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Comment by dmitrybrant | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but TrustPilot is a form of near-perfect evil. If someone leaves a negative review of your business on TrustPilot, you can have it taken down... for a measly $400 per month. If you refuse to purchase their premium package, they can prioritize the negative review to be shown above the positive ones until you do. If your competitor hires a review-bombing spammer to add negative reviews en masse, well, you'll just have to upgrade to the next-tier plan.

It's a shocking lack of integrity, but not surprising, given the business model. Anyway, it's disappointing that TrustPilot gets any publicity for being anything credible.

Edit: A nice little touch is at the bottom of their website that says "See what our customers are saying about TrustPilot", with a hand-picked selection of reviews... from TrustPilot! About TrustPilot! Chef's kiss.

Edit 2: This is not to say that Trustpilot's intentions aren't necessarily good, and they may even be striving to provide neutrality. But the problem is that their business model is, by its very nature, antithetical to neutrality. And of course Trustpilot is not the only review site that has this issue, but it's definitely a site where this issue is glaringly apparent.

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A few years back I left a negative review for one retailer of oak furniture on TrustPilot. It was deleted for profanity within 60 seconds. There was no profanity in it. I repeated this four or five times before eventually it stuck. I noticed it was quickly buried by the deluge of five star reviews. Then I noticed they claimed to have over 100,000 Trustpilot reviews. The numbers were impossible. It's heavily astro turfed and it would surprise me little to see that there's a significant review score downside to not paying them for a subscription. For me, TrustPilot has the reverse effect - if your business uses it I trust you less.

I rarely go on aggregate review scores, but instead on the worst reviews.

I read the text of these reviews. Sometimes the reviewer had unrealistic demands. If this worst case is acceptable, I proceed. If it is a choice between competitors, it often comes to the least bad option.

If there are no reviews under 5 stars, I'm suspicious. If a company replies to reviews, I mentally flag it as doing reputation management - not something you tend to need do when providing a service your customers love.

It is amazing how many nightmare companies have 4-5 star trustpilot reviews.

It is the same thing as any other companies in the reviews business. The same can be said of Glassdoor or Yelp for example. As long as a review as an impact on the finance of a company. You can be sure the reviews provider will give ways to remove those reviews.

Actually, Yelp doesn't remove legitimate reviews.

Edit: I speak from personal experience as a small business owner, described in more detail below.

In theory the same can be said of glassdoor. In reality it is different

In reality, Yelp doesn't play games with reviews. I became the top-rated business in my city for my niche while turning down their sales people over and over. I successfully got one review removed in that time because it was clearly a spam account based on their review history. I have several legitimate 5-star reviews from actual happy customers on my business profile that "are not currently recommended" due to Yelp's aggressive anti-cheat software. There are plenty of unhappy business owners who would have people believe their poor Yelp ratings are because the game is rigged, and I'm sure Yelp makes plenty of mistakes, but it is not pay-to-win.

That’s not a counter argument. I was once the top rated player on a pay to win game server without having paid anything. The issue with pay to win in games and online reviews is the distortion not the impossibility of success.

Yelp etc needs the average review to be somewhat useful so people actually trusts the Star ratings. However, they can still accomplish that while distorting a significant number of reviews.

This thread is full of people with no first-hand experience repeating rumors and suspicions. No, I cannot prove a negative, but I don't think speculation is compelling evidence either.

Yelp has successfully defended it’s self from several such lawsuits, on the other hand it’s also been sued several times over this. So, it’s a little past just internet rumors.

The simple fact Yelp lets companies pay to highlight a favorable review is IMO enough to destroy their credibility. Worse they directed customers through GrubHub for an unearned commission which is as far as I can tell simple fraud. But, that’s not what people are alleging here.

> Actually, Yelp doesn't remove legitimate reviews.

They say that, but they decide which reviews are legitimate, and they're more likely to decide that positive reviews are legitimate, if a business is paying them.

On the other hand, my experience pre-pandemic was that Yelp had the only reliable database of local USA businesses' hours of operation (there is probably now no way to know other than phone calls).

Google rings small businesses up every week asking what their hours of operation are...

In fact, I know a business who complained he got more calls from Google trying to update their maps database than he got from real customers!

> Google rings small businesses up every week asking what their hours of operation are...

So THAT'S what all the humans at Google are up to, while their bots are busy locking legitimate user and developer accounts!

>>So THAT'S what all the humans at Google are up to

How cute. You think that these are humans calling from google. No biological human has represented google by phone since the 90s. It is all androids and chatbots.

Sounds like exactly what they trained Duplex for, so I doubt that would be a human calling.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...

Wow that is incredible.

Google emails that - they don't call.

That's nice they call. I'm aware of a variety of business listings they helpfully automatically update to be wrong. The only way to know is to check back often.

> They say that, but they decide which reviews are legitimate, and they're more likely to decide that positive reviews are legitimate, if a business is paying them.

Do you have any evidence of that?

I have several unsolicited 5-star reviews for my business that have been flagged as "not currently recommended." Yet despite fighting off their sales reps for years my business is the best rated business in my city in my category.

Based on my experience, the Yelp hate is just sour grapes from businesses that are reluctant to bend over backwards to make every customer happy.

> sour grapes from businesses that are reluctant to bend over backwards to make every customer happy.

Not too many business that do that stay in business for long. "The customer is always right" if not taken with many grains of salt will bury you when you get just the right customer (who will directly reference the mantra).

It's certainly a challenging way to run a business. I don't recommend anyone blindly pursue that strategy.

One key to making it work is to invest in long term relationships with your clients. A transaction with a client you have an established relationship with is much less risky than a transaction with a stranger.

This has been discussed previously on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149078

Not sure if the policies have changed since then, but I am inclined to believe him.

Just bc this one person didn’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. They’ve definitely taken my negative reviews down or made them invisible so I stopped using them

Just because they took your reviews down doesn't mean they did so corruptly rather than according to algorithm/policy.

Right the algorithm ofc takes “fairness” and “user experience” as its training inputs no doubt

It's bizarre that the one person with actual experience in this thread is being downvoted...

But I second this. Yelp won't remove legitimate reviews, even for paying businesses. You can pay for priority in search listings and to show up in the Similar and Nearby sections, but that won't help you get negative reviews removed.

As I speak, there are 2.5 star restaurants being promoted in every search I do for nearby restaurants. If Yelp removed the negative reviews as people claimed, they wouldn't be at 2.5 stars right now.

(It's true that some individual sales reps claim Yelp will do this if you pay them, but those are individual sales reps trying to hit a sales or bonus goal.)

.. and people are saying that Glassdoor reviews can easily be taken down, without evidence.

It might be true, but a claim that undermines the entire business.. warrants at least a link or an anecdote.

Yelp removes any post legitimate or not if you have zero “friends” on Yelp and if you have no profile picture iirc.

On the business side all I’ve heard from Yelp Business was that they will let more bad reviews slide thus lowering your rating if you do not pay for their protection racket. Also, paying them gives good reviews that would otherwise be rejected now allowed as acceptable.

Maybe those businesses were not paying for the “premium” service tier that includes Yelp sending a photographer to your business to then create a video for you with an annual plan.

I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps. It’s difficult to trust online reviews.

Yelp removes any post legitimate or not if you have zero “friends” on Yelp and if you have no profile picture iirc.

That's definitely wrong, as my Yelp profile has zero friends and no profile picture, and all of my reviews are still up, when viewing the businesses logged out, across multiple devices using different IP addresses.

I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps.

I have spoken to restaurants on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce investigating this issue, and found no evidence that these claims are true.

>Yelp won't remove legitimate reviews,

I've had my legitimate Yelp reviews shadow-removed (I could see the review on the computer it was made on, but not others). So they absolutely did at one point remove/hide reviews.

-person with actual experience

Reputation extortion business model

Yeah, I'm not sure what's happening on Amazon, but I've noticed that most of my bad reviews never get published or disappear.

The answer is to give a 5 star review, the first paragraph with usual blah blah, the next paragraph with the actual feedback. Even better if you use the coded ways to provide negative feedback. The goal is to make it expensive to distinguish true good reviews from fake good reviews.

About 1/3rd of my bad reviews are now flagged "sensitive" (belatedly), so no longer normally visible.

Reputation extortion as a service. I get the mental image that this is how the mob has evolved. No longer are knuckle dragging guidos with crooked noses walking door to door in the neighborhoods offering protection services. "It'd be a shame if something were to happen..." but online.

at a previous company, HR (or a PR firm they hired) would stuff the ratings with tons of super positive reviews for the company.

The small company my friend worked for just made all their employees put in a review. While the owners watched.

They were pretty terrible people. Always talking about how they were going to "get rich and leave all of you behind".

Wow, that is some next level douchebaggery. That would probably trigger my creative justice instinct.

at a previous company, HR (or a PR firm they hired) would stuff the ratings with tons of super positive reviews for the company.

A company I once worked for required employees to post positive reviews of its app, as a condition of employment.

This started shortly after I left, so I'm grateful I never had to deal with that.

Better Business Bureau too. It's been documented a number of times that when a non member joins suddenly poor ratings will rise / complaints vanish.

The BBB perfected this model long before the internet was around. I worked at a computer repair shop way-back-when and the owner called the BBB an extortion racket.

This. 100%. If you don’t pay the BBB their extortion fee they will tell anyone who asks that “you are not a member in good standing” which is technically true since you are not a member. Because you didn’t pay the fee. Legalized extortion.

Interesting thing to note about the BBB is that it is a federation of independent businesses with loose national control. I understand that to the consumer they look the same, but this argument is a bit disingenuous to compare the BBB, a non-profit weak national entity, with these globally internet focused ratings businesses. Each BBB region has control over only their region.^1

The BBB you might be referencing about is the BBB of LA, which no longer exists and this 2015 article mentions: https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau...

That BBB was then merged into the Silicon Valley BBB, a totally different set of people and operations.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau

This is as good an use-case for a decentralized blockchain as any.

How would that fix the problem of spammy reviews?

Agreed - it's a bad use-case for a decentralized block chain, like all of the other uses brought up so far.

Definitely not the same as Yelp.

On Yelp you can buy placement in search results (or on other restaurants' listings in the "Nearby" or "Similar" sections) but they won't remove negative listings for pay. It's certainly possible that individual sales reps will offer that service if they are desperate to hit sales or bonus goals, but Yelp won't actually do it, since the review review team is separate from the sales team.

Source: Personally interviewed nearly a hundred local businesses on behalf of the local Chamber of Commerce.

I have first-hand experience getting negative Yelp reviews removed.

Nearly impossible if you're a non-paying business on Yelp.

I didn't say that Yelp didn't remove negative reviews; I said they don't do it in exchange for pay as implied, and comments from actual business owners on this thread, and my first-person experience interviewing almost a hundred businesses as part of an investigation for the local Chamber of Commerce confirm that.

I am a business owner and I’ve had reviews taken down solely because I was a paying Yelp customer. I’ve had other accounts that were non-paying that couldn’t get fraudulent reviews removed at all.

Yelp is a scam, but you pay the piper because their local SEO is too good.

> Perhaps a bit off-topic, but TrustPilot is a form of near-perfect evil.

That is certainly not off-topic in this context. The horrid behavior (or business model) of TrustPilot is relevant (and immoral), and should be known.

Every time I see one of those "4.2 / 5 stars on TrustPilot" banners, I'll start thinking about the extortion money to keep hiding those negative reviews; what a scam..

Apart from the business model: No one ever takes time to write positive reviews of big businesses on third-party sites out of good heart. By default only people who have something to complain about go there. (I know this first-hand based on PlayStore/AppStore ratings of the app I worked on in the past).

The diff between 1.8 and 4.2 business is that the latter sends mass emails to the customers saying "write us a nice review on TrustPilot, and maybe you'll win a $50 gift card". (Although, in case of the app, we just asked nicely, and many people clicked the banner and went on to give 4* or 5* ratings in the store, for free).

Having said that, if company doesn't care about 1.8 rating and has no actions to change, it's probably a bad sign...

That's probably true; people are most likely to give feedback if it's negative; making the TrustPilot way of earning money even worse, as it mostly attracts negative reviews. Then companies with those negative reviews have to "buy them invisible" on TrustPilot.

I wish I could give TrustPilot a 1 star review right now :-)

>No one ever takes time to write positive reviews of big businesses on third-party sites out of good heart

Maybe I am missing the context of big businesses, but I will often write a good review of a company (say on trustpilot) I have used, with no reward to myself. Even well known ones. The most recent example being Scan the hardware retailer in the UK. I have though also done it for reward too, so I am not completely altruistic!

We receive many positive reviews after asking customers with the default Trustpilot template to rate us ("how many stars you give us?"), catching them at the point of likely being most happy. Mostly these reviews are brief with just a few words, but many of our customers do not mind spending a minute to give high marks. Some of those reviews even look like we paid for them or hired a bot :) but we can easily trace them to their real accounts.

Something I try to do, if I want to write an unfavourable review, is write a few positive reviews for other companies I've had recent positive experiences with first.

I figure that this gives my negative review some credibility, and it also helps the good businesses.

I wonder if actually enforcing this might help things. If someone can't find anything positive to say about five other companies, I don't think I'm interested in their negative review.

Isn’t this the exact same thing Yelp has been reported of doing?

Seems like any form of reviews — Amazon, Yelp, TrustPilot — or even independent reviews (that are often given a product in exchange for “their honest review”, can’t be trusted anymore.

Someone will find a way to game the system.

We’ve gone from being ignorant, to being informed, back to being ignorant again — or worse, ignorantly mislead.

It's mafia tactics in a modern world.

Nice business you got here, would be a shame if someone said something bad about it online. You know we can make that go away...for a price.

Protection money indeed.

Amazon reviews could potentially be salvageable. The way I see it, their problem is that items sell more when they have a plurality of reviews, so there's a disincentive for the platform to take down positive reviews (because they drive revenue). But Amazon is a platform that depends on repeat business (hence the existence of Prime) so it also has an incentive to ensure that the totality of a product's reviews give a useful idea of the product's pros and cons.

On the other hand, sites that let you remove bad reviews or showcase good ones are running a 21st-century protection racket.

Years back I signed my ecom business up for ResellerRatings’ similar service for like $20 or $50 / month. Eventually they determined we should be paying a few hundred per month based on their impression of our traffic and upped the price, notifying us at the bottom of a very, very tall newsletter email. It was like a year before we noticed, they quickly refunded us 6 months when we told them we were charging it back (presumably that’s how far back we could charge back without fighting harder).

Is there any information on this?

I just had a look at their pricing page and it doesn’t seem to say anything about this.

Maybe a screen shot would do if it’s something you only see when you have the plan?

Well of course they wouldn't advertise these sorts of practices in their pricing plans. But you can get certain hints from some of the verbiage. For example, they talk about "review invitations" -- this is code for review gating, which is the practice of selectively inviting users who are more likely to leave positive reviews.

They also say "Curate your Trustpilot Company Profile Page through ... adding authentic content". The term "authentic content" is code for "positive reviews", because you'll be able to flag any negative reviews as inauthentic.

And of course you can also look at reviews of Trustpilot itself from third parties, i.e. websites where Trustpilot doesn't have a paid/boosted account, for instance: https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/trustpilot

Review invitations can be sent on basic plan. Only 100, though, but you can choose internally which customers to invite. I don't see that as a problem, because people do need to be reminded (or asked) to write positive reviews, because when everything is working as customers expect, many won't be bothered to venture onto review sites to write about that. So they must be asked while hot. And it's much better than offer any incentives to reviews - many companies aren't shy to do exactly that, but that's where the line gets crossed..

Yes. Here is an example of the evil after I posted a negative review:

> Thanks for your review on Trustpilot. > >Based on your review, Curve would like a little more information about your experience. This will help them write a more useful >reply to you. It'll also help them verify that you’ve had a genuine experience with their business.

>Of course, it’s totally up to you what you share.

"verify" vs. "totally up to me" are different things.

This is important to validate the review was left by a genuine customer. You can indeed share as much (or as little) information as you want, but they'll have to decided on the balance of probabilities if you had a real interaction with the company you're reviewing. We receive many reviews and often fake negative reviews, so this helps to provide at least a level of protection against such attacks.

Do they verify fake positive reviews, or just the fake negatives?

> If someone leaves a negative review of your business on TrustPilot, you can have it taken down

I don't think this is true. If this was true, then any sane business would pay the $400 and have a decent record on TP.

Except not everyone wants to play the game.

The BBB pioneered this business model. Yelp perfected it. This is just another flavor for another market.

There 100% needs to be regulation around any kind of review site. If you can pay and change how the reviews look it is 100% corrupt and shouldn’t be allowed.

Also if you can leave a review for something that you have not consumed it is 100% corrupt and shouldn't be allowed. The fraudulent usage goes both ways and in the end the sites are only for the ignorant.

$400/month is not a trivial sum of money for a mom-and-pop shop. Plus if this becomes the norm, there will be other predatory sites jumping at the bite.

I'm not sure about that. A sane business would not give in to bullying tactics. Most small business owners I know have probably never heard of Trustpilot, and if they did, would probably consider any kind of fee for maintaining a decent record to be an obvious scam.

They don't exactly say 'you can have it taken down' though. And, believe it or not, some businesses take the view that they will not be held hostage in this way.

There are several big brand retailers in the UK who don't pay Trustpilot; you can tell by how many negative reviews they have manged to amass.

Another 'benefit ' of paying Trustpilot is that you can have gold stars underneath your search and ads listings. Google seem happy to to be part of the scam too.

as someone that used to work there i can say this info is false.

>If someone leaves a negative review of your business on TrustPilot, you can have it taken down

no, they can flag it but neither that nor the money they pay as subscription has any direct effect on the review being taken down, this solely lies on the discretion of moderators according to the terms of usage.

>they can prioritize the negative review to be shown above the positive ones

no, like hackernews trustpilot has a a scoring mechanism that is quite easily explained and also reflects on what is being shown, look here: https://support.trustpilot.com/hc/en-us/articles/201748946-T...

>It's a shocking lack of integrity

trustpilot has the most open and transparent platform for reviews, bad actors get marked publicly no matter if they are companies(free or paying) or reviewers.

Otherwise known as the Yelp business model.

Can you purchase a subscription from Yelp to remove all negative reviews?

As a business owner? Yes, you can use Yelp and pay them for removing/burying negative reviews.

This is simply not true. I am speaking as a small business owner on Yelp.

I have never seen any credible evidence for this accusation. I don't dispute that some unscrupulous Yelp sales rep or another has represented this to be the case to some business owner who then posted about the interaction online. I do dispute whether Yelp actually does remove reviews for paying businesses.

Not sure why you're downvoted, there were serious allegations saying exactly this

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bu...

https://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-yelp-20130420...

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/yelp-blames-greedy-law...

Serious, unsubstantiated allegations. If I could pay Yelp to remove reviews, believe me, I would. It would be far easier than the alternative: bending over backwards to make every customer happy.

Yelp's sales people can be aggressive, and it wouldn't surprise me if a rogue employee deceived a prospect to close a sale, but there is no way to pay to win. Yelp also does flag legitimate positive reviews sometimes, but the alternative is to be like Amazon where half the reviews are fake.

I believe that the middle ground is true: there's no official way for "pay to win", neither is the corruption so rampant that everyone has access to it, but there still is some.

So basically.. nothing out of the norm.

http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/09/02/11...

You can allege anything. Whether the allegations are true is another question. You only have to read the various lawsuits that have passed on this issue to see how flimsy these business owners' cases are.

It would be so easy to demonstrate that you could pay Yelp to remove reviews, if the capability exists. Someone would have done so by now.

Pay-to-win does not have to be black-and-white; nor should one expect it to be if it could be used against them in a court.

All of the following can be true:

-Yelp removes obviously false reviews.

-Yelp does not remove obviously true reviews.

-It is better for your business' rating to pay Yelp.

Yelp is the arbiter of what constitutes 'false'. It stretches credulity to believe that Yelp taking payment from a business has no influence on this determination. Even sending paying and non-paying requests down different pipelines could result in more negative false reviews being removed for paying businesses. For instance, spending more time considering whether a review is false might lend itself to ultimately removing more reviews. This needn't be intentional.

So, the question in my mind is whether Yelp deserves the reputation; rather than whether any specific allegation is true in exactly the way it is alleged. If the allegations about their salespersons' claims are true the answer must be that they not only deserve the reputation, but that they built it themselves.

(As a Yelp user, I already consider them too shady to use. Maybe they've changed, but their deceitful links that pushed me to open their app were so frustrating and off-putting I've quit them entirely.)

> If you refuse to purchase their premium package, they can prioritize the negative review to be shown above the positive ones until you do.

That's not my experience. Here in the UK at least they display reviews in chronological order, newest first including for "unclaimed" businesses".

I mean, there is a redflag to me when the name of your company is literally starting with Trust.

Yet again proving anyone can be rich if they don't have to worry about pesky morals.

This business model is nothing new. The BBB has been operating this way for years.

>you can have it taken down... for a measly $400 per month

Might be wrong, but glassdoor does it too

not that I don't believe you but is there any proof to back your claim?

Glassdoor allows to flag reviews that break their T&Cs, including sharing of company confidential information. Even disclosing that your CTO left, could be considered breaching confidential information. Many negative reviews are removed this way.

"Applied for a Java role, but had JavaScript questions. Tried to explain to interviewer there are unrelated things, was asked to come back when I learn more about Java. One star."

Removed because it exposes interview process.

Trustpilot are a scam operation themselves and I agree that they are near-perfect evil.

They shake down companies involved with them and give add very little of value. If anything, they are harmful to ecommerce as it makes people more skeptical of reviews

Important to remember some of the other players like TrustPilot when considering the posts about Google's moderation of Robinhood reviews. Moderation is hard, every actor (reviewer, reviewee, and review service) can be malicious.

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