Tripadvisor lays off 25% of workforce
skift.com
skift.com
Like Yelp, review sites are a weird niche where if you get too big, your subjects start working to game the system, and the value of your product begins to degrade. Stack Overflow has experienced a similar effect.
After gaining some fame from that article, the author has continued his shenanigans: when asked for TV interviews he sent lookalikes of himself to be interviewed.
Unless you make the penalty for gaming the system a 'black hole' approach (ie, you no longer show up on searches), people will game the system hard.
It's unscrupulous, absolutely, but I imagine it's very hard (if not impossible) to prove who is or is not performing the gaming.
I stayed in a place in India with glowing Trip Advisor reviews that had rat turds on the bed. When I checked some of the reviewers, I noticed they were cranking out very similar boilerplate reviews for properties all over the place. Almost every place I stayed at in India begged me to write positive reviews for them. I know TA has since tried to clean a lot of this up.
But if you can find a less popular source of reviews which isn't worth someone's time to game - then you get a much better chance at an authentic rating/reviews.
She said that a small motel near me had great reviews. "This was the best part of our trip to Colorado!". 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor.
I decided to check in. It was clearly immediately a mistake. There were so many red flags - from the weaving, amphetamine addled check in clerk, to the smoke stained room with ripped, stained bedsheets, and how the proprietor didn't even give me a room key. The room door could not be locked from the inside - the knob was smooth and no deadbolt. There's no way those reviews could be legitimate. The hotel was terrifying and I left after 20 minutes and filed a CC chargeback.
I looked it up myself and the place had 1.5 stars on Yelp, 2 on Google, 5 on Facebook and as mentioned, 4.5 on TripAdvisor. Upon reading and comparing, the Facebook and TA reviews seemed obviously fake. Yelp contained stories of the manager talking to the children of guests at the vending machine in an incoherent way and asking 'if they'd seen Billy' and various other disturbing stories.
I looked into the manager, Wayne, and found his Facebook page. It was filled with references to Satan worship, group sex and demonic possession. The necklace he wore which I thought was a Star of David was actually a pentagram, as displayed in his collection on FB. He had photos of his dog that he claimed depicted demonic possession on his FB page, as well as photos of their satanic altar at the motel.
So, my conclusion was that TripAdvisor and Facebook are very, very bad at preventing false reviews compared to Yelp or Google.
Low tech/low cost warfare against the tech marketing power houses always works.