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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I used to go a lot to a particular restaurant which I really liked which I remember had a bad review about a rude waiter. The review described that waiter in detail, and despite going there all the time I never saw him there. The review said that waiter was really rude, but I've never seen anyone be rude there. The staff was always quiet, professional, and polite. I couldn't imagine any of them being rude to anyone. Maybe that waiter had once worked there, but got fired or quit and was no longer there, but the review remained.

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.

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> 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.

This is actually a pretty common strategy in Property Management. Multi-unit buildings owned by REITs are known to build this into their marketing plan. Sooner or later enough tenants will complain and the negative reviews will make it hard to fill empty units, so just "rebrand" and change your name. Common strategy by Essex Properties in the Bay Area.

Interesting. This wasn't a building though, it was a condo owned by a private landlord who contracted out management since they had a job that took them overseas.

(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.)

A similar problem happens on Glassdoor. If you look at the salaries for pretty much any position at a big legacy company the bulk of the data comes from reviews submitted up to a decade ago...during the depths of the financial crisis.

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.

comp.fyi and Blind are much much better for that sort of thing.

I've seem the first but what's Blind's url?

teamblind.com

This is the same case with any review where the recent data and historical could be entirely different.

Steam solves this quite well by showing recent and all-time ratings. After all, one future patch can make or break a game.

>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.

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.

It doesn’t make sense at all, but it is the way everyone is used to.

why do you think it does not make sense? Brand value is considered an asset and is usually part of the pricing evaluation. When someone buys a business, I would assume they also pay for the business brand value.. and that likely includes their online reputation.

"brand value", "online reputation", bah! Those are meaningless words for a customer who cares about the actual quality of something.

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.)

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