Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

That’s why new restaurants hire people to line up outside.

Totally tangential but follow-ups on that psychology:

* some people would walk in and see the still mostly-empty bar and get fed up that they waited in line for "nothing". This was surprisingly few people though.

* some people would ask and buy just about any explanation - "oh that guy is new and still learning", "we had someone get in on a fake ID and got a fine the other day so the guys are just being careful" or whatever and the people would be glad they got in early to get a good spot.

* sometimes we'd slow down the bar staff a bit too so that there was a line to buy drinks and people were happier that they had to wait in line again - confirming their bias that they must have gotten in at the start of the rush.

* some people were wise to the scam and everyone who called us on it thought it was great. They often offered to have their buddies come through the line a few times in exchange for a free drink.

* for some reason when you let your buddies, regulars and off-shift staff cut the line and get in quick, the rest of the folks seemed more willing to wait in the line.

tl; dr - group psychology of humans is wierd.

But there's not really any alternative. Apple Maps can't show me things because it's missing the entries entirely. Yelp became useless years ago. I feel like we're going back in time because the best way to find local restaurants has become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations.

There's also a lot of brigading on Maps. You'll see 5 1-star reviews in a row, and realize they are either duplicate accounts or friends who are all reviewing the same experience.

For example some of my favorite Asian restaurants in the city are rated 3.5ish while Uber Eats is rated like 4.7. It leads me to believe a lot of people are rating Google Maps restaurants also based on service. One in particular

https://www.ubereats.com/ca/store/china-lan-lanzhou-beef-noo... (4.7)

https://goo.gl/maps/GnLmwJNRjBHP9UnN8 (3.9)

This place is awesome, and personally have experienced bad service but don't really care, so I do understand the Google Maps rating, but do find the whole rating system not helpful for me as I'm interested in good food and willing to accept bad service.

If only. Its more like "these are the businesses that have paid me. They don't match what you want, but tough cookies."

Same with the much vaunted Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines. They stopped recommending stuff that you would like a long time ago, around the time everyone was trying to copy their recommendation engines, and started recommending stuff that makes the company more money.

I just mean that Yelp has chosen to filter and limit in addition to what I'm actually searching. It might be a conversion thing - if I have one really good match it's easier to decide than if they actually show me all 10.

But it means it's really really important to the business now to be that 1 that doesn't get filtered.

And THAT really increases the market for all these fake-review things.

> Dean said [Yelp's] notices validate her work, but also perfectly exemplify what she calls Yelp’s “whack-a-mole” approach ... she showed SFGATE several sketchy posts that she hasn’t mentioned in her videos — and which are still up and active.

> “I find it annoying, like, ‘You need me?’” she said. “... They’re a billion-dollar tech company that’s got teams of engineers and a trust and safety team.”

> ... Yelp said its automated recommendation software checked the 21 million reviews submitted last year for “quality, reliability and user activity” and had filed 75% into the “recommended” category, which are the reviews that figure most prominently on businesses’ pages and affect their star ratings. Of the remaining 25%, just 4% were removed by Yelp’s own moderators, 2% were removed by the reviewers themselves, and 19% were categorized as “not recommended reviews” — which don’t affect companies’ star ratings but are still accessible on businesses’ Yelp pages.

> In Dean’s mind, it’s not enough. She feels Yelp should better use account data to proactively identify problematic users and ban them altogether, and speculates that Yelp might be avoiding a crackdown on fake reviews because the positive boosts to businesses’ ratings might increase Yelp’s value to those businesses.

Given that this kind of problem is rampant across social media (where the platform is incentivized to promote horrible things, as we've seen with Meta, Insta, etc etc), it probably should be criminal if we ever want to erase this scourge. As the article shows, _businesses can't opt out from Yelp_ -- which is a pretty horrible state of affairs.

So you're getting both new reviewers (or travelers) who don't know it used to be better who still call it good, mixed with old reviews calling it good.

It's not even just a management change that causes this. This is when you almost wish Google maps would put your location history to use. It sees you visit the place frequently and thus if you stop visiting and leave a negative review it should weigh that review higher and give it more visibility. An old stale review or a review from someone who visited once I don't think should be as impactful or useful on the experience.

Overall I find discovering new places to be frustrating as reviews often seem useless. Usually I find the best method of discovering new places is still via word-of-mouth in person.

The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.

This is:

Change.

Read it through again and you'll get it.”

-- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Any information repository eventually comes to face the problem that the phenomena it is describing is no longer the same, for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons.

And you better be happy with it.

Think that's the root of the issue. A review system should not be in the business of advertisement or any kind which could change the review ranks

But from Yelp's perspective, a paid-for review claiming bad food is just fine, because it only tarnishes the restaurant's reputation. On the other hand, a claim of fraudulent review manipulation hits both the business and Yelp's reputations.

For tow trucks just search for ones that can do a semi. They’ll know who to call.

(Use AAA for tows and vehicle lockouts, never a locksmith you find on your own.)

Unlike roadside assistance (which works), the one thing I can tell you not to do for emergency plumbers is trust a home warranty service like American Home Shield. These sorts of "services" pay contractors subpar and flat rates, which deprioritizes your claims and incentivizes corner-cutting. They will not deliver miracles like finding you a plumber on Thanksgiving.

of course secrets can be kept in large organizations, but it's funny how often that get repeated.

That, and, as the article details, and I’ve seen in my own personal experience, business owners are extremely aggressive about trying to get you to take down negative reviews, which I’m sure not only gets people to take them down but also discourages people from writing them in the first place.

I wouldn't think so. In a society so rife with obvious scams everywhere you look, at every level in public and private sector orgs, it would be patently idiotic to trash your own career on account of a dishonest restaurant review operation.

I wish we lived in a world where such bravery were meaningfully valued, but we don't. For any might-be whistleblowers, this reality has been made painfully clear in the time since the Snowden leaks nearly a decade ago, during which nothing has changed.

It's normal for a new local restaurant to get a bunch of good reviews because locals are trying it for the first time and want to help. Then it's normal for reviews to drop off because every local who would leave a review, has. Then it's normal to start attracting negative reviews from people who have never visited because local competing restaurants have realized where the downtick in their own business has come from, and so start trashing the competition. And then the negative reviews stop because the competing restaurants were satisfied they'd left enough negative reviews.

These stories have been going around about Yelp for over a decade at this point. And Yelp has churned through so many salespeople... you'd think there would have been tons of credible whistleblowers by now if this were really how Yelp operated.

Small biz across the world are subject to the reach of social media addicted primates with persecution complex. Few will take the risk of a review bomb or nobodies traveling to vandalize their business.

It’s not a new meme by any means: https://fortune.com/2015/04/07/yelp-reviews-controversy/

If they go to the media, even if they are 100% on the whistleblower's side, it'll be a week (at most) of slightly negative PR. People will forget, if they noticed in the first place.

Is there a government body that will act on this? What will they do? A small fine? Would this actually go to court?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=336153126478324...

which ended with: The case was dismissed on appeal on the grounds that the complainants had not adequately proven (1) Yelp had wrongfully threatened economic loss by manipulating user reviews, (2) it was unlawful for Yelp to post and sequence both positive and negative reviews, (3) Yelp authored negative reviews, and (4) Yelp’s conduct amounted to a violation of antitrust laws by threatening or harming competition.

Yelp was also sued for false advertising (essentially saying they were a trusted, unbiased review source) which they somehow also won:

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-finally-d...

anyway, I actively avoid Yelp reviews because of this chicanery.

I made dozens of them ... they failed to gain traction. A few are over 100 views a couple years later (like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3byGVjPq468) but I have still failed to crack the world of social media. It's not zero ... that's nice I guess.

I'm planning to do a reboot sometime soon. I took a couple weeklong trips around the country to some research libraries in the past year or so, but I'd like to execute differently to try to be more effective. This was my third show run attempt.

I think I may need a new foil for my host. The guy I did the shows with is a longtime TV comedy writer (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1104065/) but he's not exactly a second city graduate.

There are multiple comments like this and I wonder how does it work? Like, you can just tell they guy to f-off, block his number and warn him that you are calling police if he continues to "stalk" you, no?

Many small businesses get their viral loop started from glowing reviews from family and friends. That sort of growth hack will never disappear, and the subtle cases will be undetectable. I decline to write such reviews, but others won't.

They also seem to have a much broader range of things covered now, so I think the strategy was to go cheaper, faster, wider.

I worked on an anti-fraud team in a similar role, and I agree with GP that it's a harder problem than people realize. It's easy to come up with a simple metric that would identify the fraud that you observe, but you don't know what false positives it would catch as collateral damage.

Like this example that you find wildly implausible:

>Two actors, seemingly independent, have each reviewed three businesses only. And they've reviewed the same three businesses, in the same order. And perhaps they each reviewed the first business, then two weeks later, the second business, and then the third. Odds? Getting pretty slim now. A third actor, doing the same? You're stretching the bounds of credulity for sincere reviews.

I think it's highly likely that if you used this metric to find patterns, you'd find fraud, but you'd also find lots of legitimate reviews (e.g., friends who go to the same restaurants together, friends who recommend restaurants to each other).

Is it actually? My bank calls me to ask which transactions were mine and which ones werent, thus requiring outside feedback

It seems Apple Maps and Pay could result in good reviews, because they'd all be tied together.

I havent used since I missed a turn. Why not use google maps?

Google Maps I still don't understand where they get a lot of reviews from in the first place. While some look like normal reviews, there's a lot that have no comments at all or comments completely unrelated to the place ostensibly being reviewed (or just cryptic things like "not good" or "good"). It's not a bad comparison to use alongside Yelp, but it's definitely led to more clunkers, especially for places with n<20 reviews.

Alice from [brand] would then have to find a way to get customers to take off their watches or somehow artificially inflate their happiness scores. Or, funnel naturally happier people to their establishment, similar to lead sourcing.