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).
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.
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!
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.
That's sufficiently weasel-worded to mean nothing.
delete from reviews where id = ?
> 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.