourself, do you have incentive to leave a bad review? After all, your interests are not aligned with the rest of Yelp's customers. Or even, necessarily aligned with the taqueria's success. Maybe it's to your codependent advantage that they always stay small and delicious and hidden and yours... preciouss. This is the problem Yelp hasn't solved yet: how to align the interests of Yelp, Yelp reviewers, Yelp readers, and restaurants. Yelp succeeds if reviewers leave bad reviews because they are upselling bad review protection (they say they aren't several times in the FAQ, but they protesteth too much for me), or if restaurants buy ads. Yelp readers succeed if reviewers are honest and they can use reviews to optimize their personal quality/dollar equation. Restaurants succeed if Yelp drives Yelp readers to them, if reviewers leave good reviews. Reviewers have many incentives to game reviews. One of the Yelp FAQs is about payola. If they review enough they gain community prominence through badges/titles. If they review too much, their reviews look suspicious (because they could be making them up instead of actually attending). If they become untrustworthy due to a secret Yelp algorithm, their reviews are obscured from prominent view. If they have a bad experience at a place everyone thinks is great, they run a risk writing a contrarian review and being labeled untrustworthy. And on and on.

cletus 15y ago

Yelp is fundamentally flawed. Firstly, they have a clear conflict of interest, which has been discussed many times, when it comes to selling advertising. Buying advertising (anecdotally) seems to make bad reviews magically disappear. Secondly, and this has always been the problem with "local", is you need a certain critical mass for it to be usable. You can argue that Yelp has reached this point in many cases (although see the next two points) but there are many businesses with <5 reviews. Third, there is too much friction in asking people to review (and even rate things). Most people simply don't and probably never will. This exacerbates the "critical mass" problem but also introduces a selection bias. The people who comment and rate aren't necessarily representative of general opinions or you (the personalization problem). I've gone to eat at some places in NYC that are 3.5+ stars that have varied from average to terrible. In some cases I've gone with someone who shared this positive review but--and I realize the counterargument to this is that it's subjective--they're just wrong. Fourth, there is a clear fraud problem with reviews and ratings. People are clearly paid to give positive reviews (eg you see someone rate a given car dealership in the Bay area on one day and then another in Maine the next day and so on). Of any of the companies in "local", IMHO Google is in the best position to deal with this particular problem (disclaimer: I work for Google). Lastly, as such reviews become increasingly important, there is the issue of extortion. If this hasn't happened already it will. Criminals already target websites with DDoS attacks that go away if the site in question pays what amounts to "protection money". There's nothing really to stop such criminal enterprises shaking down businesses with the threat of a bad slew of reviews. It's worth making extra mention of personalization. Many (Google included) seem to view "social search" and "social recommendations" as some kind of panacea to some or even all of these problems. I disagree. I know a couple of people who, say, like Adam Sandler movies. I do not. Not even remotely. Their movie recommendations are so diametrically opposed to mine that I can pretty much take the opposite of what they recommend. The way forward with this will be something like the Netflix model (IMHO) where these great data mining systems will attempt to find people who are like me and have similar tastes whose recommendations will likely coincide with mine.

ed209 15y ago
Friction on posting a review is a huge problem. On the flip side, you ask any of your friends "where's a good place to eat tonight?" no doubt they'll have a few reviews in them and promptly let you know some places you should try. I think this industry needs more of a q&a (quora type) approach where I can ask the same question that I would ask my friends. That way I'm only recommending places (take that as a 4+ star review) and not criticising businesses. This benefits both customers by show places that have been recommended multiple times as an indicator of quality and business that don't suffer as a result of a bad night or rouge staff member. This approach makes it easier to actually find what you too because by virtue of the way that place is suggested ("where is a good spot for breakfast?") we already get a ton of meta data.

tmchow 15y ago

Shameless plug: We just launched Chewsy (http://chewsy.com http://chewsy.com) last year after years of frustration with these aggregate business review sites. We're focused on rating what you ate and sharing recommendations with friends. It's similar to other food apps on the market but different in significant ways. For example, it's not like a vertical instagram like some of those other popular food apps. We're very much in growth mode, but San Francisco is getting some good traction and our hometown of Seattle is thriving. I encourage you to try it out and perhaps it can help you find your next best meal (and help you recommend something to your friends).

zephyrnh 15y ago

I think this makes sense. Filtered reviews are reviews that yelp considers to be fraudulent. They may be reviews created by multiple accounts from the same computer to inflate a restaurant's rating. Or they may all be negative reviews created by one person with multiple accounts to try to hurt a business they weren't happy with. Either way, I think it's perfectly reasonable that such a system of filtering should and does exist. Now maybe their filtering system is so horrendous that it makes a 4-star restaurant seem like a 2.5 star restaurant, but I find this hard to believe. As for asking people to advertise with them to make "bad reviews disappear", that would be terrible, so I can't speak to that, since all we have to go on is this particular owner's word vs Yelp's. Is there any proof of this happening?

bumbledraven 15y ago

Filtering legitimate reviews is a big problem. Once I discovered that Yelp filtered most of my reviews, I stopped writing them. It's not even like I'm some anonymous coward (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course): I have had a photo of myself on Yelp for a long time, my account is linked to a few friends of mine on Yelp, and I even went to a Yelp event. I wonder how many other people like me stopped writing reviews for the same reason?

RayJR 15y ago

I cannot believe the coincidence! My father owns a small pizza business (small as in 1 store, 22 years) and yesterday a yelp power user got upset because I didn't give her free jalepenos. She knew we charge extra for things like ranch but still expected jalepenos for free. She got so mad she changed her review and said there was a "hair" in her pizza "months ago." She is obviously saying this to damage us because she was treated the same as all customers and expects special treatment. Extortion? That's how it felt but I don't care because our true customers know better and are great people. See the whole thing here: http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine. Sort by date, most recent review. This was yelps response when I reported this user: Hi there, Thank you for inquiring about the reviews of Ray's Pizza on Yelp. We've looked at Jayne L's review, and since it appears to reflect the personal experience and opinions of the reviewer, we are leaving it intact. Unfortunately, we don't take sides on factual disputes, and suggest instead that you contact the reviewer again to clarify any misunderstandings. We think it's important for businesses to be part of the conversation, and have created a suite of free tools to help business owners get the most out of Yelp. It looks like you've already unlocked your business page. As a reminder, you can: - Communicate with your customers via private message or public comment - Track how many people view your business page - Add photos and a detailed description of your business - Convert Yelp users into customers by posting a Yelp Deal to your listing You can login to your account here: https://biz.yelp.com/ https://biz.yelp.com/ Regards, Summer Yelp User Support San Francisco, California I am a yelp user and it was great but for businesses its getting out of hand when there is no transparency. What if people are paid to yelp a lot and then use their influence to sell reviews? It could happen.

dbcfd 15y ago
Good luck getting a power user (or god forbid, a community moderator) review removed. A number of them feel they deserve preferential treatment because of their Yelp status, and will go out of their way to bash you when that doesn't happen.

deleted 15y ago

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b0o 15y ago

Main flaws from his conclusion: 1. "Don't filter reviews. If the site is supposed to be "Yelper" driven and democratic, so be it. Post them all!" The reviews are for Fior D'italia ARE posted, a handful are removed (10 out of 218+115 filtered reviews). The other 300 reviews are still there, which should be more than sufficient for someone to decide if they want to eat at that place. Of the 115 filtered reviews, ~50 of them were 4-5 star reviews made by reviewers with less than 3 reviews, it seems logical to filter those out. 2. "Allow businesses to opt out". Yelp shouldn't let them. It's the internet. There is some truth in this, but yelp exists to filter out the good and bad restaurants. I can see some lawsuits coming out of this. 3. "Give businesses a chance to post comments or respond at the top of their Yelp page where the public can read it before going to the reviews". If yelp were to do that, then businesses could just stall the bad reviews and only keep the good ones, rendering the review system useless. 4. "Post the filtered reviews where they are easy to find and review. Many customers of ours have had their reviews of the Fior filtered out, and they are livid." Filtered reviews are at the bottom, and they are pretty easy to find. As I said, the filtered reviews, have reasoning to be filtered in the first place. 5. Continued from above: "They don't understand why this is done, nor do we". I understand why those reviews were filtered perfectly. Of the 115 reviews, ~50 were 5 or 4 star reviews made by reviewers with less than 3 reviews, I can see why they would be filtered because they're probably bots. Yelp's system is decent. If you only take the 23 Elite members' reviews, they give this place an average rating of ~3-stars, which is a bit better than the overall review. But the owner should really read his reviews, especially the 1-star reviews. If for some reason, the guy who wrote this article reads this: 1. Read your 1-star reviews, half of them are saying your food is too salty. The other half is saying your service sucks ass, either because your waiters take too long, bad vouchers(?), bad pricing and bad environment. Price, I get for a $$$ restaurant people should be prepared to fork ~$100 for the meal, but I guess the quality wasn't worth the price. If this guy wanted to take an objective opinion of a yelp review, why not take Ike's place's yelp review with 4,128 reviews. 2. Instead of complaining about it online, why don't you just ask your customers to write reviews. Provide them a link to your yelp review, ask them to review for 10% off or something, put computers with internet browsers with your yelp page as the home page. Make them scream how good or bad your place is. If I'm ever in the area, I might check this place out, if my wallet can handle it. But yeah, I've been seeing increasing reviews on how yelp is putting down positive reviews because they don't advertise with them.

dbcfd 15y ago

As a business owner, I have also seen the extortion for advertising model. Businesses that advertise with Yelp have low star reviews filtered, while businesses like mine that do not, have reviews from valid customers (often with friends and other reviews) filtered, to lower star ratings. I have also seen reviews that are blatantly fake (e.g. reviews from Santa Claus, comical reviews, etc.) persist, until a significant amount of time passes. This indicates manual removal, and no actual Yelp filter.

micheljansen 15y ago

I first read about Yelp's extortion practices in 2009 [1]. I thought that now they have grown so big, the extortion would have stopped. Apparently not :( [1] http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-e...