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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

> Surely Yelp can pick up on a continuous, consistent pattern of negative reviews.

But a continuous, consistent pattern of one-shot negative reviews is also not particularly difficult for a competing business (or anyone with a grudge) to reproduce.

This is a hard problem, and I don't think the credit check-style identity verification questions suggested in the post are going to solve it. For one thing, I think an overwhelming number of people would find it creepy. They're trying to tell people about a bad moving company, not get a car loan.

Putting more of your "valuable" online identity at stake seems likely to help. I hate to say it, but "Log in using your Facebook account" suddenly gives Yelp a lot more data to exploit to decide just how much trust they should put in your reviews.

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I agree it's easy to reproduce. Not an easy problem by any measure.

Putting in my credit card (or revealing any information I don't deem relevant to the company / form) is always an immediate deal breaker. For Yelp, a critical mass of reviews is needed, I'm not sure they can afford that.

Why would they find it creepy? You wouldn't need to say your using credit history. It would be as simple as asking the user a question "Please validate your a real person by answering these few questions".

As far as the user is concerned it's just a few questions and answers.

...about stuff Yelp has no business knowing, or asking about.

Have you seen the questions they use? They range from "which of these addresses have you previously lived at" to "which of these companies do you have a loan with" to "how much is your loan payment" among others. They're pretty creepy and made even more so by the fact that these are the same questions you answer to prove your identity to, say, the credit bureaus or your creditors. It's not the sort of stuff one should be answering lightly.

> Why would they find it creepy? You wouldn't need to say your using credit history. It would be as simple as asking the user a question "Please validate your a real person by answering these few questions". As far as the user is concerned it's just a few questions and answers.

If the questions were about my credit history then this is a deal breaker.

There is no way a site like yelp can get me to authenticate by answering questions about my credit history and I suspect that the vast majority of people would agree.

Now, facebook credentials, that's a different story.

"just a few questions and answers" that I would be, frankly, shocked, that Yelp knows out of nowhere without the explanation that they're hitting my credit file... and then with that explanation, it's equally creepy that they want to hit my credit file for me to leave a review of a pizza place on the Internet.

As far as the user is concerned it’s just a few questions and answers.

Just a few questions and answers that could hint at all kinds of things including relationship status, orientation, race, financial status, etc. Imagine if some stranger on the street, or even the cashier at a trendy retail store, asks you about some detail they have no business knowing. You would find it creepy. Now imagine it's some random web site (which is all Yelp is to most people).

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