A restaurant owner who asked for 1-star Yelp reviews
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
>Under the alias “Babghanoush I,” Cerretini posted 13 fake positive reviews for Botto Bistro, as well as fake critical reviews of neighboring restaurants — sometimes going so far as to disparage fellow owners.
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>In the spring of 2014, after turning down another Yelp salesperson, Cerretini claims that four 5-star reviews were filtered from his page, and three 1-star reviews were suddenly catapulted to the top of the page. For the chef, this was the final straw.
>“Those 1-star reviews were from people who never even set foot in my restaurant,” says Cerretini. “One complained about our waiters… we didn’t even have waiters!”
Yeah, I wonder why you got fake negative reviews.
"Documented records shared with The Hustle by a Yelp spokesperson tell a fuller story of Cerretini’s actions."
Are you saying that neighboring restaurants gave him bad reviews in retribution to the bad reviews he gave them? Or are you saying that Yelp themselves created fake negatives reviews because the owner turned away the Yelp salespeople?
After some years the restaurant closed for renovation, and when it reopened there were completely different people working there, and the food was way worse. It was probably sold or went under new management, though they kept the name. So all the reviews this place had gotten over the years were really no longer relevant, as it was effectively a new restaurant. Yet all the Yelp reviews remained.
The opposite is also a problem: a property management company I had issues with changed their name three times in the 24 months I was a customer. Each time they get a brand new slate, and can have reviews for the old company on the new page removed under the Yelp TOS, since if you say in your review you're not a customer, you're admitting to violating Yelp's review guidelines.
(So you can't type in the address of the building and see bad reviews under different name for same addy. To be fair, the condo board and neighbors were nice, but as a renter I can't do repairs or replace broken appliances.)
Well, it makes sense doesn't it? When you buy a restaurant you get to keep the name, location, word of mouth, etc. Makes sense you also keep the reviews.
New owners not having the same standards and ethics is more common than not. (Can go both ways of course but nevertheless, the ratings should not pass over, it makes zero sense.)
At many smaller companies with only a few submitted salaries, the problem is much worse. I've received offers for 2.5X the quoted salary for the same position glassdoor supposedly had 10 submitted salaries for (bay area).
None of these review aggregators are incentivized to dump old reviews and make it look like they have less data than their competitors. Inevitably, consumers will start trusting reviews less and less...similar to what has happened on Amazon.
Steam solves this quite well by showing recent and all-time ratings. After all, one future patch can make or break a game.
Users can and will be creative on the site. Making fake accounts in order to mislead others is not a creative practice that aligns well with typical users of Yelp.
Imagine if they allowed total anarchy and didn't police any of the reviews. Small business owners and consumers would be upset about all the fake reviews. Yelp claims they attempt to filter out these reviews; opponents claim they either go too far or filter as a form of extortion.
Who am I, as a consumer, to trust here? My only solution is to avoid using Yelp: then I don't have to worry about either of these problems. If I'm traveling, I ask the locals where they like to eat.
I'd argue that Yelp's whole business model is flawed; it doesn't scale for this very reason. No matter which path they take, it's going to be a PR nightmare. Unless they're able to both avoid filtering and disincentive fake reviews, somebody's going to be unhappy (and vocal).
Right on point.
Right now we can only trust Yelp words, and the way their software behave it's far from transparent. And it gives exactly the opposite impression.
"Caesar's wife must be above suspicion"
'Fake reviews' or 'modifying display' in an uncsrupulous manner are essentially unethical and breach the nature of the system.
But in the end the real issue is I think that reviews by random people don't help that much at all.
We only need basic review by some competent person and more than anything: map, address, phone number!
nope! you don’t need to believe the truth. a lot of people don’t. but the hacker news community tends to like to surface technical truths even when they defy popular sentiment.
> Making fake accounts in order to mislead others is not a creative practice that aligns well with typical users of Yelp.
Which only matters if typical users of Yelp can tell it's fake.
Rossmann's conclusion was that this probably isn't anything that Yelp secretly condones or instructs, but they declare their expectations, and their people will succeed by whatever means necessary. Obviously that doesn't include doxxing other businesses who already pay for advertising. :facepalm:
I can take the revenge bit at face value, though it would be hilarious if Yelp really was playing everyone who couldn't believe that a company would actually encourage that. They made it possible at least, fertile ground, etc.
Disclaimer: I really don't care about Yelp. At all. I don't know, I wasn't there, I didn't do it.
I had a favorite sushi restaurant who would get the shakedown calls from Yelp sales. I was a regular and I remember the Mom+Pop owners complaining about the shakedowns.
But what Yelp does is apparently legal.
I’ve reported reviews in the past that stayed up.
Yelp didn't pull the reviews because they couldn't prove that they were by people who are related to the business owners. They were all fresh accounts with no other activity, and all used the same style. Silly that yelp tags real reviews as fake but doesn't yank the truly bogus reviews.
delete from reviews where id = ?
That's sufficiently weasel-worded to mean nothing.
If he was doing that on ladder, that’s generally considered to be bad form.
So if you wanted to be rank 9999, you just forfeit all your ladder matches.
Game theory to 9 year olds?
What can Yelp do to you if you invite their worst punishment as a badge of honor?
This is brilliant.
What? Will Yelp remove me from Yelp’s listings and search results?
Oh, darn!
If we want to kill Yelp, we have to switch. My cousin works for Likewise[2] and recommends it. It solves the fake/biased reviews problem by letting you as a user select who influences your recommendations (including friends and family). I've never tried it, so I can't vouch for it myself.
1. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Yelp-can-give-paying-cli...
Then the internet came along, and it was so much easier to google than to look in a little book. They have a website, but it never seems to work properly (completely broken in Firefox right now). The data is presumably still good, though.
Oddly I see lots of hipster businesses with signs mocking yelp, but none of them seem to register that GM is similar.
I think there’s a weird culture around yelp reviews especially of people who openly label themselves as yelpers. I haven’t met them but it’s an easy group to mock. I’d bet a lot of those restaurants don’t realize how many visitors end up at their business because they saw something they liked about it on yelp despite not being some kind of power users of the site.
Frankly I like the platform more for discovery than reviewing, but generally most restaurants at 4 stars or above are pretty consistently good, while those between 1 and 3 are pretty consistently trash. It’s also nice being able to search reviews for menu items and things like “happy hour” or “patio”.
Lately I use Eater a lot more than any user-driven service though.
But more to your point, I’ve noticed that when friends/family refer to “5 star restaurants” these days, they’re almost always referring to 5 stars on yelp. To them, it goes without saying that they’re using yelp as the measuring tool.
I have firsthand experience with them biasing ratings from helping friends manage Yelp listings. I don't know how widespread it is, but it does happen. While possible, it seems unlikely that thousands of people have reported the same pattern (good reviews buried after declining to become a Yelp customer).
You can see this yourself on many listings. Click on the reviews that Yelp has hidden because of "quality issues". That's what they use for plausible deniability. My own positive reviews have been hidden from businesses (no personal connection to them, just places I liked) for being "suspicious".
All of my wife’s reviews were being hidden until she added established accounts as friends on yelp. Not sure why anyone treats it as a social network but so it goes.
2. A constant stream of new small business owners
3. A good story (pay us and we'll make you more money)
1) In the US, Yelp's reviews of restaurants have a significantly higher correlation with reality than any other review site. Google reviews are okay.
2) In Europe, Yelp reviews are mostly by American tourists and are sparser and higher variance quality-wise. Google reviews seem to be generally the best in Europe. (Canada might be a toss-up between Yelp and Google.)
3) In both continents TripAdvisor reviews are pretty much meaningless. I've been to multiple restaurants on TripAdvisor with ~4.5 that have absolutely sucked in terms of both food, service, and atmosphere.
I don't have much experience with reviews for local businesses that aren't restaurants or outside of the US/Canada/Europe. But in the US, for all of Yelp's supposed manipulation, their reviews are noticeably better than other sites'.
That doesn't seem all that different than what yelp itself does.
Or just existing does the same.
All the wink wink 1-star reviews are gone - many 1-star reviews left, but only those that seem somewhat believable. There are also only a few hundred reviews, not the thousands mentioned by the article. I'd guess that Yelp watches his page pretty closely and deletes any reviews that are obviously fake.
That said, I'd bet that the majority of the 1-star reviews, even the ones that appear believable, are still fictional.
In all of these cases, people love to complain about the injustices and imperfect heuristics being used by the gatekeepers. A lot of these complaints are very valid, but a lot of them also seem to miss the bigger picture entirely. These gatekeepers and their heuristics serve a very valid purpose in society, which is why they wield so much power to begin with. The only productive complaints are those that suggest viable alternatives or improvements - suggestions that don't simply trade-off one set of bad outcomes for an even worse set of bad outcomes. It's hard to take Grotto's "burn Yelp to the ground" ethos seriously, because I've lived through the pre-Yelp era of Yellow Pages and tourist traps, and I'd never want to return to that world again.
If Yelp was really interested in clearing the air, they'd show how their algorithms are making the decisions they're making. It's not like they'd give away their entire platform or market space by doing so, there's such immense network effect at play with Yelp that they'd likely never be unseated.
But they won't, and I suspect it's because they do manipulate it, even if slightly, because they have have every single solitary financial and business reason to do so.
Or, even if they don't manipulate them directly but simply have baked that behavior into the algorithm, it wouldn't even look that different. It's not as if Yelp wouldn't assume this behavior would attract complaints and regulatory attention, so they'd be motivated to make sure it's as subtle and undetectable as possible, which when you have total and complete control of a closed-source codebase, is easy.
Do we have proof? No, and that's why Yelp won in court, they couldn't be implicated beyond a shadow of a doubt of manipulation. But considering how much of their system is nothing but shadows and doubts, I don't find that all that exonerating.
With this kind of publicity poopsenders might soon go public
I always feel bad leaving a mediocre review for small businesses, so I generally will only do that for places that it doesn't really matter (random gas stations).
That said, I still use the app. I use it for pictures, especially recent pictures of menus and food. I also use it for basic business info like hours, address, phone number, and (sometimes) map.
If I were to own a business that would be a natural yelp candidate, I would definitely incentivize one-star reviews.
First, I think that good yelp reviews attract some (perhaps many) pathological customers, many of whom are not from your natural customer base. These folks will put an effective service tax on the business, and they will make the place not what your regulars want it to be. Think a minor version of the Michelin Star hug of death.
Second, I think that there are much better / more effective outreach methods than yelp and similar apps to target the audience you want.
What I would do is keep an up-to-date collection of images of the menu and food on the site, and the business information would be accurate. I would be tempted to muck with the business information if yelp tried to go to war, but I imagine taking the high road would be the correct choice even if yelp didn’t.
I would not create accounts to post to about any restaurant, including my own. I also would not advertise on the platform.
I fully believe that a lot of these “social” sites seeking growth with questionable ethics practices will end up biting themselves in the ass. The tech isn’t that complex. I (naively?) believe that companies that make an effort to delight both sides of the marketplace (purveyors and potential customers) without trying to make VC-level returns will eventually marginalize predatory sites and apps. I hope this comes sooner rather than later.
Agreed, I think that any crowd source review of anything is so open to massive gaming that you can't trust it.
That said you can't really trust (as an example) the general technology press reviewing most things either since they all have interests in one way or another (call out Foo vendor for something and suddenly find yourself no longer on the VIP list at Foo's future launch events).
Not sure what the solution is though.
I usually use some combination of TripAdvisor, Google Maps, Yelp, and OpenTable to get an idea of what’s going on. TripAdvisor tends to have less millennials which is nice.
Actually, what would be ideal, is filtering out the prolific reviewers in any of these platforms.
Other things to get good data would be more general questions, like “what are some places you like to eat in your neighborhood” or “what places stood out to you on your recent trip to _____”
... and then some incentive to respond or something.
Some time around the point when our society grew large and mobile enough that relying on personal experience and word of mouth wasn't enough, because a sufficient number of people ate in areas to which they wouldn't return any time soon.
More likely, something else useless to take its place.
We need a rough idea of what's there, some photos of the place and food tell a lot of the story. And prices.
Maybe some 'editors choice' for the one's that stand out.
A 'guide book' made by a small, decent team is as legit as any public review system, probably more so.
20 reviewers x4 restos a day (most are little brasseries, don't need tons of time) is 80 / day, 800 in 10 days only.
It would only take maybe 4-5 people to do it ongoing, once most were established.
If some reviewer smashes a restaurant because the food is too spicy it makes it of no value.
So as a Christian, I don't view the Christian fish as evidence of ethical business practices.
Christ speaks the divergence between appearance and action in Matthew 7:22-23:
"Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
I'd read it like:
"Yes, we are godless heathens for not having lemon, ice, ranch, butter, etc. Get over it."
I tried their paid advertising for a client in 2017, and have avoided it like the plague ever since.
Not only did the trial yield no leads, but Yelp billed substantially more than the defined monthly campaign spend.
It took repeated complaints and escalation to a sales manager to even get part of the overage credited.
My experience was:
* Near zero detail or transparency in campaign reports
* Deceptive and confusing budget rules
* Absurd cost per click (even compared to Google Ads)
* Sudden filtering of all the legitimate 5-star reviews on one listing, after we declined further sales efforts
At least in the golden days of paid movie critics (or even restaurant reviewers) I could decide whether or not my tastes (in movies or restaurants) were similar to the critic. Crowd reviews make that impossible.
Call me old-fashioned, .... please.
Friends and I have a tradition of picking movies from the top 250 list and we always skip these as a result.
Not sketchy at all
I love this paragraph so much!
https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/
Bitingly funny.
By his own admission, he is no longer paying yelp for any service so there is no contractual agreement between the two entities right? A punishment where they delist the business from their site is giving him and other businesses exactly what they want? So.....?
From a conceptual level, an unrelated entity lists the details of you/your business on their own accord and then threatens you with "terms of service violation" when you do something or share information it doesn't like? Seems insane.
Good Lord people, it's an actual Italian restaurant. You wanted the real deal? You got it.
They just want a rough idea of what to expect.
Frankly - you should be able to tell by the pictures of the place, and photos of the actual plates (if they're legit).
That's 90% of right there.
The odd bit of bad service or extra great service I don't think is a huge deal. I've never thought poorly or great of a place because of the service, I always just assumed that was the individual server.
All we ever need is for 2 or 3 people with decent taste to walk in the place, have a taste, take a few photos and 'tell us what it is' - maybe point out what's good, what's bad a little bit.
And then maybe some 'editors choice' for the one's that naturally stand out.
That's it.
I'm interested in reading professional food critics, but well-organized food photos (plus objective caveats) would surpass anything that could come from Yelp randos.
If I could reach through the internet right now I would.
"is the only effective way of assessing a restaurant you’ve never been to personally"
That's why they use it, not because it 'has reviews', but because it's a comprehensive directory, it has the address, phone number, photos, and the 'reviews' give a rought idea of what's up.
If the reviews were replaced with a simple star rating, then people wouldn't care.
There is also Google Search, which shows images, price.
I haven't used Yelp in a few years, it's simply unecessary.