4 ms·
Wait, why on earth should people be prevented from leaving a negative review when they have a negative experience? A review site that doesn't let people leave n
by sedev 13y ago
Wait, why on earth should people be prevented from leaving a negative review when they have a negative experience? A review site that doesn't let people leave negative reviews is an untrustworthy review site.
Sure, people are unreasonable - but that has nothing to do with Yelp! Think of it this way: you can make it look like the world experienced vastly more earthquakes in the 20th century than in the 17th, but what actually happened was that detection got much better. Similarly, Yelp doesn't at all change people's propensity to think unreasonable things about restaurants they go to: it just improves detection. Improved detection, I argue, is an inherent good. Knowing what people really want makes it easier to deliver that, even if the process of finding out what people actually want is painful (and it usually is, since most of us are not very good at knowing what we actually want).
- jmduke 13y agoIf we assume that a consumer is more willing to order from a restaurant that has a sterling rating, then Yelp is suddenly more incentivized to limit the number of negative reviews. (I personally don't believe this, but it's certainly a rational argument.)
- callmeed 13y ago>> Wait, why on earth should people be prevented from leaving a negative review when they have a negative experience?* They shouldn't be. But now Yelp controls both the reviews and part of the experience. It's a conflict of interest on multiple levels. It was already an issue when they started filtering reviews and letting paid accounts have more control. Now they also have a hand in ordering/processing/delivery. The only analogy I can think of is Amazon–which has both reviews and its own products (Kindle). A bad review of the Kindle hurts Amazon directly. Therefore, it incentivises them even more to make a good product. Yelp, on the other hand, never suffers from a bad restaurant review, a charge error, or a late delivery by one of it's partners. Only the restaurant suffers. In fact, a bad review is good for Yelp because it becomes a sales lead.
- thufry 13y agoKindle is the only product where the Amazon review system is guaranteed to be "fair" -- Amazon is delivering the entire experience. Many other products on Amazon (where people look for reviews, even if they are buying elsewhere) have bad reviews because the "shipping was slow" or the "price went down right after I bought it" -- things that shouldn't fairly be attributed to the product.