Being established isn't enough, eventually they have to push on those whose information / access they provide.
Personally I gave up on Yelp as years ago I could see so many reviews for places by people who clearly had no clue what that place even was. Such as if you go to a Neapolitan pizza place... you really shouldn't complain that the pizza is "just thin crust". Or the always great "this place isn't as good as X" where X is a place that costs 3x as much....
A charitable interpretation is that the salesperson is basically claiming there were 21,000 searches the business showed up in, where they could have been shown at the top if they advertised.
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/09/yelp-accused-hiding-posi...
https://raymondfong.net/a-candid-yelp-advertising-review-is-...
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-rev...
They had paid for Yelp advertising, and after deciding to stop suddenly their search result priority dropped, bad reviews were prioritized in their profile, and good reviews started being removed.
Yelp employees don't know about these practices.
Yelp says it doesn't have these practices.
And these people can't ever offer substantive evidence for the outrage porn they're writing.
I'm thoroughly convinced after reading countless of these types of posts that the anti-Yelp sentiment is purely born out of salty business owners who don't like the fact that they get terrible reviews from an experienced audience.
This post does not belong on HN. There is nothing worth discussing about this story except to fulfill someone's outrage porn fetish.
However, hasn't Google reviews pretty well made Yelp irrelevant at this point? And while there's lots to be concerned about Google's business model, I'm not aware of any potential for conflict-of-interest in Google reviews as with Yelp.
If it were a race to rate everything as close to 5/5 as possible, yes. Google, Facebook, and Tripadvisor are all winning that race.
Yelp typically has lower ratings and is easier to filter/search.
It's far from the perfect platform, but certainly less astroturfed than the others.
I know I don't. I asked why I should. The principle behind the question was providing rational evidence to lend credence to these stories. Your statements don't offer anything that help with this.
https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business...
There is more evidence in the filings for Curry v. Yelp.
This quote has never been more relevant here.
> Yelp employees don't know about these practices.
> Yelp says it doesn't have these practices.
And both of these parties have skin in the game. Their incentives are, of course, to pretend they do not have dishonest and extortionate practices and to perpetuate the status quo.
> I'm thoroughly convinced after reading countless of these types of posts that the anti-Yelp sentiment is purely born out of salty business owners who don't like the fact that they get terrible reviews from an experienced audience.
I'm thoroughly convinced after your post that not only do you not understand how Yelp works (that they have the ability to arbitrarily move reviews to and from recommended and not recommended, affecting a businesses' score), but you also do not understand that Yelp is generally a bad medium for non-biased reviews, because most people will only leave a review if they're ecstatic about the business or have a gripe with it.
For every piece of feedback you see, there are probably at least 400-500 normal business interactions with regular people, despite whatever arbitrary rating Yelp has chosen to display on that week.
> And these people can't ever offer substantive evidence for the outrage porn they're writing.
You don't get to play arbiter on the height of the bar set for evidence. There have been multiple accounts over the years from business owners detailing the nature of their phone calls with Yelp. Until their algorithm for rating is open sourced, the burden of proof is actually on Yelp to showcase that the ratings are not being manipulated in any way. What's stopping them from removing a 5 star review and citing that it "doesn't follow guidelines" and pretend that it's ok?
> This post does not belong on HN.
Indeed it is your post that doesn't belong on HN. It is indicative of poor research, victim blaming and vague goalpost moving.
I think you need to avoid using conspiracy theories. It's a rating system, not a secret government project.
>There have been multiple accounts over the years from business owners detailing the nature of their phone calls with Yelp.
You and I have very very different standards on what constitutes evidence on any subject matter. It's simply not rational to take people are their word when they're so emotionally invested in this subject matter, or what's more likely is they're just being scammed. Small business owners tend to not be the brightest bunch of people. And there is a sizable population of current and former engineers all saying Yelp does not do these things. There has never been evidence of anything the actions people accuse Yelp of taking. It's either scammers or rather, as I've come to see, business owners just being salty they get negative reviews.
Based on how you're thinking about this, you'd think the IRS and the scammers who call people over the phone pretending to be the IRS are one in the same. That's how insane you're being.
>Until their algorithm for rating is open sourced
You seem to be under the impression this would mean anything, but it's an opinion born out of a dearth of knowledge on technical systems and security in general. The code being published isn't necessarily the code being run.
>It is indicative of poor research,
I think you need to really have a big think about what opinions and solutions you think are worth considering.
>victim blaming
What? There are victims here?
>vague goalpost
Now you're just throwing words around.
Now I don’t like Yelp. Fakespot often finds loads of fake reviews and that’s a problem, but one unrelated to Yelp’s social media “reputation.”
But Google's "reviews" aren't really reviews at all. They're one-liners that people type into their phones, without telling me anything about local specialties or WHY some particular dish was good or bad. (What's "too spicy" for someone might be just what I want, etc.)
The best Yelp reviews are really informative. They're quirky and opinionated, but that's part of the fun of reading them. I routinely collect a couple Google-generated names and then look up the places on Yelp to get the real deal.
I understand that Yelp's sales team plays dodgy games with merchants to "fix" negative reviews, or to shake down merchants who don't buy ads. Wish they didn't.
But from a consumer standpoint, a seriously flawed Yelp is still more useful than a deluge of momentary burps from a Google system that is practically insight-free.
I wish Google would incentivise helpful reviews and better verify that a user has actually been to a place before prompting them to review it. Something as simple as creating a guide on how to write a meaningful review could probably go a long way.
I couldn't find a source for this but I once heard of an North American company which had opened some offices in northern Europe and used the same satisfaction survey across all offices. They were astonished to see satisfaction scores being so low in northern Europe so they launched an investigation into the matter. The result of the investigation was that satisfaction in the European offices was actually comparable if not higher than the North American offices, but culturally they would use a score like 3/5 to indicate that they had no complaints, reserving higher scores for when things were above and beyond great.
Someone with better Google-fu might be able to find a source because I probably got something wrong but I think that was the gist of the event.
[1] https://astoldbydana.com/2014/11/11/grading-on-the-french-sy...
Follow-up question: was it all a cunning plan or was it discovered by chance? My guess is the chance discovery.
Isn't their new business model basically track your location and sell the data to anyone with money? The title to their website it literally "Foursquare - The Trusted Location Data & Intelligence Company" (https://foursquare.com/).
