8 ms·

Yelp Outing Businesses that Solicit Reviews

27 points by ca136 14y ago

ca136 14y ago
Original article on nytimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/technology/yelp-tries-to-halt-deceptive-reviews.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/technology/yelp-tries-to-h...
3minus1 14y ago
I don't trust Yelp. https://www.google.com/search?q=yelp+extortion&aq=0&oq=yelp+extortion https://www.google.com/search?q=yelp+extortion&aq=0&...
- andrewljohnson 14y ago
  I imagine you don't trust any major review company then. The BBB must be a bunch of scumbags too, if your metric is what a google search looks like when attaching the word extortion to their name: https://www.google.com/search?q=bbb+extortion https://www.google.com/search?q=bbb+extortion And Obama is a liar: https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+liar https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+liar And Romney too: https://www.google.com/search?q=romney+liar https://www.google.com/search?q=romney+liar Search engines give you what you search for.
  - icelancer 14y ago
    >BBB must be a bunch of scumbags too Er... they are.
  - skinnymuch 14y ago
    The BBB is one of the worst examples for this. They are an awful organization. Hell, this very site has talked about their horrible morals before. And I'll leave politics alone.
hkmurakami 14y ago
Seeing some of my favorite hole in the wall restaurants get bad reviews and seeing some bland and uninteresting (but good) places get great reviews on Yelp has made me remember Malcolm Gladwell's commentary on people's preferences for three distinct flavors of spaghetti sauce. "If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people's preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky"[1] Which tells me that since Yelp tries to aggregate everyone's taste into one unified rating metric, the tastes from which Yelp ratings are derived are quite likely to be different from those of my own. Thus I really can't trust Yelp ratings, even if there were no 'gaming' or 'extortion' going on in their reviews. [1] http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html
- grey-area 14y ago
  This is a really interesting point, unfortunately the counterpoint to this is that a complicated rating metric is not successful either. People don't want to spend ages filling in some huge questionnaire and if you start trying to introduce complicated systems of combination star ratings like the zagat ones for example, it just bamboozles both reviewers and readers, and still has the same issues as a simple 5 star rating does - it's too rough a tool and tries to decide in advance on a procrustean taxonomy into which all decisions are forced. I think the most useful reviews are textual ones which set out the interests and prejudices of the writer (sometimes inadvertently), and elaborate on why they like or don't like this particular place/thing, which can give you clues about their lifestyle, tastes, and even whether they were hired by the company to write this review in the first place! I'm always suspicious of reviews which say something is great and then list several selling points as if they were read from a brochure - not many people write like that without prompting and it's a good way to find fakes. Unfortunately another problem as outlined in that article is that even if you managed to completely represent the views of others, you'd find that many of them were simply uninteresting to you, as they are based on false premises or different tastes. That's where social rating systems become more important; where you can decide whose ratings you trust (not necessarily friends), and use those to make decisions - I still think you need the complexity of written reviews to really flesh out people's opinions though. We have a few ideas on this over at coolplaces, but have not yet had time to take them anywhere. Trust does require that you identify with a person's tastes, and also that you know they are real, so using a network of like-minded people built up over time can help mollify the concerns you have about yelp reviews. Thanks for the great article linked, I've not had time to finish it but it really does cover this subject in depth from a different perspective.
dchuk 14y ago
A company that is constantly being sued for extorting businesses into subscribing so that those businesses can suppress bad reviews is now calling out businesses who purchase good reviews. Yelp is just a shitty company.
- pbharrin 14y ago
  Well put! Don't forget to mention that Yelp has never turned a profit.
- andrewljohnson 14y ago
  Could you substantiate that claim? I did a few Google searches, and I find your remarks to be, well... just wrong. As far as I can tell, there was a class action lawsuit against Yelp, which was dismissed, and a couple of other lawsuits from single business owners. I would imagine that any company the size of Yelp is going to get sued a few times, and I imagine a lot, if not all of those, are just bad small businesses. Are you just scurrilously slinging mud, based on a single headline you read sometime in the past? I find Yelp to be quite useful, and the people who I have met that worked there were good, hard-working souls.
  - arohner 14y ago
    jwz now owns a nightclub. Here's his experience: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - kami8845 14y ago
    Ask any tech-inclined person in NYC and they will freely tell you that Yelp are scumbags
dude_abides 14y ago
Interesting point from the original nytimes article, that opens up a whole can of worms: "What’s to stop someone from going and soliciting fake positive reviews for a competitor’s restaurant, in order for them to be publicly shamed?"
- arbuge 14y ago
  Probably the fact that soliciting fake negatives is a more direct route to damage them. Granted, not exactly something that would restore your faith in Yelp...
codegeek 14y ago
So let me understand this. You have a great small business where your customers are really happy. They decide to give you a positive review on Yelp. Boom, you get calls from Yelp to pay for advertising. You refuse to do so and boom, all your positive reviews are removed. And they add/fake negative reviews OR leave the negative reviews on from customers ? Wow, that is scary if true.
bravura 14y ago
PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP. PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP. They are a great company and their recommendations are consistently amazing. Anyone who says that Yelp tried to extort money from them to remove negative reviews is whining and the negative reviews are all accurate. PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP. PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP.
balancdreviews 14y ago
Yelp needs negative reviews. This is not a site comprised of people with impeccable taste that can rival any restaurant critic or ones's own sense for restaurant choices, based on experience, or word-of-mouth (spoken word). This is yet another way to use the negativity of the web (XYZcompanysucks.com) as a form of blackmail. What a joke. The company that needs to be "outed" is Yelp. If all the accounts are true, these guys are crooks. Anyone who bases all their dining decisions on what people post to sites like Yelp is not going to have as rich an experience as people who mastered the "old ways" (i.e. personal knowledge not acquired online). Why? Because Yelp is _primarily_ for people who want to complain. And _primarily_ for people who have no taste or worldly experience but who want to post things to the web (tech savvy). There are exceptions, but c'mon, let's be real. The web is the ultimate gripe channel. Don't believe me? Try basing all your decisions on Yelp. You will not eat as well the the guy who has a sincere interest in restaurants and understands how to use the "old ways". There's certainly potential for such knowledgeable people to come together at a site and produce something amazing: balanced, informative, _informed_ reviews. The web is an amazing instrument for information excehange. But Yelp is not such a site. Their "business" relies lots of complainers who usually (have tech savvy but) have no taste, and on the restaurateur's fear of a fool with a megaphone.
anotherbadlogin 14y ago
Yelp should out itself for being underhanded assholes, while it's at it.
a5seo 14y ago
Yelp's strategy could backfire. Now all a competitor has to do is put ads on Craigslist or Mturk begging for reviews for all of its competitors, knowing Yelp will see them and penalize them. Yelp is going to find themselves boxed in on this. Google has already been down this road with links, and they've taken the stand that "no link can hurt you" because it's too easy for competitors to manipulate that.
vampirechicken 14y ago
We need a crowdsourced ratings site that rates croudsourced ratings sites.

27 points by ca136 14y ago

ca136 14y ago

Original article on nytimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/technology/yelp-tries-to-halt-deceptive-reviews.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/technology/yelp-tries-to-h...

3minus1 14y ago

I don't trust Yelp. https://www.google.com/search?q=yelp+extortion&aq=0&oq=yelp+extortion https://www.google.com/search?q=yelp+extortion&aq=0&...

andrewljohnson 14y ago
I imagine you don't trust any major review company then. The BBB must be a bunch of scumbags too, if your metric is what a google search looks like when attaching the word extortion to their name: https://www.google.com/search?q=bbb+extortion https://www.google.com/search?q=bbb+extortion And Obama is a liar: https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+liar https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+liar And Romney too: https://www.google.com/search?q=romney+liar https://www.google.com/search?q=romney+liar Search engines give you what you search for.
- icelancer 14y ago
  >BBB must be a bunch of scumbags too Er... they are.
- skinnymuch 14y ago
  The BBB is one of the worst examples for this. They are an awful organization. Hell, this very site has talked about their horrible morals before. And I'll leave politics alone.

hkmurakami 14y ago

Seeing some of my favorite hole in the wall restaurants get bad reviews and seeing some bland and uninteresting (but good) places get great reviews on Yelp has made me remember Malcolm Gladwell's commentary on people's preferences for three distinct flavors of spaghetti sauce. "If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people's preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky"[1] Which tells me that since Yelp tries to aggregate everyone's taste into one unified rating metric, the tastes from which Yelp ratings are derived are quite likely to be different from those of my own. Thus I really can't trust Yelp ratings, even if there were no 'gaming' or 'extortion' going on in their reviews. [1] http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

grey-area 14y ago
This is a really interesting point, unfortunately the counterpoint to this is that a complicated rating metric is not successful either. People don't want to spend ages filling in some huge questionnaire and if you start trying to introduce complicated systems of combination star ratings like the zagat ones for example, it just bamboozles both reviewers and readers, and still has the same issues as a simple 5 star rating does - it's too rough a tool and tries to decide in advance on a procrustean taxonomy into which all decisions are forced. I think the most useful reviews are textual ones which set out the interests and prejudices of the writer (sometimes inadvertently), and elaborate on why they like or don't like this particular place/thing, which can give you clues about their lifestyle, tastes, and even whether they were hired by the company to write this review in the first place! I'm always suspicious of reviews which say something is great and then list several selling points as if they were read from a brochure - not many people write like that without prompting and it's a good way to find fakes. Unfortunately another problem as outlined in that article is that even if you managed to completely represent the views of others, you'd find that many of them were simply uninteresting to you, as they are based on false premises or different tastes. That's where social rating systems become more important; where you can decide whose ratings you trust (not necessarily friends), and use those to make decisions - I still think you need the complexity of written reviews to really flesh out people's opinions though. We have a few ideas on this over at coolplaces, but have not yet had time to take them anywhere. Trust does require that you identify with a person's tastes, and also that you know they are real, so using a network of like-minded people built up over time can help mollify the concerns you have about yelp reviews. Thanks for the great article linked, I've not had time to finish it but it really does cover this subject in depth from a different perspective.

dchuk 14y ago

A company that is constantly being sued for extorting businesses into subscribing so that those businesses can suppress bad reviews is now calling out businesses who purchase good reviews. Yelp is just a shitty company.

pbharrin 14y ago
Well put! Don't forget to mention that Yelp has never turned a profit.
andrewljohnson 14y ago
Could you substantiate that claim? I did a few Google searches, and I find your remarks to be, well... just wrong. As far as I can tell, there was a class action lawsuit against Yelp, which was dismissed, and a couple of other lawsuits from single business owners. I would imagine that any company the size of Yelp is going to get sued a few times, and I imagine a lot, if not all of those, are just bad small businesses. Are you just scurrilously slinging mud, based on a single headline you read sometime in the past? I find Yelp to be quite useful, and the people who I have met that worked there were good, hard-working souls.
- arohner 14y ago
  jwz now owns a nightclub. Here's his experience: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- kami8845 14y ago
  Ask any tech-inclined person in NYC and they will freely tell you that Yelp are scumbags

dude_abides 14y ago

Interesting point from the original nytimes article, that opens up a whole can of worms: "What’s to stop someone from going and soliciting fake positive reviews for a competitor’s restaurant, in order for them to be publicly shamed?"

arbuge 14y ago
Probably the fact that soliciting fake negatives is a more direct route to damage them. Granted, not exactly something that would restore your faith in Yelp...

codegeek 14y ago

So let me understand this. You have a great small business where your customers are really happy. They decide to give you a positive review on Yelp. Boom, you get calls from Yelp to pay for advertising. You refuse to do so and boom, all your positive reviews are removed. And they add/fake negative reviews OR leave the negative reviews on from customers ? Wow, that is scary if true.

bravura 14y ago

PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP. PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP. They are a great company and their recommendations are consistently amazing. Anyone who says that Yelp tried to extort money from them to remove negative reviews is whining and the negative reviews are all accurate. PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP. PLEASE WRITE A POSITIVE REVIEW FOR YELP.

balancdreviews 14y ago

Yelp needs negative reviews. This is not a site comprised of people with impeccable taste that can rival any restaurant critic or ones's own sense for restaurant choices, based on experience, or word-of-mouth (spoken word). This is yet another way to use the negativity of the web (XYZcompanysucks.com) as a form of blackmail. What a joke. The company that needs to be "outed" is Yelp. If all the accounts are true, these guys are crooks. Anyone who bases all their dining decisions on what people post to sites like Yelp is not going to have as rich an experience as people who mastered the "old ways" (i.e. personal knowledge not acquired online). Why? Because Yelp is _primarily_ for people who want to complain. And _primarily_ for people who have no taste or worldly experience but who want to post things to the web (tech savvy). There are exceptions, but c'mon, let's be real. The web is the ultimate gripe channel. Don't believe me? Try basing all your decisions on Yelp. You will not eat as well the the guy who has a sincere interest in restaurants and understands how to use the "old ways". There's certainly potential for such knowledgeable people to come together at a site and produce something amazing: balanced, informative, _informed_ reviews. The web is an amazing instrument for information excehange. But Yelp is not such a site. Their "business" relies lots of complainers who usually (have tech savvy but) have no taste, and on the restaurateur's fear of a fool with a megaphone.

anotherbadlogin 14y ago

Yelp should out itself for being underhanded assholes, while it's at it.

a5seo 14y ago

Yelp's strategy could backfire. Now all a competitor has to do is put ads on Craigslist or Mturk begging for reviews for all of its competitors, knowing Yelp will see them and penalize them. Yelp is going to find themselves boxed in on this. Google has already been down this road with links, and they've taken the stand that "no link can hurt you" because it's too easy for competitors to manipulate that.

vampirechicken 14y ago

We need a crowdsourced ratings site that rates croudsourced ratings sites.