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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

First and only Yelp review I ever left was three stars for an Indian restaurant in 2011. It was quickly hidden because "it didn't pass the bot filter" or something. I've never used it since as a reviewer or to find places. It lost all credibility on my first interaction with it.

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My wife left a bad review for a restaurant and was stalked and harassed by the restaurant owner for years afterwards.

Since she couldn't get Yelp to help with that, it makes every review suspect. It doesn't take much of that behavior to convince people to only leave good reviews, and then they're basically useless.

I had a restaurant owner out me by name in response to a Yelp review. I pointed out that her attitude toward customers like me tells the world everything they need to know. That place went out of business, guess it wasn't just me.

How did they know your real name? Because they had your credit card and remembered you from your visit? Whenever I have a bad review to leave, I always wait a couple weeks, to minimize the chance they'll remember me...

> My wife left a bad review for a restaurant and was stalked and harassed by the restaurant owner for years afterwards.

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?

Yeah I had a similar experience with a plumbing business I chose not to hire after their rude and aggressive salesman came and insulted me in some misguided bid to get me to sign a contract.

I probably would have reacted the same way. But at the same time, Yelp's algorithm probably treats accounts with a track record as more legit than ones that were just created and then wrote a review. I wonder if they ever would have unhid your review if you had kept reviewing, or even just using the app to search for places to go.

Which is the flip side of aggressive removal of possible fake reviews people are clamoring for.

Precision vs recall, the bane of our lives

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