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I don't like Yelp, so here are some random unsubstantiated complaints about the reviews about Yelp itself.

I'm inclined to agree with you about the original poster's perspective but it is hard for me to get past the serious accusations and evidence presented by numerous business owners; that Yelp basically extorted them when they received negative reviews and were a new listing on Yelp.

Based on multiple reports it appears as if Yelp's business intelligence group actively targeted(s) businesses that met certain criteria (new, very few reviews), sent those results to an inside sales team, and then if the customer didn't purchase from the inside sales rep Yelp effectively changed their filter process for that individual business to "penalize" them for not paying to play.

Zagat, Urbanspoon, and TripAdvisor, have never to my knowledge ever implemented these type tactics. I might be wrong, but barring a set of insurmountable complete coincidences for each and every one of the businesses that reported these algorithm changes in the way reviews were displayed, I've got to conclude that Yelp is using their inside sales teams to pressure (extort?) businesses that their business intel teams identify, and make them pay dearly if they don't pay.

I think this is a vocal minority. Sure, you hear all the time about this random biz owner who thinks Yelp is out to get him, but that doesn't account for the hundreds of thousands of biz owners who have claimed a free account and not cried afoul.

A more likely explanation of "extortion" is that the sales org hires 21 year olds fresh out of school who routinely don't make it past 90 days. I'd imagine some of these reps might resort to shady practices to fill a quota, but that's also why they don't last past 90 days. I think this is just a problem of needing a sales organization to make money.

Disclaimer: I used to work on the engineering team at Yelp, and I have the utmost respect for the intelligence and morality of the engineers on the review filtering team.

I'm willing to postulate that the shady tactics are originated by the sales reps, but not that Yelp isn't responsible in that case. Tolerance of a culture of unethical sales, creating an incentive & hiring structure that encourages it, and being obstructionist when someone who encounters it tries to get their issue dealt with speaks rather more to complicity than innocence. As further anecdotal indication (since you appear to believe that all complaints are isolated and don't appear to have any threshold at which you'll accept otherwise), my girlfriend's cell phone was listed as her restaurant's phone number and she was told repeatedly by support staff, sales, and supervisors that Yelp would not under any circumstance correct this unless she paid for an account. Since her place was open from 6pm to 9am and she had to have to phone on in case of emergencies there, she got calls all night long seven days a week. The only thing that fixed this when she was at the point of involving her lawyer was a random Yelp employee who frequented the restaurant hearing about it. If a single internal comment is enough to fix it, but a legally actionable case (non-public number acquired from a review, refusal to address, telemarketing calls to it) gets "sue and be damned" I'm inclined to think that the company has a major issue at the interface with businesses. She literally did not care what the reviews were because word of mouth in a couple of communities was far more important, but they kept trying to sweeten the deal by offering to "fix" the negative ones.

But that has never been proven and is highly unlikely. The critics always stretch the facts. For instance in the dog trainer case, the one negative review was by a yelp elite member (typically harsher reviewers) with over 400 reviews. While most of the hidden reviews were during a one week period and by users with only one review (ie, "drive by").

So then how do you explain them filtering mostly negative reviews for their own service while filtering all positive reviews for the dog training company?

I'm not defending Yelp. I'm just saying there's no evidence that Yelp is widely hated amongst average people. (I assume it's not, but I don't have any data for that either.)

I can't explain their filtering algorithm because I didn't write their filtering algorithm. Ultimately, automatic fraud assessment is the only way Yelp is going to scale; it's too expensive to have a human validate every review, so you get the computer to do it for you. 99% of the time, it works. 1% of the time, you get the situation where the dog training company gets screwed. It's like when your credit card gets flagged for buying gas out of state or using an ATM in China. It's annoying that you got false-positived for fraud, but that's what happens. It's the only way the credit-card system can work. Same for Yelp's filtering; no automatic filtering, no Yelp.

The problem with Yelp is that people don't take it with a grain of salt. But that's not Yelp's problem, that's a "people are morons" problem.

I wonder the psychology (of many review sites) that people are more motivation to seek out area's to post negative reviews, rather then a positive. Lack of a business "if you enjoyed our service please let us know via (Yelp, Google Pages, etc.) which may net a higher return of happy customers.

I personally more inclined to hop on Yelp as a warning to other consumers on a poor business, vs, just random "ups" to other well run businesses. I gain no benefit but altruistic feelings, and this, takes time. The time it takes to post a negative review is rewarding in itself to try and "help" others avoid or be wary of said business.

Also, markets should take a factor in analysis of Yelp reviews. As an example, larger cities have a much higher preponderance of reviews as a whole, where even medium (what I would call them) such as SLC (where I live) are very sparse and therefore limited in search / decision making.

I believe the way the algorithm works is it looks for how credible a given complaint is based on many factors. If I had to guess, they'll look at the age of the user account, how active it is, how many other reviews are written by the user. A user who just created an account and wrote a negative review against Yelp is probably going to be filtered out because that user isn't a regular reviewer. A more compelling argument would take all the users that were filtered and analyze their history. That's where the interesting data is, so show me that and convince me that Yelp's algorithm is bad. Don't just say "Look at how difficult reCaptcha is, Yelp must be up to something here." When has any implementation of captcha ever been easy to use?

That original article says that the users banded together to write positive reviews over a short period of time. We don't know whether the business owner incentivized them or if they just did that altruistically. The facts are simply not known, the best we can do is make assumptions there (which makes for a pretty weak argument to begin with). Banding together and writing reviews with the sole purpose of boosting a business' online reputation is what really happened here, and Yelp specifically designed their algorithm to deal with those use cases. The actual pattern businesses follow for building a reputation is very incremental: positive reviews spread over time, not a short burst by people who aren't actively using the site to review other businesses.

To make a compelling case, rather than what appears as a rant in its current form, you need more data. You need to show that the users are active on Yelp and they aren't afraid to write both positive and negative reviews to reflect their true experiences. Banding together in groups to write positive reviews is basically the same thing as submitting a story to HN and getting all your friends to upvote it.

You need to show that the users are active on Yelp and they aren't afraid to write both positive and negative reviews to reflect their true experiences.

That shouldn't be necessary. I've written like, five reviews ever and they're all honest, I have a few friends that have written reviews and they seem to average one review every few years or so. Meanwhile I've seen reviews from elites that are well-written but absolutely pointless for me. Sometimes it's as if they're writing more to impress other reviewers than to actually give me any useful information.

Banding together and writing reviews with the sole purpose of boosting a business' online reputation is what really happened here, and Yelp specifically designed their algorithm to deal with those use cases.

Why filter the reviews entirely instead of just sorting them down or something? Especially if they seem more or less legit except there's a small bunch all at once?

Banding together to boost an online business's reputation really should not be cause for filtration. Fake accounts, bots, lies, and attempts to bury negative information are problems. A bunch of loyal customers who hear about yelp from the owner and want to write a review is quite simply not a problem and yelp shouldn't be doing anything about it.

And why discriminate against businesses that don't sell advertising?

Banding together to boost an online business's reputation really should not be cause for filtration. Fake accounts, bots, lies, and attempts to bury negative information are problems.

How do you algorithmically distinguish between the two? To Yelp, someone who signs up for an account and writes one positive review is the exact same thing as a script written to create bots that go off and write one positive review. They're both identical. And the bots' behavior can change to write more reviews to prevent looking like a bot. Business reputations take time, so when Yelp's algorithm sees "this business has been around since 1975, and 100% of its positive reviews just came in over the past 10 months, where 100% of its reviews were previously negative before that", that should be a red flag. I can't find the age of Frank's dog training business on Yelp; I searched and I didn't see it listed. So I can't say for certain whether the age of his business on Yelp had to do with the algorithm flagging the reviews.

And why discriminate against businesses that don't sell advertising?

Yelp is letting you bump up your flagged reviews if you pay an advertising fee. If Yelp's algorithms don't trigger any red flags, positive reviews should show up unfiltered on your page whether you pay for advertising or not.

How do you algorithmically distinguish between the two?

Maybe it can't. It doesn't matter you use a linear or binary search if the program isn't fed valid data.

I'm suggesting they are using an algorithm to solve a problem that it shouldn't be used to solve.

And the bots' behavior can change to write more reviews to prevent looking like a bot. Business reputations take time, so when Yelp's algorithm sees "this business has been around since 1975, and 100% of its positive reviews just came in over the past 10 months, where 100% of its reviews were previously negative before that", that should be a red flag.

Interesting that you use the term "red flag" since that usually means a "warning" or "needs attention." There's a world of difference between using an algorithm to raise red flags, and using an algorithm to automatically prune content. In fact, a three-decades old small business with a lone, 1-star review should raise a red flag about the 1-star review.

Business owners soliciting reviews was the reason that (at least) one lawsuit against Yelp was dismissed, and I'd imagine flashmobs of high ratings are particularly easy to detect algorithmically.

It is not just about clueless people writing reviews. Yelp as a business doesn't care about the business owner when some inaccurate reviews are being posted and clearly break their TOS. Yelp doesn't try to be fair toward the business, and why should they? Their goal is to sell ads which will have the side effect of pushing positive review toward the top of a page business. So having an algorithm system biased toward promoting negative and potentially fake reviews is good for Yelp business, since a business owner will rather have the positive reviews listed first when advertising through Yelp.

Unsubstantiated complaints? I simply wrote what I saw, besides a few opinions here and there. And I know a lot of people do indeed dislike Yelp, but like some other sites with huge user bases, there's little other options to turn to, so you're stuck with using Yelp. I actually use Yelp quite a bit myself.

Anyway, the evidence is clear for there to be good reason to hate on Yelp (see my article). But like you said, there's also good reason to hate on clueless reviewers. Why can't we do both until either issue is fixed?

Unsubstantiated complaints?

You claim that Yelp is writing their own 5 star reviews:

Personally, I wouldn't be shocked if Yelp is putting in its own 5 star reviews for itself in order to offset the barrage of negative reviews. Common perception of Yelp is not good, far from their current 3-star rating. Just glancing over the first few 4 and 5-star reviews for Yelp, all but two came from an 'Elite' member. Of course they review Yelp highly, they get thrown crazy parties. And I wouldn't be shocked if you lose your Elite status for a negative Yelp review.

This is pure FUD. You don't know if you lose elite status for a negative review. Not everyone gets to go to crazy parties. If this were Wikipedia, every statement would be tagged [weasel words] or [citation needed]. You've just made a bunch of stuff up.

If this is just entertainment, fine, but if you think you're writing something useful that is worthy of HN, then you're a little off. Your article boils down to links to filtered reviews not being obvious enough (even though the link is the same as all the other links on the page), complaints about reCaptcha, which Yelp doesn't even control, and then a bunch of made-up facts/anecdotes that you have done no research to prove true or false.

Look, I don't even like Yelp. But this is simply sloppy journalism, and it reads like it was written by a fifth grader who got a bunch of one-star reviews on Yelp.

Jesus dude, do you work for Yelp? So damn angry over an article that mostly states the breakdown of Yelp's filtered reviews.

Notice I said "I wouldn't be shocked" twice, not "I know for a fact that". I not once said that was the way it was, I simply said I thought it to be a decent possibility.

And this isn't worthy of HN? It reads like it was written by a fifth grader? It's number one on HN right now. Did I do something to you at one time in the past? If so, I sincerely apologize for ever wronging you.

I don't work for Yelp. I'm just saying there's nothing interesting about your article, without wasting my time by going line-by-line.

Do you really think your article is an example of top-quality writing and analysis? (Also, why post your own work to social news sites if you can't take the criticism? I don't hate you, I hate this article.)

Ha, I can take the criticism just fine man. I can also defend my writing, which is all I'm doing.

And no, I definitely don't think my post was top-quality writing or analysis. It was my second blog post, so I'm far from those labels. However, I'd place it a notch above a fifth-grader.

I can substantiate as a Yelp elite, that you don't lose Elite for writing bad reviews.