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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Really cool story, but he never mentioned where he got the fake reviews that propelled him to #1 in the first place. There was one mention of the original “celebrity” endorsement, but what about all the reviews thereafter? Where did those come from?

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You can see in the screenshot of it being the number one restaurant that it only has 83 reviews (likely the originals from friends that likely got him into the top 10,000), yet it's still #1. I'm speculating, but TripAdvisor likely ranks not just by reviews, but probably page views and other interactions that one could consider to be viewers having a positive judgment of the restaurant. In fact, you can see from the other screenshot, the page has the same 83 reviews when it was ranked #156, so it got to #1 without receiving any new reviews.

> UPDATE 6/12/17, 17:12: After an eagle-eyed reader spotted that each mocked-up TripAdvisor screen shot contained the same number of reviews, we have edited the images so that the number of reviews match those in the actual screen shots and replaced two of the images.

At the end of the section you referenced, regarding endorsements:

> So I contact friends and acquaintances, and put them to work.

I think that's all there is to it.

> Reviews written by real people on different computers, so the anti-scammer technology TripAdvisor utilises doesn't pick up on my hoax.

It gets a little lost in the article but this and the above quote is all they did for the reviews

So he has thousands of friends and acquaintances? Or did each leave multiple reviews?

The screengrab[1] in the article show's only 96 reviews when the restaurant got to #1

[1] https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1512580232417-n...

(edited to update the image and review count)

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