[HN Gopher] Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews...
___________________________________________________________________
Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can't be
trusted
Author : gnicholas
Score : 350 points
Date : 2023-06-14 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sfgate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sfgate.com)
| rfwhyte wrote:
| Online reviews have become one of the dankest cesspits of
| misinformation and deceit on the entire internet. Amazon's
| reviews are so thoroughly gamed as to be functionally useless and
| Amazon knows this and tacitly supports it through their inaction.
| Yelp and Google Places review are being gamed en-masse by bad
| actors and scammers and have become so distorted that by relying
| upon them you're now more likely have a bad experience than a
| good one. Review websites are stuffed full of advertorials and
| universally have such super shady advertising / sponsorship
| policies it's functionally impossible to know whether the review
| you're reading was paid for or not, and all the big tech sites
| are so dependent on advertising revenue, they almost never post
| critical review for fear of upsetting their advertisers. It's a
| unspoken rule in the industry these days that negative reviews
| are simply not published. Not to mention damn near every single
| product review video on YouTube, IG Reels, Tiktok, or wherever
| else now is either straight up sponsored content where the
| "Reviewer" is receiving monetary compensation for their so called
| "Review" or at minimum is receiving the product for free, which
| creates yet another perverse incentive, as anyone who posts a
| negative review will simply stop getting free products to review
| in the future.
|
| There are literally dozens of 100+ person companies in China and
| India who's entire business model is faking online reviews.
|
| The entire industry is broken, and the average consumer can't
| find literally a single source for unbiased, trust-worthy reviews
| of anything anymore, which I for one believe is the system
| working exactly as designed and intended. Never forget the rich
| will sacrifice literally anything that's generally considered to
| be part of the "Public good" if it means they'll get rich faster,
| which is exactly what's happening here.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Serious question: is Yelp still relevant? I feel like outside of
| select metro areas it's not useful at all with very dated
| content.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I don't use Yelp to determine if a place is good or not.
|
| I use yelp for personal entertainment, because the outraged,
| bombastic reviews are often hilarious in how just beneath the
| surface are classist, racist, xenophobic and jingoistic
| undertones. These are among the few reviews I believe 100% are
| actually real people!
| schnable wrote:
| It surprisingly has up to date content where I live, and
| generally anything 4+ stars is good and below 3 stars is not
| too good. The individual reviews are usually not useful, but
| looking at patterns and trends of recent reviews can be useful
| if you know how to filter out the obvious BS and one-off
| overreactions.
|
| The problem is a real lack of reviews for smaller places,
| especially outside the downtown area. Google Maps has more
| content there.
| 78124781 wrote:
| I agree, though the other issue for smaller places is that
| they are more susceptible to review-bombing by one
| disgruntled party (do we really need 6 reviews from 6
| different people about how the same table had to wait an hour
| to get the check one time?) or "5 stars for 30% off"
| incentives (which I have unfortunately seen a number of,
| especially at small businesses trying to distinguish
| themselves).
|
| Google Maps I still don't understand where they get a lot of
| reviews from in the first place. While some look like normal
| reviews, there's a lot that have no comments at all or
| comments completely unrelated to the place ostensibly being
| reviewed (or just cryptic things like "not good" or "good").
| It's not a bad comparison to use alongside Yelp, but it's
| definitely led to more clunkers, especially for places with
| n<20 reviews.
| heyheyhey wrote:
| No review site depending on users is perfect but I've found
| it's the best option for a quick "what's a good restaurant for
| x cuisine" in America.
|
| I've found Google Maps or Tripadvisor to be too hit-or-miss
| especially when traveling abroad where Yelp isn't as prevalent.
| randomdata wrote:
| I forgot it exists. Looking at a bunch of local restaurants,
| there has been essentially no activity since 2017, and Google
| and Facebook have orders of magnitude more reviews in every
| case.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| At least in New York, it is. It's less prone to the cost noise
| that infects the other rating services--where a 3 star could be
| due to bad food or someone being surprised by New York prices.
| (There is also a scourge of paid top ten articles that makes a
| simple search useless.)
| janalsncm wrote:
| I personally prefer more objective signals like the menu,
| pictures of the food, and pictures of the interior. Maybe I'm a
| snob but foods that people describe as "delicious" and
| "amazing" to me look greasy, salty, or altogether not much
| better than I could cook myself with basic cooking skills.
| angry_moose wrote:
| The Apple Maps integration seems to be most of what's propping
| them up these days. It's especially infuriating because you can
| only see about 2 reviews before you're prompted to download the
| Yelp app for "full access".
|
| I thought Apple was supposed to be working on their own review
| system or switching to a different service, but I haven't seen
| anything come of that.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Why would you use Apple maps though?
|
| I havent used since I missed a turn. Why not use google maps?
| gnicholas wrote:
| I use Apple Maps and do have some complaints, but I like
| when it tells you which lane(s) to be in as you approach
| freeway interchanges. Sometimes it's obvious where you're
| supposed to be (far right), but sometimes when consecutive
| exits are close together, you actually need to be 1 or 2
| lanes over.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Google maps does that too?
|
| "Use the left two lines to take exit 12 towards Buemont
| Street"
|
| "Use the second from the right lane to continue on
| Sepulvada Drive"
| gnicholas wrote:
| On my iPhone, I either use Apple Maps or Waze. I'm pretty
| sure Waze doesn't offer this, though I haven't updated
| the app in a while.
| bombcar wrote:
| Apple Maps is the only place left where I see it, and I wish
| I wouldn't.
|
| It seems Apple Maps and Pay could result in good reviews,
| because they'd all be tied together.
| schnable wrote:
| Sometimes they show TripAdvisor reviews instead of Yelp.
| angry_moose wrote:
| Huh. Wonder if it's a regional thing?
|
| I don't recall ever seeing that and I just checked about 25
| places in my city and none of them had TripAdvisor.
| schnable wrote:
| Yes, I think so.
| jeromegv wrote:
| It's definitely regional. Here in Toronto, checking for
| few addresses around me I see a mix of
|
| -Apple Maps native reviews
|
| -Yelp
|
| -OpenTable
|
| And I'm definitely seeing a lot less Yelp than I used to.
| At least in Toronto, yelp is pretty much dead anyway.
| People mostly use Google Maps.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I find that if a restaurant has 4.5 or 5 stars (assuming a
| decent number of reviews), typically it is very good. However,
| plenty of the places I eat/enjoy have 3 stars (none have 2 or
| 1). So I use it as a rough filter for that purpose.
|
| It's also useful for seeing if particular menu items are good,
| since fake reviews don't typically get into that much detail
| (or at least there are other real reviews that would outweigh
| them in search results for that item).
|
| FWIW, I live in silicon valley.
| Ichthypresbyter wrote:
| There's the ongoing meme that the best Chinese restaurants
| have 3.5 stars on Yelp- from the combination of 5 star
| reviews from people who love the food, and 1 star from people
| who didn't like the brusque service or didn't get the
| American Chinese food they were expecting.
| RajT88 wrote:
| There's a Malaysian/Chinese resto near me like that. It's
| an absolute sleeper of a place to have eat. Barely visible
| from the road, and connected to a supermarket (and they
| wheel in and out shopping carts from next door as they run
| out of ingredients during the day). My Japanese roommate at
| the time was turned onto it by his Korean boss, and I took
| my Chinese/Filipino/Indian/American coworkers there and
| then they started going there all the time.
|
| The 1 star reviews complain about the organ meat, which
| there were totally grossed out by. "Beef tendon pho" is
| super legit, and what you get in Asia. You're in the wrong
| place if you expect American-Chinese fare.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's super weird to me that people will leave a bad
| review because there were things on the menu they didn't
| like. I like some types of organ meat, and dislike
| others, but it would never even enter my mind to be like
| "2 stars because 40% of the menu is stuff I don't like".
| People are weird.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I have another comment in the thread which got downvoted
| by someone.
|
| My take, having seen a lot of these posts on yelp, is
| that people leave such reviews because restaurants are
| offering something which they are not familiar with, or
| does not match their notions of "normal" (however narrow
| that may be). You see this less at restos which serve
| burgers and pizza, and more with places serving non-
| American food.
|
| I just took a spin through the couple of Asian places in
| my town, and they have relatively high numbers of 1 star
| reviews. Digging into them, what you see a lot of are is
| complaints like:
|
| "This is the worst Asian food I have ever had because
| (proceeds to describe exactly how the dish is supposed to
| be)". Also a lot of complaints about these Asian
| restaurants being "dirty" (which they aren't - as I'm
| only reading through places my wife and I go to / order
| from frequently). It was like this _specifically with
| Asian food_ in the last town I lived in as well. I recall
| one complaint about how they romanized a Thai word,
| insisting "pad see ewe" was misspelled (ORLY!). It's
| bizarre. Mexican restaurants by comparison, get
| complaints about the food being too spicy, or the decor
| (at takeout places no less) being bad. And, of course,
| "dirty", which again, the places I frequent, aren't.
|
| I can't help but conclude that people who write these
| reviews are judging things based on their own biases, of
| which they are not self-aware. A more harmless example is
| a review from a great Thai/Chinese resto where I used to
| live where someone suggested the place smelled "musty".
| Well - it _was_ in a sublevel of a large building (
| "basement" is the word they used), but it was not in any
| way musty in the 10 years I spent going there. None of my
| friends ever took issue, even a good friend with a really
| sensitive nose.
| jeffcouturier wrote:
| I was going to ask the same. I thought this was very common
| knowledge for a rather long time.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > Before Fake Review Watch and all her research, Dean used review
| sites often, she said. But now she tells everyone she knows to
| stick with good old word-of-mouth -- especially with recent
| additional hits to the online system, like the surge of reviews
| spurred by COVID-19 policies and new reports of AI chatbot-
| written Amazon reviews.
|
| Kind of sick of reading this advice. If I knew someone I trusted
| to recommend me a contractor why would I be on Yelp looking in
| the first place? Hello.
| Solvency wrote:
| This is where NextDoor comes in. I guarantee your entire town
| is likely already on there talking about contractors they've
| used. The app is slow and sluggish but it's legitimately where
| most homeowners and "regular townsie folk" are these days.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I am on some Facebook neighborhood groups which I think are
| similar enough to Nextdoor, but there are plenty of scammers
| about and also, it's hard to trust people's judgment given
| how many idiotic posts you see floating around.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I was glad to see that the horoscope was only the 7th most
| popular page on SFGate today.
|
| I can only imagine that this means all these recent troubles I've
| been hearing about San Francisco have been resolved and people do
| not need the help from their horoscope anymore to know what to do
| to resolve their problems.
| 1024core wrote:
| > Dean began documenting her findings, starting with serial
| offenders from the Facebook groups. In a list of 17 people who
| reviewed SavantCare on Yelp, she found what she called "a
| suspicious pattern": 10 of them had reviewed the same dentist's
| office in Los Angeles, nine had raved about the same California
| wedding DJ company and five claimed to have visited the same
| Mountain View tattoo parlor. Five of the accounts, she noticed,
| had even reviewed the same moving company in Florida.
|
| SMH... I mean, how difficult is it for Yelp to catch this?!? Hire
| a high school student with interest in data analysis, and you'll
| catch these idiots quickly.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > Hire a high school student with interest in data analysis,
| and you'll catch these idiots quickly.
|
| _The calls are coming from inside the house!_
|
| It's not in Yelp's interests to try to catch this. At least in
| the short term.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| It's amazing the lengths someone will go to in order to avoid
| doing something when the incentives run in the opposite
| direction.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Most of the "Yelp is extortion" line comes from businesses that
| have had good reviews hidden (that they probably gave people
| discounts for, or paid for.) Every good hidden review is seen
| as an outrage.
|
| It'd be less controversial to kill _bad_ reviews like this
| (because bad reviews often can be extortion or attacks on
| competitors), but the users would notice and also bitch. [edit:
| even worse, businesses that got bad reviews deleted by talking
| to Yelp might be characterized as "in bed with" Yelp.] A Yelp-
| like business is no-win imo. Voting isn't much of a signal if
| you let anybody who happens to walk by vote.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yelp and friends DO catch tons of this, but the people doing it
| keep working and working until they get past the filter.
|
| Whereas if 1024core or bombcar posts a review, and it gets
| blocked/shitcanned/shadowbanned/ignored/never posted, we give
| up and move on with our lives, we have better things to do.
| Solvency wrote:
| "I mean, how difficult is it for Yelp to catch this?!?"
|
| The mistake you're making is assuming Yelp: * Wants to "fix"
| this problem. * Isn't actually complicit in this problem as a
| means to incentivize small business owners to sign up and pay
| for Yelp to help "manage their business profile".
| jiveturkey wrote:
| And the second mistake is (if they did care) thinking this
| wouldn't just result in an arms race. IMHO we _want_ easy to
| spot fake reviews. I _want_ flash to come back. It was so
| easy to block annoyances in that day. Now we have HTML5
| popups.
| hwayne wrote:
| IIRC Dan Luu had a post about this: sites _do_ catch a lot of
| this but there 's just so much out there that they can't catch
| it all, not without accidentally flagging genuine reviews and
| getting everyone mad at them.
| datadeft wrote:
| It is such an easy thing to solve with a blockchain. We do not
| need a 3rd part like Yelp. Just a chain with 2 actors,
| restaurants and reviewers.
| 2023throwawayy wrote:
| And that solves fake reviews... how?
| datadeft wrote:
| I am pretty sure that we can use clustering for that. As they
| said there was a clear pattern the restaurant recognized. If
| they had all the data it would be easy. The reviewer could
| also ask for a token from the restaurant before submitting
| the review or a signature, there are plenty of options.
| 2023throwawayy wrote:
| And what exactly does a blockchain provide here that a
| plain ole' database does not?
| datadeft wrote:
| Tamperproof history
| dwater wrote:
| It sounds to me like Yelp is upset that other businesses are
| trying to do the same thing they do. My friend was GM of a new
| local restaurant here, and at first they were getting lots of 4
| and 5 star reviews and almost none below that. But around the
| time they were contacted by a Yelp sales rep to start paying for
| promotion and advertising, the 4 and 5 star review stopped
| coming. My friend watched multiple people post reviews that never
| appeared. Then negative reviews started appearing from people
| that he knew never came in because he was working the host
| station all day. All this activity was reversed once they started
| paying for Yelp services. It's the kind of behavior that's
| impossible to prove for anyone outside of Yelp, and they of
| course claim they don't do it.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm curious what laws (if any) Yelp would have violated in that
| scenario.
|
| My non-lawyer intuition is that this is something like fraud,
| extortion, or racketeering.
|
| The parent comment doesn't mention the restaurant's location.
| Are the relevant jurisdictions are some combination of the
| following?
|
| (a) the restaurant's location
|
| (b) Yelp's HQ in the restaurant's country, and/or
|
| (c) Yelp's HQ in the U.S.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This has been known for like 10 years now. I can't believe
| anyone actually still uses or trusts Yelp reviews.
|
| There were lawsuits in the early 2010s over trying to reveal
| the identity of negative reviewers because so many restaurants
| were claiming they were fake/extortion.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Known to whom? You might be a sophisticated consumer but go
| hang out at the DMV and ask yourself how many of your fellow
| countrymen would really question yelp reviews.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Same story from a restaurant owning friend except the sales rep
| called him a second time offering to remove negative reviews as
| a service. Simple extortion like the mafia.
| vkou wrote:
| > It's the kind of behavior that's impossible to prove for
| anyone outside of Yelp, and they of course claim they don't do
| it.
|
| This kind of conspiracy would be _trivially_ uncoverable in the
| discovery phase of a lawsuit.
|
| I mean, I'm not saying that Yelp isn't doing this, but _if it
| is_ , it would bust right open the moment anyone sued them for
| anything related to this.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| You'd think there would be some whistleblowers after all of
| these years of the same allegations. Where are they?
| nedFlan wrote:
| I've heard this story more than once from business owners.
|
| Small biz across the world are subject to the reach of social
| media addicted primates with persecution complex. Few will
| take the risk of a review bomb or nobodies traveling to
| vandalize their business.
|
| It's not a new meme by any means:
| https://fortune.com/2015/04/07/yelp-reviews-controversy/
| api wrote:
| NDAs and threats to sue? If this is how Yelp does business
| they'd be very aggressive about enforcing that.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah that's the part I don't get too.
|
| It's normal for a new local restaurant to get a bunch of good
| reviews because locals are trying it for the first time and
| want to help. Then it's normal for reviews to drop off
| because every local who would leave a review, has. Then it's
| normal to start attracting negative reviews from people who
| have never visited because local competing restaurants have
| realized where the downtick in their own business has come
| from, and so start trashing the competition. And then the
| negative reviews stop because the competing restaurants were
| satisfied they'd left enough negative reviews.
|
| These stories have been going around about Yelp for over a
| decade at this point. And Yelp has churned through _so_ many
| salespeople... you 'd think there would have been _tons_ of
| credible whistleblowers by now if this were really how Yelp
| operated.
| axus wrote:
| Apparently Yelp will remove positive reviews that have been
| posted before, and save up negative reviews for publication
| after the advertising pitch; to be unpublished if
| advertising is paid for.
|
| They may not actually be writing the reviews, simply
| choosing when to publish or unpublish them, and in what
| quantities, and which to count for the overall rating.
|
| It doesn't matter who's casting the reviews, but who's
| counting them.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| If that's the case shouldn't there be at least one
| screenshot of this behavior happening? I've heard dozens
| of anecdotes over the years. You think that at least one
| restaurant owner would screenshot their rating and the
| number of reviews as soon as Yelp reaches out to
| 'suggest' advertising.
|
| The fact that this seems to be commonly-accepted
| knowledge without a single piece of evidence is strange
| to me.
| pempem wrote:
| In fairness running a restaurant is nearly a round the
| clock job. Running delivery and the online reservations
| is more. Managing reviews is even more.
|
| I agree that its hard to believe one restaurant hasn't
| tracked it yet but I think its more a confluence
|
| - are you good enough/ no dip in performance that you can
| claim this correlation or are you confident enough to go
| out saying that knowing you have to defend against ppl
| saying "well maybe you just suck now!"
|
| - did you have time to screenshot it when it was
| happening aka the day Yelp called and your dishwasher was
| out sick and your supplier of eggs upped their price
|
| - how long does the business even run. lots of
| restaurants close down and Yelp is not on a top ten list
| of concerns
|
| - if you're established then your focus is growing
| business not dealing with the mafia. maybe you pay them,
| maybe you double down on other channels like uber eats or
| a new location or whatever.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, that's all totally fair, but was there seriously
| not even _one_ -- out of the hundreds of thousands
| (millions?) of businesses -- business owner who managed
| to find the time to do this?
| kingofkyiv wrote:
| [dead]
| grumple wrote:
| Could be individual salespeople doing it, and probably
| without Yelp truly "knowing". I worked at a nationwide gym
| once upon a time, and it was common for salespeople to trick
| people into signing long term contracts.
| scythe wrote:
| This theory is better than most, considering that other
| organizations have used similar tactics to get the benefits
| of bad behavior while dodging responsibility, such as
| HomeVestors of America (aka "We Buy Ugly Houses"):
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/ugly-truth-behind-we-
| buy-...
|
| Amazon also somewhat infamously uses contracting
| organizations with scandalous labor practices.
|
| But to the contrary, these allegations have been levied
| against Yelp for _nearly a decade_ , and yet no real clear
| evidence of this happening deliberately at least once has
| appeared. Meanwhile, people have switched to Google
| Reviews, which also have a pay-to-play element (for
| visibility) and dubious corporate backing.
|
| One rather mundane explanation might be that people who
| click on restaurants near the top of the search results are
| just friendlier reviewers overall, while people who search
| to the fifth page are more picky.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| best guess: they have been NDA'd and the dirty work completed
| by temp workers or contractors.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| secrets can't be kept in any large corporation therefore this
| is a conspiracy theory
|
| of course secrets can be kept in large organizations, but
| it's funny how often that get repeated.
| treve wrote:
| I worked at Yelp in 2018, and the allegations were there, I
| would be extremely surprised that a secret like this could
| be kept if it were true. It was generally a pretty open
| culture which lots internal open cynicism. There was just 0
| evidence or even rumors internally this is true. I believe
| it's way more likely that the system is large enough to
| generate outliers that believe they're being targeted.
|
| However, hyper aggressive sales reps were there and while I
| don't have specific details, I know their methods were the
| cause of at least some people not comfortable staying
| there. They however would not have access to things like
| reviews.
| dnissley wrote:
| Is it possible that sales reps were using the publication
| of negative reviews by others as a tip-off of which
| businesses would then be more likely to purchase the
| service by which negative reviews could be removed? If
| so, the timing of those sales pitches along with negative
| reviews could make it seem like this is what was
| happening.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I mean, this isn't the CIA here. It's a tech company people
| are probably filing in and out of in about two years. And
| the salesmen are all meant to be in on it?
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Yeah, if pay incentives are there, and we're talking
| sales... They're not necessarily people of the highest
| esteem. And if the hiring party puts a little pressure on
| the candidate, I could definitely imagine a tight ship.
|
| A scrupulous person wouldn't join the Gestapo, y'know?
| emodendroket wrote:
| Most tech companies leak like sieves and the incentive
| isn't there after you're no longer being paid. It seems
| hard to believe it could be that airtight to me.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| I dunno, man. I've seen lots of FRA, OSHA, MSHA,
| corporate, and food safety violations over the years -
| but they benefit me and my peers because they're
| shortcuts to the metric target. It's a win-win and
| everybody keeps it quiet, and everyone is on to it. And
| these are businesses that aren't selecting for privity.
| jollyllama wrote:
| ITT: people who have never heard of NDAs
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| IANAL, but can an NDA legally bar someone from reporting
| a suspected crime to law-enforcement?
| zaphar wrote:
| No, But do _you_ want to fight that out in court?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I dunno. Guess it depends on how pissed off I was.
| jollyllama wrote:
| I don't think Yelp's practices constitute a crime in the
| USA. The crime of a hypothetical Mafia is when they
| threaten violence for not paying. Yelp just changes what
| their site says about your business, which isn't a crime
| unless you can prove slander (very difficult).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Spreading falsehoods is libel. Pretending they can't know
| the truth doesn't shield them from culpability.
| Especially when their entire business depends on
| suppressing negative reviews.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| In print, it's "Libel", not slander.
| mrbabbage wrote:
| Federal law protects whistleblowers who confidentially
| disclose trade secrets to law enforcement:
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1833
| dcsommer wrote:
| NDAs have nothing to do with this. Employees leak all
| kinds of stuff from tech companies all the time despite
| NDAs.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Who will they blow the whistle to?
|
| If they go to the media, even if they are 100% on the
| whistleblower's side, it'll be a week (at most) of slightly
| negative PR. People will forget, if they noticed in the first
| place.
|
| Is there a government body that will act on this? What will
| they do? A small fine? Would this actually go to court?
| NegativeK wrote:
| The point isn't that whistleblowing might put a sudden end
| to it; it's that nobody has ever blown a whistle, with
| evidence that isn't hearsay, ever.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah I find it a bit hard to believe. If you really think
| reviews are inauthentic it's not hard to click on their
| profiles and see. I find it hard to see much evidence for
| astroturfing. If anything I think it's fairly generous about
| not putting negative feedback front-and-center.
|
| That, and, as the article details, and I've seen in my own
| personal experience, business owners are extremely aggressive
| about trying to get you to take down negative reviews, which
| I'm sure not only gets people to take them down but also
| discourages people from writing them in the first place.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > which I'm sure not only gets people to take them down but
| also discourages people from writing them in the first
| place.
|
| I leave negative reviews for places that deserve them, and
| there's nothing they could ever do to get me to take it
| down, or discourage me from doing it. I doubt they could
| ever do anything that would make most people feel
| differently from me about that. In fact, I'd be pissed and
| just start leaving more negative reviews if they even
| thought of getting aggressive.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Well, sure, some will react that way. But some guy kept
| calling my wife and trying to intimidate her over my
| review. That probably works at least some of the time.
| And how many people want to go to court to defend
| themselves over a review? Seems like it's not worth the
| effort.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Oh, I thought you were talking about anonymous reviews,
| where the the businesses can respond but not contact me
| directly. I wouldn't leave a review where they would be
| able to contact me. And even if they did, I'd handle that
| scenario a bit differently. Sorry that happened to you.
| Solvency wrote:
| I am friends with 3 different businesses in my town. A
| baker, a cafe, and a small restaurant. All three of them
| have experienced the exact same thing. I've seen it happen
| first-hand on their accounts.
| jaktet wrote:
| So just to be clear, you unselected the default "yelp
| sort" and sorted by either review date or best or worst
| and they don't show up?
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sorry, not sure I understand the question. Part of what
| I'm saying is the default sort tends to be fairly
| generous to the business.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| If this is sufficiently widespread, seems like there's an
| opportunity for a honeypot operation.
|
| I.e.:
|
| (1) Guess at what information triggers this kind of
| shakedown by Yelp for a new business. E.g., credit-card
| sales data for new restaurants.
|
| (2) Set up a fake business that pushes all of those
| buttons. E.g., register a new restaurant business in the
| state; temporarily rent a space and maybe put up signage;
| generate realistic credit-card purchase data and/or cell-
| location data for fake customers.
|
| (3) Wait for the Yelp reviews to come in. [Possibly legal
| offence #1]
|
| (4) Wait for the Yelp sales call. [Possibly legal offence
| #2]
|
| (5) Turn down the sales offer.
|
| (6) Wait for the negative reviews. [Possibly legal
| offence #3]
|
| (7) Ask prosecutors to pursue criminal charges, and/or
| file a civil suit. Either way, get to the point of
| legally compelled discovery.
|
| I wonder if this would be a fun first project for a newly
| minted government prosecutor.
| trillic wrote:
| Back in the 70s, the Chicago Sun-Times did this with
| corrupt government agents by purchasing a bar.
|
| https://interactive.wttw.com/timemachine/mirage-tavern
| erehweb wrote:
| Seems like a lot of work for a speculative theory, given
| all the stuff government has to do.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The same place the tobacco companies kept their whistle-
| blowers for 30 years?
| 111111IIIIIII wrote:
| > _You 'd think there would be some whistleblowers after all
| of these years..._
|
| I wouldn't think so. In a society so rife with obvious scams
| everywhere you look, at every level in public and private
| sector orgs, it would be patently idiotic to trash your own
| career on account of a dishonest restaurant review operation.
|
| I wish we lived in a world where such bravery were
| meaningfully valued, but we don't. For any might-be
| whistleblowers, this reality has been made painfully clear in
| the time since the Snowden leaks nearly a decade ago, during
| which _nothing_ has changed.
| jstarfish wrote:
| The thing about whistleblowers is that nobody _actually_
| likes them. "Whistleblower" is to white-collar crime as
| "snitching" is to anything street-level.
|
| We "appreciate" them when they call foul on others, but you
| appreciate them a hell of a lot less when you have such
| moral crusaders in your own ranks. They aren't loyal to
| anybody but their own sense of self-righteousness and can't
| be trusted to keep their mouth shut if you piss them off
| after they discover dirt on you. They're only ever a
| liability.
|
| On the flip side, barring being vindictive it's not worth
| it to blow the whistle on anything unless you can prove it
| beyond all doubt and intend to pivot to motivational
| speaking for the rest of your career. Outside of the
| defense industry (the DoD _does_ pay generously to anyone
| tattling on Snowden /Teixera types), there is literally no
| incentive to speak out, and a lot of potential retribution
| you invite.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Very true. Whistleblowers' friends come and go, but their
| enemies accumulate.
|
| (I repurposed that from an aphorism about being in
| politics.)
| mock-possum wrote:
| what? _I_ like them.
|
| I don't get this automatic assumption that everyone is a
| hypocrite and no one is willing to face accusations of
| doing things wrong in their own life. I mean, is that how
| you operate? That's not how I do things. If I'm doing
| something wrong I _love_ finding out about it -
| otherwise, how will I eve do things right?
|
| if your goal for relationships with other people is to
| prevent them from discovering dirt about you then... I
| dunno man, I'm not sure how it's possible to live happily
| around other human beings with that kind of attitude.
| what kind of person does that make you?
| aphatankha wrote:
| [dead]
| wayne wrote:
| It's possible the sketchiness is caused by a restaurant's
| competitors (writing negative reviews, falsely flagging
| positive reviews, spamming) rather than Yelp proper.
| hoten wrote:
| That adds a bit more complexity to the problem, but it
| still remains that Yelp is running a platform that to some
| extent relies on the ability to abuse it.
| jrumbut wrote:
| There is an enormous gulf between a platform with abusive
| users and a platform where the operator uses it to engage
| in extortion.
| jaktet wrote:
| Just to be clear did you change from the default "yelp sort" to
| one of the other options? I don't know many small business
| owners but the one I did know that didn't pay Yelp had their
| default "yelp sort" results filled with negative reviews.
| Sorting by most recent the reviews were all positive and the
| one I left finally showed up.
| [deleted]
| annexrichmond wrote:
| I have seen this same claim so many times over the years and
| not once I have seen direct evidence of it, just hearsay. "My
| friend", "My wife's cousin", etc. How hard would it be to show
| before/after screenshots, timestamps of Yelp sales calls, etc.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| It's also really hard to tell if Yelp is doing it. I would
| absolutely believe there are third party scammers posing as
| Yelp
| Melatonic wrote:
| I would totally believe this. Probably not THAT hard to
| pose as a yelp salesmen and try to trick restaraunt owners
| into paying you. And of course the scammers could be quite
| good at gaming the review system.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Isn't this cause for defamation? Or is it protected under
| article 230?
|
| Even if it's not yelp doing it the fact that they are publicly
| advertising the reviews should make them culpable.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| There have been cases on exactly this, and the basic summary
| of the result is Yelp can do what it wants on it's own
| platform:
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=336153126478324.
| ..
|
| which ended with: The case was dismissed on appeal on the
| grounds that the complainants had not adequately proven (1)
| Yelp had wrongfully threatened economic loss by manipulating
| user reviews, (2) it was unlawful for Yelp to post and
| sequence both positive and negative reviews, (3) Yelp
| authored negative reviews, and (4) Yelp's conduct amounted to
| a violation of antitrust laws by threatening or harming
| competition.
|
| Yelp was also sued for false advertising (essentially saying
| they were a trusted, unbiased review source) which they
| somehow also won:
|
| https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-
| finally-d...
|
| anyway, I actively avoid Yelp reviews because of this
| chicanery.
| TimPC wrote:
| It's section 230 not article 230 but yes it's somewhat
| protected. You could go after the end user for defamation and
| you could probably use the legal system to force yelp to turn
| over identifying information from their logs if a judge
| agreed a comment was defamatory. But you'd have to go after
| the poster not after Yelp.
| ProAm wrote:
| > It's the kind of behavior that's impossible to prove for
| anyone outside of Yelp, and they of course claim they don't do
| it.
|
| Im surprised there hasnt been a class-action defamation suit.
| That would force discovery at least.
| bequanna wrote:
| It is easy to imagine that (some) Yelp sales reps are following
| an unofficial playbook to manufacture negative reviews around
| the time they engage prospects.
|
| If one sales rep is caught, easy for the company to label them
| a rogue, bad actor.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| A relative of mine owns an Air company that is as transparent
| and honest as they come (they've sent technicians who have no
| idea I'm related to the owner) and he was telling me they were
| a scam, but I had no idea that is how they work. I wonder how
| long until someone sues them for extortion.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I've heard the same stories from several local restaurants.
| With one added detail, which was consistent between the 3
| restaurants: The sales pitch was always $300/mo. to ensure they
| have only high ratings. When they don't pay the fee, the
| negative reviews start showing up, and the positive reviews
| start disappearing.
|
| It's such a consistent story it beggars belief that there's
| nothing there.
| asah wrote:
| Interestingly, I never hear this about TripAdvisor or Google
| / Google Maps...
| RajT88 wrote:
| Same. I'm sure there's claims out there, but they've got to
| be few, and I wouldn't imagine that _all of them_ have _all
| the same details_.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| [flagged]
| g9yuayon wrote:
| Wow, isn't this extortion. If this allegation were true,
| someone in Yelp should go to jail.
| gnicholas wrote:
| A bit of a side note, but this is super rare:
|
| > _Meanwhile, Dean took SavantCare to small claims court over the
| letter and calls she later received, and won a $275 judgment in
| March 2018 for "negligent infliction of emotional distress."_
|
| NIED claims are nearly impossible to win. In law school we were
| taught to point them out on issue-spotting questions, but that
| they were basically unwinnable.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I've heard a judge in CA say that emotional distress claims
| were not permissible in small claims court.
| pc86 wrote:
| That's either not the case (this was in California), or is
| for something "worse" than negligent infliction. As a sibling
| comment pointed out it's possible that this was a summary
| judgment so perhaps it isn't _technically_ emotional
| distress.
| dylan604 wrote:
| so you're claiming that since there was a win, that it was that
| egregious?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The article doesn't say whether Savant Care showed up. If
| they didn't show up it would have been a default judgement.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Not sure of the jurisdiction issues where the judgement was
| issued but the last time I looked into it you can't
| meaningfully collect a judgement from small claims court in
| my area.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The article also didn't say whether the judgement was
| collected, just that it was won.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Not egregious, certainly for the couple hundred dollars
| recovered. I was mostly pointing it out (1) because any
| lawyers here would find it interesting that someone,
| somewhere, once won on an NIED claim, and (2) so that non-
| lawyers wouldn't get the sense that NIED claims are winnable,
| in general. They are often tacked on to other, more legit
| claims, but they are very rarely won.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Egregious in the sense that it was so over the top obvious
| there was no other outcome but to award the win vs some
| minor squabble between two parties. Not that it was so
| egregious mountains of cash were expected.
| bombcar wrote:
| Judges in small claims court are much more lenient with
| petitioners (and defendants) than they are in "big real court".
|
| And it could have been a default judgement.
| ryanackley wrote:
| First and only Yelp review I ever left was three stars for an
| Indian restaurant in 2011. It was quickly hidden because "it
| didn't pass the bot filter" or something. I've never used it
| since as a reviewer or to find places. It lost all credibility on
| my first interaction with it.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Which is the flip side of aggressive removal of possible fake
| reviews people are clamoring for.
| hwayne wrote:
| Precision vs recall, the bane of our lives
| gnicholas wrote:
| I probably would have reacted the same way. But at the same
| time, Yelp's algorithm probably treats accounts with a track
| record as more legit than ones that were just created and then
| wrote a review. I wonder if they ever would have unhid your
| review if you had kept reviewing, or even just using the app to
| search for places to go.
| wccrawford wrote:
| My wife left a bad review for a restaurant and was stalked and
| harassed by the restaurant owner for years afterwards.
|
| Since she couldn't get Yelp to help with that, it makes _every_
| review suspect. It doesn 't take much of that behavior to
| convince people to only leave good reviews, and then they're
| basically useless.
| gnicholas wrote:
| How did they know your real name? Because they had your
| credit card and remembered you from your visit? Whenever I
| have a bad review to leave, I always wait a couple weeks, to
| minimize the chance they'll remember me...
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I had a restaurant owner out me by name in response to a Yelp
| review. I pointed out that her attitude toward customers like
| me tells the world everything they need to know. That place
| went out of business, guess it wasn't just me.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah I had a similar experience with a plumbing business I
| chose not to hire after their rude and aggressive salesman
| came and insulted me in some misguided bid to get me to sign
| a contract.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I hate to be dismissive, but this is kind of a "Water Is Wet"
| article. Does anyone really think online reviews are anything but
| totally gamed, bought, and paid for? It's kind of a Universal Law
| Of Spam: Any place on the Internet where users can add content
| _and_ where content might be profitable to someone, will
| eventually end up full of spam and paid-for content.
| hwayne wrote:
| Not everybody is online enough to know this!
| trabant00 wrote:
| Funny to find your post at the bottom of the thread.
|
| I tried to use a few apps for finding restaurants, compared
| their rating with the experience I had and concluded it's a
| waste of time and money.
|
| There's not even a need to know or understand anything about
| it. No insider info from Yelp, not experiencing it as a
| business owner. Just try and see for yourself.
| standardUser wrote:
| Of course some reviews are real, and there's an art to
| deciphering the wheat from the chaff. The problem is that
| there's the constant pressure you describe to drown out
| legitimate reviews or otherwise game the system, so that 'art'
| becomes more and more tricky and less reliable. I gave up on
| reading the Yelp tea leaves a long time ago, and other
| prominent ones like Google Maps and Tripadvisor have been
| getting worse over time. I can still usually intuit my way
| through Amazon and and Steam reviews, if there's enough reviews
| and I take my time.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Man I forgot about Yelp until I read this. Apparently its because
| its packaged inside Apple's "Walled Garden" Maps. Seems like they
| got a weed in there that needs to be picked.
| acumenical wrote:
| In the future, reviews will be automated, thus immunizing them
| from unsavory practices such as paid reviews. Your GPS-enabled
| wearable compute device will determine which establishment you
| patronized and for how long, and biometric data will determine
| whether you enjoyed your time there. These data will be
| "anonymized" and aggregated. "90% of [brand] Watch wearers like
| You experienced heightened happiness scores at this restaurant!"
| Trust in reviews will have been regained and the world will be a
| better place.
| morkalork wrote:
| Hello, [restaurant name], this is Alice from [brand] calling.
| Would you be interested in our premium marketing package?
| Features include enhanced filtering of "anomalous" (negative)
| happiness-score(tm) readings. The subscription costs only 1,337
| credits/month.
| acumenical wrote:
| Good point if the app was independent like Yelp. I envisioned
| this as a first party product from a more powerful company,
| which makes the Watch as well, that could then directly
| integrate the consumer/review data into their Maps app on
| their Phones and other devices.
|
| Alice from [brand] would then have to find a way to get
| customers to take off their watches or somehow artificially
| inflate their happiness scores. Or, funnel naturally happier
| people to their establishment, similar to lead sourcing.
| [deleted]
| kingofkyiv wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| Graziano_M wrote:
| Seeing the 'Moving company from Florida' triggered me. I was
| scammed by a moving company from Florida in 2020, and I did a
| deep dive to look into them and I found huge networks of moving
| companies, scammers, & reviewers, all in cahoots.
|
| I actually managed to get one company's fake reviews removed from
| google maps, bringing them from a 4.8+ to a 1.x overnight. Within
| a few months they were back to > 4, but the owners had sold the
| company and started a new one.
|
| It's insane how deep this goes. At best it's done by companies
| that want to cheat the system by getting an unfairly good review,
| but at its worst it's used to trick users into a false sense of
| confidence so that they can be scammed.
| kansface wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like Yelp et al chiefly facilitate fraud at this
| point.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's a protection racket. Total scam.
|
| If you have 20 minutes I did a show about it 2 years ago
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9rmh8O_ksM.
|
| I guess you can 2.0 speed that and get it done in 10.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dechvhb0Meo
| kristopolous wrote:
| The original model was as a long-form instagram live stream
| which I understand nobody did but I was being experimental.
| Basically a single shot, single take show on alternative
| platforms. The portrait format was to accommodate that media
| expectation.
|
| I made dozens of them ... they failed to gain traction. A few
| are over 100 views a couple years later (like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3byGVjPq468) but I have still
| failed to crack the world of social media. It's not zero ...
| that's nice I guess.
|
| I'm planning to do a reboot sometime soon. I took a couple
| weeklong trips around the country to some research libraries
| in the past year or so, but I'd like to execute differently
| to try to be more effective. This was my third show run
| attempt.
|
| I think I may need a new foil for my host. The guy I did the
| shows with is a longtime TV comedy writer
| (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1104065/) but he's not exactly a
| second city graduate.
| majormajor wrote:
| Good for her. Yelp's business model seems to work best if they
| can pick winners, which is unfortunate.
|
| If I search for "dinner" on Yelp for "current location" and look
| at the map, it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I
| can see within a mile if I drive down the street.
|
| And if your business model is centered around hiding all but the
| winners - who might pay for placement + reviews both - then you
| have to try to keep people from talking about it, and the moral
| interests just get worse and worse.
|
| Google Maps isn't any better; OpenTable seems the "least bad" of
| options I've looked at recently, at least for fancier
| reservation-having places, in terms of _actually showing my
| options_.
|
| (It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending"
| algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the
| ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place, when
| probably there's half a dozen other options within 10% of taste
| and quality, that some people very well could legitimately like
| better if they heard about them too.)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Yelp's business model seems to work best if they can pick
| winners,
|
| People must have read a different article than I did. This
| woman is finding tons of third-parties that are either posting
| fake positive reviews for money, or extorting businesses by
| writing bad reviews and offering to reverse them for money.
| She's looking for people who are trying to scam Yelp, or trying
| to scam businesses through Yelp.
|
| But HN seems stuck in a narrative (for a decade, not new) that
| Yelp is some sort of organized crime syndicate, and refuses to
| budge.
| majormajor wrote:
| "Picking winners" here doesn't mean Yelp is doing the faking
| themselves.
|
| I just mean that Yelp has chosen to filter and limit in
| addition to what I'm actually searching. It might be a
| conversion thing - if I have one really good match it's
| easier to decide than if they actually show me all 10.
|
| But it means it's _really really_ important to the business
| now to be that 1 that doesn 't get filtered.
|
| And THAT really increases the market for all these fake-
| review things.
| floren wrote:
| > It's a broader internet problem in general - "trending"
| algorithmic reinforcement stuff will push everyone towards the
| ONE TRUE BEST HOTTEST MOST POPULAR bbq/ramen/whatver place,
| when probably there's half a dozen other options within 10% of
| taste and quality, that some people very well could
| legitimately like better if they heard about them too.
|
| Instagram doesn't help -- gotta get a shot of me eating noodles
| at the hot new place! There's a new ramen shop in downtown San
| Mateo that has a 30-person line outside at all times... I can't
| imagine it's that much better than the half-dozen other ramen
| places within 3 blocks, but by god it's new, and anyway would
| people be lining up like this if it wasn't good? I better get
| in line too...
| oefrha wrote:
| > and anyway would people be lining up like this if it wasn't
| good?
|
| That's why new restaurants hire people to line up outside.
| sophacles wrote:
| Back in my bar-tending days we always told the door staff
| (bouncers) to slow down when checking IDs early in the
| evening, just to get a line going. It works surprisingly well
| for drawing in more customers.
|
| Totally tangential but follow-ups on that psychology:
|
| * some people would walk in and see the still mostly-empty
| bar and get fed up that they waited in line for "nothing".
| This was surprisingly few people though.
|
| * some people would ask and buy just about any explanation -
| "oh that guy is new and still learning", "we had someone get
| in on a fake ID and got a fine the other day so the guys are
| just being careful" or whatever and the people would be glad
| they got in early to get a good spot.
|
| * sometimes we'd slow down the bar staff a bit too so that
| there was a line to buy drinks and people were happier that
| they had to wait in line again - confirming their bias that
| they must have gotten in at the start of the rush.
|
| * some people were wise to the scam and everyone who called
| us on it thought it was great. They often offered to have
| their buddies come through the line a few times in exchange
| for a free drink.
|
| * for some reason when you let your buddies, regulars and
| off-shift staff cut the line and get in quick, the rest of
| the folks seemed more willing to wait in the line.
|
| tl; dr - group psychology of humans is wierd.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Utterly bizarre, yes. I think the psychological term for
| this is "social proof", and it applies to all sorts of
| weird things. For instance -- a person who is getting lots
| of flirty attention in public will tend to appear more
| attractive to others. Not because they are, but because
| seeing them get attention is social proof that they're
| worthy of attention.
|
| Once I became an old fart, I started seeing these lines as
| a sign to move on. The question in my mind (at any age) was
| always "is the place worth waiting in line for?" But these
| days, I already know from years of experience that the
| answer is very likely "no".
|
| Skipping the line has improved my nights out, though,
| because in looking for an alternative, I frequently find
| hidden gems and can enjoy them before the rest of the city
| discovers them.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Once I became an old fart..._
|
| This has been a process for me. I still occasionally
| succumb to the silliness, but for the most part when I
| see a line, my reaction is, "meh, I'm hungry/thirsty now;
| let's go somewhere else". One thing that's telling is
| that some of the places I already know I really enjoy
| rarely have lines or are completely busy.
|
| And absolutely agree that you often find hidden gems that
| way. A lack of a line will often just mean the business
| is too inexperienced or honest to use some of the
| psychological manipulation practices the GP talks about.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| It gets worse. People have been 'following' the ratings when
| they rate foods.
|
| A popular local restaurant came under new management and their
| food is now atrocious. We actually threw their food in the
| garbage after getting takeout there a month ago.
|
| Meanwhile, tourists are still leaving thousands of rave reviews
| on their google maps page. Noticeably, you will see one or two
| bad reviews every 50 reviews or so, where a person comments
| about their confusion about the restaurants score.
| Fogest wrote:
| Yep, a local pub used to give large portion sizes on in
| person or takeout orders. Then one day we ordered and it was
| like half the size as normal but of course the same price.
| Thought it was maybe just a fluke so we gave them a second
| chance. Unfortunately the portions will still the same
| smaller size. I proceeded to update my review to indicate the
| change in portion sizes with the same price. However I
| noticed many older reviews still indicating large portion
| sizes as well as even new reviews saying it. Because many new
| people wouldn't even have the comparison to how it used to
| be.
|
| So you're getting both new reviewers (or travelers) who don't
| know it used to be better who still call it good, mixed with
| old reviews calling it good.
|
| It's not even just a management change that causes this. This
| is when you almost wish Google maps would put your location
| history to use. It sees you visit the place frequently and
| thus if you stop visiting and leave a negative review it
| should weigh that review higher and give it more visibility.
| An old stale review or a review from someone who visited once
| I don't think should be as impactful or useful on the
| experience.
|
| Overall I find discovering new places to be frustrating as
| reviews often seem useless. Usually I find the best method of
| discovering new places is still via word-of-mouth in person.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are
| many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging
| up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of
| the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt
| ones, this.
|
| The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
|
| This is:
|
| Change.
|
| Read it through again and you'll get it."
|
| -- Douglas Adams, _So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish_
|
| _Any_ information repository eventually comes to face the
| problem that the phenomena it is describing is no longer the
| same, for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons.
| TX81Z wrote:
| First time I used OpenTable I went to a highly rated and
| expensive place, had horrible food, and then my wife spent most
| of mothers day in bed with food poisoning. 0/10.
| madrox wrote:
| This makes me wonder if Yelp is the problem or reviews as a
| mechanic.
| awiejrliawjer wrote:
| I'm always amazed when I search for any generic term on Google
| Maps at how many places I know about don't show up in search
| results. What a shame. They clearly ran out of new ideas years
| ago.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Also malicious reviews by competitors.
| jahnu wrote:
| For a related issue check out W Brian Arthur's El Farol problem
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Farol_Bar_problem
|
| He also talked about this on Mindscape
|
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/08/23/161-...
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _it leaves out an astonishing number of places that I can see
| within a mile if I drive down the street_
|
| That's because it's not sorting by closest, it's sorting by
| best results. This isn't a bug, it's a feature.
|
| If you go to the next page of search results, you'll see the
| next 20.
|
| If you want to prioritize closer, just zoom the map in.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| This is why Craigslist does great. They take a small fixed fee
| on volume and don't favor listings.
|
| A good restaurant directory - some exist for restaurant niches,
| but none in general - could clean up with non-obtrusive ads if
| the focused on completeness and accuracy with a fairly minor
| feature set. It would just require having enough capital and
| time to establish social trust.
|
| Curating reviews is just broken, just like SEO has turned out
| to be. It is unavoidably gameable. Yelp seems like a zombie
| site. They are free-riding on their prior reputation and
| gradually spending it away to acquire revenue. When the
| reputation is gone, the revenue will be, also.
| eep_social wrote:
| Zagat was a decently good restaurant directory but Google
| bought it, didn't do much with it, and then sold it to some
| shitty app maker.
| stevespang wrote:
| [dead]
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| Google Maps is terrible for hiding results. I'll use the filter
| to show restaurants with a 4.5+ star rating, and it hides
| dozens of places 4.5+ stars while instead showing results 4.0 -
| 4.4 stars and even some that have no reviews at all. I find the
| arrogance insulting. You want to see 4.5+ star Japanese food
| restaurants? Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm
| going to replace some of those results with 4.1 star Caribbean
| food restaurants that you'll like instead.
| telchior wrote:
| I despise Google Maps for this. I can know that a restaurant
| exists, zoom in on its block, search 'restaurants' --
| nothing. It'll zoom out the map and show other stuff. Worse,
| I can max my zoom and hunt for it on the map and it will
| outright show a blank space. Only searching for the
| restaurant's actual name will bring it up.
|
| But there's not really any alternative. Apple Maps can't show
| me things because it's missing the entries entirely. Yelp
| became useless years ago. I feel like we're going back in
| time because the best way to find local restaurants has
| become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see
| what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations.
| titzer wrote:
| Just wait until they control AR/XR. You'll see only what
| they want you to see.
|
| Search-based interfaces with ranking, controlled by someone
| else, are all screaming to be gamed and monetized. We
| should hate this but we don't.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Internet search in general has severely declined in 2023. I
| was trying to figure out the syntax for putting a URL in
| slack the other day and couldn't find a proper article
| anywhere in the top 10 results.
|
| I think they are trying to integrate their bard UI into
| search and it is killing the results.
|
| At this point, I use google to search reddit in order to
| find organic results. Unfortunately, that will probably be
| taken over by spammers soon enough.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I feel like we're going back in time because the best way
| to find local restaurants has become walking / driving
| around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting
| word of mouth recommendations.
|
| Let's face it, that never stopped being the best way. There
| have always been problems with internet reviews, if only
| the ones inherent in the 1-5 star mechanism. But, it is
| very inconvenient to ask around for recommendations when
| you're (for example) hungry and passing through an unknown
| town or something. So I get why we need a source that isn't
| completely unreliable.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| Google maps is also terrible at showing _only_ relevant info.
| I searched for "coffee" in a small area earlier today (small
| because I wanted to walk); it zoomed out to a much larger
| area and showed me coffee shops along with taquerias, oil
| change shops, banks, etc. both in the results pane and
| scattered all over the map. It was such a mess as to be
| unusable.
| sjf wrote:
| Thank you, this is a huge problem with maps search results.
| It's showing too many results and the ranking is rubbish.
| Searching for coffee shows tons of low quality results
| including ones for Target and McDonald's.
| pests wrote:
| I mean, McDonald's does have coffee. I wouldn't say that
| is incorrect.
| palidanx wrote:
| Weird thing is I began comparing things like Uber Eats
| reviews and Google Maps reviews for local Asian restaurants,
| and I see things in Google Maps are reviewed substantially
| lower.
|
| For example some of my favorite Asian restaurants in the city
| are rated 3.5ish while Uber Eats is rated like 4.7. It leads
| me to believe a lot of people are rating Google Maps
| restaurants also based on service. One in particular
|
| https://www.ubereats.com/ca/store/china-lan-lanzhou-beef-
| noo... (4.7)
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/GnLmwJNRjBHP9UnN8 (3.9)
|
| This place is awesome, and personally have experienced bad
| service but don't really care, so I do understand the Google
| Maps rating, but do find the whole rating system not helpful
| for me as I'm interested in good food and willing to accept
| bad service.
| newah1 wrote:
| I hesitate to suggest that this may indicate there aren't
| that many 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants. Even great
| resaurants in my area struggle to break the 4.5 barrier.
| freetinker wrote:
| Perhaps. But then why not just say "no results found"?
| Because that might give the impression to the "average"
| user that Google is broken and isn't solving their problem.
| To the more sophisticated user, Google is just meddling
| where they shouldn't.
|
| Google is proving the central limit theorem by catering to
| the average.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Google long ago decided that "No results found" is never
| an acceptable response. Same with regular Google search.
| It will just choose arbitrary things to show you instead.
|
| It's one of the things that has reduced the usefulness of
| these tools.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| At least here where I live, Foodora and similar have ruined
| what was left of the Google ratings for any place offering
| take-away, because there's ton of 1 star reviews which
| concerns the transport.
|
| At least viewing the most recent comments and reading the
| comment that goes with it helps figuring out if it might be
| a decent place or not... at least sometimes.
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| Changing the zoom level will typically show these missing
| results. For example, I just checked my neighborhood. There
| are 5 restaurants within a few hundred feet of each other
| rated 4.5+ stars. With my filters set to 4.5+ stars, when I
| zoom out a bit, 4 of the 5 restaurants disappear, and I
| instead see a handful of 4.1 and 4.3 star restaurants. One
| of the 4.3 star restaurants is literally next door to a 5
| star and 4.5 star restaurant, which are hidden at that zoom
| level.
|
| I thought maybe it's some kind of weighted rating, because
| it's showing me the 4.3 star restaurant with 1,100 reviews,
| instead of the 4.5 star restaurant with 600 reviews. So,
| perhaps Google thinks the additional number of reviews make
| up for the lower rating, and they rank it higher, even
| though I'm specifically asking to not see those results.
| However, it also shows a 4.4 star restaurant with 40
| reviews, while hiding a 4.5 star restaurant with 90
| reviews.
|
| This is par for the course when it comes to modern
| recommendations though. Do you want to see Netflix movies
| released in the past 3 years? Or what about a simple list
| of top rated movies? Too bad, you can watch what we tell
| you to watch. It's a complete lack of respect for the user.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| It could also be recent ratings; I think it is reasonable
| to weight old reviews lower than new ones given
| restaurants can change a lot over the months and years.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's so frustrating to find the perfect restaurant by chance
| and find it on the map directly when it didn't show up in a
| very targeted search of the same map.
|
| There's also a lot of brigading on Maps. You'll see 5 1-star
| reviews in a row, and realize they are either duplicate
| accounts or friends who are all reviewing the same
| experience.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I assumed Yelp reviews can't be trusted from day one. It's
| obviously a huge target for gaming and scamming, pretty much any
| review site is. I include Angie, and similar sites in that as
| well.
| bborud wrote:
| I deleted the Yelp app after a few too many bad restaurant
| experiences AND the fact that they removed reviews I wrote that
| were factual and helpful.
| exabrial wrote:
| I don't use the reviews, just the listings. One of my favorite
| local restaurants purposefully asks for one star reviews on yelp,
| as they were listed there without their consent.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Such a great idea. You won't get new customers via Yelp this
| way, but you will generate some word-of-mouth that could offset
| that impact.
|
| However, this strategy only works if a very small number of
| businesses use it. Once the novelty wears off, the word-of-
| mouth benefit vanishes.
| hexo wrote:
| Who does really use Yelp? I've seen no one. Is it just US-only
| thing, or?
| cromulent wrote:
| This article about TripAdvisor immediately comes to mind.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-to...
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _A Yelp post from December 2017 was the first crucial clue.
| "Melissa R." wrote, "I was offered money to leave a positive
| review for Savant Care Clinic. Must be a shady company." The user
| attached Craigslist screenshots of the apparent offer, which Dean
| took her own screenshot of just before Yelp removed the post for
| violating its terms of service._
|
| Why would Yelp forbid people from talking about this? While it is
| certainly possible to create fake email screenshots, this seems
| like a relatively small risk compared to the much more common
| risk that's being called out here.
|
| I guess they just don't want people to know how common this type
| of occurrence is, since it would undermine all trust in their
| platform.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm guessing the ToS violation was that the review wasn't about
| an actual visit to the business, but was just a report of a
| Cragslist ad the user saw about buying reviews.
|
| I agree that this sort of information is useful for potential
| patrons to have, but can understand that Yelp wants their
| reviews to be about actual visits.
| wnissen wrote:
| I think they tend to interpret anything that makes Yelp look
| bad as a violation. The owner of a wine store I bought
| thousands of dollars of wine from was arrested for running a
| $45 million Ponzi scheme (and eventually went to prison for
| years). I immediately put up a review, and Yelp took it down
| because the arrest wasn't my personal experience. Never mind
| that I had to get refunded by my credit card company. I was
| doing a public service, as a customer, and Yelp wouldn't let
| me. I took down all my reviews and deleted my account.
| spiznnx wrote:
| Yelp's stated policy is to remove reviews by people who didn't
| actually directly interact with the business, regardless of the
| content.
| gnicholas wrote:
| So if I went to a business and was solicited by an employee,
| I could mention that in a review without it being taken down?
| trifurcate wrote:
| The risk (mostly) isn't fake email screenshots, the risk is
| that I create postings for (or even commit to paying for fake
| reviews for) my competitor, and tarnish their reputation. It's
| hard to establish provenance of such an arrangement.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I think we're thinking the same thing -- that someone would
| (on their own or for money) write a review claiming that an
| innocent business had tried to pay for a good review, or take
| down a bad review. This could happen, but it's just as easy
| to pay someone to write a review saying the service/food/etc.
| was lousy. Why spend more time faking an email screenshot?
|
| But from Yelp's perspective, a paid-for review claiming bad
| food is just fine, because it only tarnishes the restaurant's
| reputation. On the other hand, a claim of fraudulent review
| manipulation hits both the business and Yelp's reputations.
| yifanl wrote:
| It'd be easy for a reader to ignore a review about the
| quality of food since that's subjective on the reviewer's
| personal tastes.
|
| A review claiming paid-for-fraud isn't so easy to wave off.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's not in Yelp's interest to publish content that undermines
| the credibility of their entire product.
| Tycho wrote:
| Reviews are just text associated with a date and a place. Seems
| like someone should be able to build a simple app or website that
| the public can use and trust for reviews, that doesn't cost much
| to run. We don't need huge businesses liek TripAdvisor (which
| mysteriously doesn't let you sort results any more). There's a
| few challenges. Fake reviews is one. Also the self-selection bias
| - people generally only feel compelled to leave a review after a
| bad experience. Or, being supportive, will be overly generous
| with the rating.
|
| Perhaps if the review site could somehow prompt recent patrons of
| a set of establishments to not rate but _rank_ the
| establishments, then some algorithm could convert that into a
| global score /ranking. You, an otherwise disinterested citizen,
| receive an email or text asking you to rank restaurants A, B, C
| which you have recently visited. You are incentivised to respond
| by a prize draw or something. Would this work? The hard part I
| suppose is getting the contact details of the potential
| reviewers.
| balderdash wrote:
| I think I'm more surprised that anyone places any faith in a yelp
| review
| warrenwilliams wrote:
| [dead]
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i never use yelp, i can typically tell what a restaraunt is like
| by the name and pictures on google, and whether they serve craft
| beer or brand names, i don't look at reviews or how much it costs
| bilater wrote:
| Reminds me of this rule of thumb when navigating Yelp:
| https://twitter.com/fwong/status/1569736492247044103
| jroseattle wrote:
| The entire fake-review cottage industry harkens back to web
| search before Google was a thing. Search results were being gamed
| as implied relevance, ultimately making Yahoo and Excite and Alta
| Vista also-rans.
|
| Online reviews need their Google-search moment. Something that
| levels the playing field, establishes a mechanism for
| credibility, and doesn't require an extortion-based business
| model.
| louzell wrote:
| Go Kay Dean! Yelp should hire her and give her a team. It's a
| win-win. She is clearly passionate about the problem, and
| effective. Yelp gains added trust of their bread and butter, the
| review system.
| arbuge wrote:
| While on the subject, are there any review sites anywhere, not
| just for locations but also of products, that can be trusted?
|
| It seems to me that all of them can be and actively are gamed.
|
| Googling using the extension site:reddit.com caught on for a
| reason.
| 78124781 wrote:
| I keep seeing people swear by the NY Times' Wirecutter and they
| do have a much more upfront set of standards for reviewing
| products, but I've actually been pretty underwhelmed by the
| recommended buys from them. Still, I respect that they're
| trying. Wish that Consumer Reports was more easily available
| now too.
| zerocrates wrote:
| My unscientific feeling is that Wirecutter's gotten worse:
| less rigorous testing (particularly for reliability), more
| arbitrary reasoning behind their choices and what things are
| dealbreakers, more products excluded. A lot of things they
| seem to basically just pick some popular brands, talk about
| Amazon reviews, etc.
|
| They also seem to have a much broader range of things covered
| now, so I think the strategy was to go cheaper, faster,
| wider.
| chasebank wrote:
| Not that I'm aware of. Reddit/HN has been compromised for years
| but I guess it's better than the alternatives. Whoever solves
| trustworthy, honest reviews will be a very, very rich person.
| bombcar wrote:
| Anything that works gets gamed, the only real possibility would
| be various sites that are so absolutely local that attempts to
| game them would be painfully obvious.
| gaucheries wrote:
| > Yelp, founded in San Francisco in 2004, is deeply entrenched in
| American consumer habits
|
| is it really? couldn't tell you the last time i loaded yelp.com
| on purpose.
| kelnos wrote:
| Your experience may not be the general American experience. It
| is a bit ridiculous that I need to point this out.
| NegativeK wrote:
| People reading HN are not the average American.
| xyst wrote:
| I am surprised a yelp/google alternative has not been created
| with a feature to establish provenance of a review. Perhaps
| something like a receipt which contains a unique link and that
| person can provide a review through the link.
|
| The review will be posted as "verified transaction" on the site
| and overall score of the restaurant is determined from there.
| "Anonymous" reviews can still be posted but won't be factored
| into the overall score and will be deprioritized by the
| system/algorithm.
|
| Of course this does not necessarily stop businesses from pumping
| out fake transaction tickets and offering users to write fake
| reviews. But at least a paper trail would be established; and if
| a historically 1-2 star business with verified transactions and
| 1-2 reviews per day suddenly sees a spike to 4-5 stars with 10+
| reviews per day over the same period. Then it can be flagged as
| suspicious and team can review the paper trail.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I actually worked for a startup that did this, albeit it wasn't
| public-facing, rather we'd incentivize people to leave reviews
| in exchange for a coupon code or whatever
|
| Turns out a lot of restaurant owners would prefer to straight
| up own the reviews/influence it themselves rather than get
| legitimate, anonymized ones. There's just not that much of a
| reason to genuinely improve as a service when there's so much
| cutthroat competition
| janalsncm wrote:
| Additionally, once you start creating a paper trail it starts
| to look more and more like a concerted criminal fraud
| operation. Yours is a good idea.
| [deleted]
| TimPC wrote:
| I worked on a start-up that was basically a Yelp competitor with
| a less-bad business model. Unfortunately, all the incentives in
| the business are about boosting the performance of your paying
| customers relative to free businesses on the platform. While we
| never went as far as faking reviews or helping businesses
| eliminate bad reviews and we at least were clear to customers
| about our search lists being curated rather than complete, there
| were clear pressures towards all the things that lead to Yelp
| being the shit-show that it is.
| irskep wrote:
| Edit: I would have loved to add to the conversation, but people
| do love their pitchforks and I should be working instead of
| commenting on HN. :-)
|
| Admitting you worked for Yelp on HN: not even once
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > It's amazing to me how many people have conspiracy theories
| about Yelp reviews, when in reality it's just really hard to
| determine good vs bad actors in review systems and it's
| possible to do a bad job as an engineer.
|
| When cards are cloned, it's exceptionally easy for a bank to
| determine which merchant is compromised by looking for common
| denominators.
|
| Take three actors.
|
| What are the odds that two of them have reviewed one business,
| and only that business? Pretty high. All good. Same for all
| three.
|
| Now, what are the odds that two of them have only reviewed two
| businesses, and both businesses are the same, on both accounts?
| Still decent, sure. All three actors, same two businesses
| reviewed, and only them? Getting a little dicier.
|
| Two actors, seemingly independent, have each reviewed three
| businesses only. And they've reviewed the same three
| businesses, in the same order. And perhaps they each reviewed
| the first business, then two weeks later, the second business,
| and then the third. Odds? Getting pretty slim now. A third
| actor, doing the same? You're stretching the bounds of
| credulity for sincere reviews.
|
| This stuff is basic probability theory. Looking across reviews
| for sets and unions of reviews and reviewers, and increasing
| the number of reviews, but still seeing commonality between
| them points to SOME malfeasance worthy of review.
| mtlynch wrote:
| This comment is fairly dismissive of GP's experience and
| intelligence. If you think you can solve a problem just by
| spitballing it, and GP's team at yelp couldn't figure it out
| for years, either you're much smarter than everyone on their
| team or you're underestimating the problem.
|
| I worked on an anti-fraud team in a similar role, and I agree
| with GP that it's a harder problem than people realize. It's
| easy to come up with a simple metric that would identify the
| fraud that you observe, but you don't know what false
| positives it would catch as collateral damage.
|
| Like this example that you find wildly implausible:
|
| > _Two actors, seemingly independent, have each reviewed
| three businesses only. And they 've reviewed the same three
| businesses, in the same order. And perhaps they each reviewed
| the first business, then two weeks later, the second
| business, and then the third. Odds? Getting pretty slim now.
| A third actor, doing the same? You're stretching the bounds
| of credulity for sincere reviews._
|
| I think it's highly likely that if you used this metric to
| find patterns, you'd find fraud, but you'd also find lots of
| legitimate reviews (e.g., friends who go to the same
| restaurants together, friends who recommend restaurants to
| each other).
| kelnos wrote:
| > _This comment is fairly dismissive of GP 's experience
| and intelligence._
|
| I don't have the full text of that comment, as they've
| edited it our, so I don't know specifically what they said.
| But perhaps they just don't know everything about how Yelp
| operates; it's not a small company where everyone knows
| everything.
|
| I also know someone who previously worked at Yelp, and
| they've talked about some of Yelp's shady internal
| practices. Everything is not all above-board there.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I can see some ways that might go awry (what if I like
| reviewing every new restaurant that opens?). But more
| importantly, bad actors will figure out and work around each
| heuristic like this you make.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Of course they will, but that shouldn't negate the need to
| identify and shut down interactions which are quite
| definitively problematic.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Another way of saying what I'm trying to say is that at
| any given time, no matter how much they keep heaping on
| new heuristics, there will be some missed cases that
| should be obvious to a human observer.
| 8note wrote:
| > When cards are cloned, it's exceptionally easy for a bank
| to determine which merchant is compromised by looking for
| common denominators.
|
| Is it actually? My bank calls me to ask which transactions
| were mine and which ones werent, thus requiring outside
| feedback
| FireBeyond wrote:
| That's your perspective. That's when -your- behavior
| doesn't match your previous behavior.
|
| What they are looking for in a different context is
| "Customer A reported unauthorized transactions, and so did
| Customers B through D. Each of these customers, prior to
| these reports, all had a transaction occur at XYZ gas
| station, so is there a skimming problem at that gas
| station?"
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, the only way you could have it work perfectly would be
| actually manually reviewing each review. Which would make the
| business model not work.
| winrid wrote:
| It doesn't matter what you did as an engineer, and in fact
| automation isnt really a big part of the discussion.
|
| If sales people etc have special access to add or remove
| reviews, which they do, or at a minimum leave negative reviews
| themselves when you don't pay, it is corrupt. It is well
| documented at this point that they do this.
| emodendroket wrote:
| That's not what the article describes at all so I'm curious
| what documentation you are referring to.
| winrid wrote:
| There are so many people complaining about the sales people
| doing this stuff.
|
| https://youtu.be/C67Lh4LE5LY
| BonoboIO wrote:
| What can you say about these accusations brought up in this
| thread?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36329248
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| Sort of beside the point, but I wanted to say how much I love the
| subject's whole vibe (to say nothing of her excellent mission).
| Her home and attire give me strong nostalgic feelings of late-80s
| after-church events in the SF Bay Area.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Yelp is a cesspool of garbage at this point. I ignore it whenever
| it's in my search results after they started forcing me to their
| app.
| fernly wrote:
| Posted article couldn't trouble to link Ms. Dean's actual
| channel. Here it is:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@fakereviewwatch
|
| It's pretty good stuff. She builds a devastating case very
| methodically, showing how the identical glowing review text is
| posted to yelp, to FB, and to Google, by different users -- and
| then traces other reviews posted by those same user ids showing
| how they are plagiarizing Tripadvisor posts.
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