Real People. Real Reviews. Real Extortion Scheme? | Hacker News Reader

Real People. Real Reviews. Real Extortion Scheme?

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43 pointskolosy39 comments

There is definitely room in the market for a new Yelp, one that is trusted and won't erase bad reviews. I'd like to see something where reviews decay over time though, similar to the HN frontpage. Once a review is "off the frontpage" long enough, it shouldn't be publicly accessible anymore. This would allow small businesses to regain their online reputation after a bad period.

Anyway, too bad for Yelp that there isn't somebody in the gov't they could pay $300/month to make this bad lawsuit go away...

Reviews aren't meant to decay quickly, sure a restaurant could improve over time but many do not and creating online accounts or hiring people for fake reviews is most likely easier and cheaper.

I'm not saying that they need to decay quickly, just that there should be some notion of decay on reviews. Reviews from last year are not as important as those from last week, especially for a food establishment. You're right though, there does have to be protections in place against gaming too.

The problem is though, that every company will get some 1-star reviews, and there has to be some mechanism for them to get erased (eventually). This mechanism should be open, clear, and well known, not $300/month to the rating company. Otherwise, once a long-running, good company gets some critical mass of negative/crazy customers leaving 1-star reviews, they'd have to close or rename or something in order to get back that unfairly lost traffic.

Except for all the people who read the bad reviews, then write their own bad reviews without even going to the restaurant. I gave up on Yelp long ago after realizing that many of the reviews could not possibly be written by people who had eaten there.

The big problem with these type of review sites is that it's pretty difficult to guarantee review authenticity. A competitor could post a bad review of your business, you could post a shiny review of your own business, nimrods who've never purchased anything from you can write a bad review, etc.

When there's more money involved, and when the business community being reviewed is more specific and defined it has proven to be very useful and successful. I.e. Angie's List.

Anonymous web reviews were useful once upon a time before the web grew up, and marketers started gaming the system en masse.

What I'd pay for is a sort of premium search tool that guarantees the authenticity of everything it serves up.

Why do you think Yelp is actually erasing bad reviews? It seems most likely that this is sour grapes from business that are unhappy with poor reviews, rather than any wrongdoing on Yelp's part.

I've deleted the Yelp app from my iPhone. It seemed like a good idea early on, but I don't feel that I can trust the results any more, and it's not worth the trouble.

It's a bummer because I travel a lot for work, so it was nice to be able to find local businesses.

i've found locale-specific sites to always be better. unfortunately that does require knowing what they are if you travel.

It's really too bad Google didn't buy them; I don't fundamentally trust Google that much more, but I do trust that Google doesn't care more about the pennies it would get from hard-selling small business than it does about the avalanche of cash it gets selling advertising to everyone.

There is, however, a special place in hell reserved for the people whose business model revolves around squeezing mom and pop businesses. It is an endless Wal Mart, stretching as far as the eye can see, inhabited by zombie greeters armed with 24-can value packs of flaming caustic Dow distinfectant spray.

you know - these rumors were already flying by then... wonder if they had any impact on the outcome.

There is, however, a special place in hell reserved for the people whose business model revolves around squeezing mom and pop businesses.

I don't know why mom-and-pop businesses should get a free pass on everything. They seem to think that because running a small business is not particularly profitable, that they shouldn't have to pay taxes, they shouldn't have to provide customer service, they shouldn't have reasonable hours, and that I should worship them for providing me with such a valuable service.

I like local businesses, but it was nice to see the last recession kill some of the crappy ones off.

(The ones I frequent that have good ratings on Yelp are the ones that deserve good ratings. The people working there tend to be super-nice, and that makes people want to rate them highly. The places with low ratings deserve the low ratings.)

They don't deserve a free pass on anything. They do deserve not to be bullied by businesses with massively more resources in ways that don't improve market efficiency.

I have no problem with Wal Mart killing off neighborhood True Value hardware stores; that has a demonstrable benefit (though perhaps not one I'd choose) for consumers.

I have a clear problem with a parasitic business extracting cash from a neighborhood cafe. I don't benefit from that at all; in fact, nobody does except for the parasite.

The business doesn't lose anything by not playing Yelp's game. You would still go to the cafe if it had a few bad reviews on Yelp, and so would I. (Then again, I read the content of reviews rather than the arbitrary star rating. If someone says "1 star, I ordered a salad and hated it because I hate vegetables" then I am not going to think negatively of the business that has this review attached. I am going to think, "damn people are dumb".)

my issue isn't impact on the guys that don't play, it's impact on the consumer from the guys that do. a crappy restaurant that has 5 star reviews because the bad ones were paid off hurts me financially.

If you are letting random people on the Internet hurt you financially, you are doing something else wrong. Take everything you read with a grain of salt.

hurt financially == going to a restaurant/store/{insert random b&m service provider here} that i shouldn't have gone to, and spend more time/money + get worse service/product out of as a result.

isn't the whole point of a review system to influence people's decisions?

In the end, you hurt yourself financially. What if there was no review system at all?

... then i would use other, less centralized and organized sources, as i did before yelp existed. what's your point?

i'm certainly not saying that yelp is stealing money from me, but trusted (yes, only to a certain extent) information is trusted information. if misleading, there are consequences to the consumer.

What I'm saying is that review sites are misleading even when reviews aren't being paid for. Paying people to write reviews makes the data no worse than it already was, because it was already pretty bad.

but that's not what's happening - they're not paying people to write reviews, they're (allegedly) collecting money for removing unfavorable reviews. i think that's more damaging.

that would be incredibly damaging. luckily we don't actually do that.

The thesis of your argument is thus that Yelp has no reason to exist. We differ on the reasons but agree on the conclusion. Let's call it a push.

I was looking for dedicated server hosting the other day, and that market is just ridiculously full of bad, stupid reviews.

"This dedicated server provider is terrible! They wouldn't even help me with a mysql problem" etc.

I'm sure half the hosting co reviews are done by competitors, and the other half are done by idiots who don't understand anything. And of course all the satisfied customers can't be bothered to write reviews.

It's always going to be best to get a personal recommendation than trusting reviews on the internet, for anything.

It's always going to be best to get a personal recommendation than trusting reviews on the internet, for anything.

This is precisely why many people expect social networks to play a larger and larger role in commerce.

The problem with that is, social network 'friends' are usually pretty meaningless. They're certainly not usually people I'd trust to recommend anything.

what if you had reviews made by your friends and sources you trust accessible to you online that seems like a better model than see what everyone and their dog thinks about everything under the sun..

Can anyone recommend an alternative?

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ http://www.dopplr.com/ http://www.zagat.com/

Still, yelp is very useful, but if you don't want to use it out of principle (for the little guys!), you can use the sites above.

How about ask someone in the neighborhood.

I've had good experiences going to new area and asking locals where I should eat. People take a lot of pride in their neighborhoods and are more than happy to help.

Even if there were some improprieties going on...If it was empirically useful, for you, why stop using it? This behavior would probably harm Yelp's business clients far more than their users.

Or do you feel is was important to make a statement?

If Yelp is a sort of monopoly, then users' standards for its usefulness is a low bar, since they'll be comparing it to nothing rather than to a better alternative. (And before users have reason to suspect any foul play at Yelp - as they now do - it's more difficult for better alternatives to gain users' attention.)

I'm not sure there's room for a lot of competition for end users in a service like Yelp. "Review accuracy" isn't a metric that users are capable of measuring with any effectiveness - it's so subjective anyway. The only thing that will put one service above another is how many businesses have been reviewed, and Yelp has a huge head start there.

Yelp's response: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/02/lady-justice-needs-a-la...

http://www.yelp.com/myths

How long ago was that put up?

oh i dunno, a year ago probably?

(ot) any particular reason the title of this was changed?

your original title was editorializing. it's not cool for the submitter to decide how people should feel about an article.

fair enough.

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