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Comment by irishloop | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what is the alternative? Just allow twenty five-star or one-star reviews to show up and say hey, if business owners want to scam the system by putting in fake reviews, then great? Or just open-source their algorithms?

I guess to me it seems infinitely easier to criticize the way someone else does it than to present a more efficient way of doing it.

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One possibility would be to allow users to manually flag reviews, instead of trying to do it algorithmically. They could also have some sort of confidence rating for reviews, or possibly a reputation system for reviewers. From looking at the hidden reviews for a couple of stores while I've been trying to find a place to get new glasses, they seem to be hiding a good number of legitimate reviews with their current system.

You are correct. Such simple change will be already going in the right direction. It is amazing to see all the reviews hidden that are legit: you can see if the reviewer use Yelp often by checking the number of reviews posted. The current filtering system seems to ignore that most of the times, but reviewers with no previous review prior giving 1 star will see that review stick.

Unfortunately, this takes the current problem(where legitimate reviews are removed), and replaces it with the exact same problem, where legitimate reviews are flagged to oblivion.

Instead of having the owner's friends post reviews, they post reviews and then flag every poor review, attempting to get them taken off. Or idiots with an axe to grind flag all the good reviews.

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