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That particular topic about Yelp and their reviews have been discussed many times on HN. Yelp is a major scam company that absolutely do not care about the busi

by yoda_sl 14y ago

That particular topic about Yelp and their reviews have been discussed many times on HN. Yelp is a major scam company that absolutely do not care about the business owner. They are in it for the money -doh- and what matters for them is Page Views, and regular users posting more reviews, thus more page views. Their filtering system is a total mess but since it is a secret on how it works they can say whatever they want... As long as their filtering system goes into promoting page views. Nowhere in there they care about the small business that are badly hurt by their lack of common sense. Simply don't use Yelp for posting reviews or reading reviews, this is the best thing anyone can do. PS: I speak from close personal experience with my wife small business being hit hard by Yelp algorithms for filtering review, and Yelp scammy sales people.

irishloop 14y ago
Out of curiosity, what is the alternative? Just allow twenty five-star or one-star reviews to show up and say hey, if business owners want to scam the system by putting in fake reviews, then great? Or just open-source their algorithms? I guess to me it seems infinitely easier to criticize the way someone else does it than to present a more efficient way of doing it.
- Philadelphia 14y ago
  One possibility would be to allow users to manually flag reviews, instead of trying to do it algorithmically. They could also have some sort of confidence rating for reviews, or possibly a reputation system for reviewers. From looking at the hidden reviews for a couple of stores while I've been trying to find a place to get new glasses, they seem to be hiding a good number of legitimate reviews with their current system.
  - yoda_sl 14y ago
    You are correct. Such simple change will be already going in the right direction. It is amazing to see all the reviews hidden that are legit: you can see if the reviewer use Yelp often by checking the number of reviews posted. The current filtering system seems to ignore that most of the times, but reviewers with no previous review prior giving 1 star will see that review stick.
  - cube13 14y ago
    Unfortunately, this takes the current problem(where legitimate reviews are removed), and replaces it with the exact same problem, where legitimate reviews are flagged to oblivion. Instead of having the owner's friends post reviews, they post reviews and then flag every poor review, attempting to get them taken off. Or idiots with an axe to grind flag all the good reviews.
jcdrepair 14y ago
The bottom line is that, depending on your business, it can take a long time to build up a good list of non-filtered ads. After 4+ years of asking customers to write reviews of our service, our business has 63 5-star reviews and about 83 filtered reviews. We have a lot of happy customers and a lot of them create a Yelp account just to review us and then never use it again. I totally understand Yelp filtering these out. Unless you're a restaurant or some other establishment frequented by the Yelping community, there's no silver bullet to getting a lot of great reviews. It takes time and probably more than half of the ones you get will be filtered. That said, I think it's foolish of pretty much everyone to use Yelp ads. They're a complete scam but that's a different topic.

by yoda_sl 14y ago

irishloop 14y ago

Out of curiosity, what is the alternative? Just allow twenty five-star or one-star reviews to show up and say hey, if business owners want to scam the system by putting in fake reviews, then great? Or just open-source their algorithms? I guess to me it seems infinitely easier to criticize the way someone else does it than to present a more efficient way of doing it.

Philadelphia 14y ago
One possibility would be to allow users to manually flag reviews, instead of trying to do it algorithmically. They could also have some sort of confidence rating for reviews, or possibly a reputation system for reviewers. From looking at the hidden reviews for a couple of stores while I've been trying to find a place to get new glasses, they seem to be hiding a good number of legitimate reviews with their current system.
- yoda_sl 14y ago
  You are correct. Such simple change will be already going in the right direction. It is amazing to see all the reviews hidden that are legit: you can see if the reviewer use Yelp often by checking the number of reviews posted. The current filtering system seems to ignore that most of the times, but reviewers with no previous review prior giving 1 star will see that review stick.
- cube13 14y ago
  Unfortunately, this takes the current problem(where legitimate reviews are removed), and replaces it with the exact same problem, where legitimate reviews are flagged to oblivion. Instead of having the owner's friends post reviews, they post reviews and then flag every poor review, attempting to get them taken off. Or idiots with an axe to grind flag all the good reviews.

jcdrepair 14y ago

The bottom line is that, depending on your business, it can take a long time to build up a good list of non-filtered ads. After 4+ years of asking customers to write reviews of our service, our business has 63 5-star reviews and about 83 filtered reviews. We have a lot of happy customers and a lot of them create a Yelp account just to review us and then never use it again. I totally understand Yelp filtering these out. Unless you're a restaurant or some other establishment frequented by the Yelping community, there's no silver bullet to getting a lot of great reviews. It takes time and probably more than half of the ones you get will be filtered. That said, I think it's foolish of pretty much everyone to use Yelp ads. They're a complete scam but that's a different topic.