Re:Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser
by Endy on Thursday January 11, 2018 @03:59AM
(#16122375)
Yes, they do hide reviews regularly - and their marketing team basically tells you if you own a business listed on Yelp with correct information. Positive reviews get hidden for non-advertisers, negative ones for advertisers. In essence when you switch from consumer side to business-owner side, the site goes from a friendly place to post reviews into a vicious protection racket - i.e. "That's a nice reputation you got there, pal. Be a shame if something... happened to it, y'know?"
I wish that was so very different than what their official team members said on the phone.
Re:Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser
by tyingq on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @11:33PM
(#16121407)
A good observation that someone at Yelp! probably missed. Nice catch.
I personally hate this sort of anonymous group think thing where's there is no way to get a human to look into dumb processes and policies. YouTube seems to be in a similar place with copyright claims. No way to get a human to look into obvious failings of automated (or dumb manual) policy enforcement.
Re:Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser
by DrScump on Thursday January 11, 2018 @01:54AM
(#16121927)
there is no way to get a human to look into...
Yelp's Talk forums in many cities have been bombarded with spam postings for fake toll-free support numbers for numerous brands. They persist for days in many cases. There seems to be little staff supervision of their site contents as a whole.
Re:Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser
by calbear81 on Thursday January 11, 2018 @12:10PM
(#16125536)
This could be easily answered by asking on Blind for an anonymous confirmation of whether or not there is any biasing factor built into the codebase.
My opinion is not, the algorithm has been examined by 3rd parties and if there are bad actors it’s probably overeager salespeople who will say anything to make their quota.
I also tend to believe that fraud detection is also playing a big part in the form of false positives in identifying untrustworthy 5-star reviews. I’m a Yelper myself and my SO is Yelp Elite and it’s not very commmon that good reviewers write reviews on the spot (using cafe wifi) for restaurants. I’m sure some store owners prod their customers to create Yelp accounts to rate them or have a sign up with “Rate us 5-stars on Yelp” which is fine but would make these reviews from new members more suspicious.
Re:Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser
by wmeredith on Thursday January 11, 2018 @08:53AM
(#16123804)
After seeing about a hundred of these stories over the last decade or so, I don’t really need any proof. There’s no way I can file this away as “not a problem” when I think of Yelp.
Whether due to official policy or unofficial policy (company culture) Yelp has an antagonistic relationship with small business owners on behalf of their customers and it’s gross.
Re:Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser
by sctb on Thursday January 11, 2018 @11:21AM
(#16125095)
We didn't ban you, but it looks like some of your posts got caught in the anti-abuse software. The best way to reach us about this is to email [email protected].
Probably because they were all on the cafe's wifi network when they reviewed the place.
I personally hate this sort of anonymous group think thing where's there is no way to get a human to look into dumb processes and policies. YouTube seems to be in a similar place with copyright claims. No way to get a human to look into obvious failings of automated (or dumb manual) policy enforcement.
My opinion is not, the algorithm has been examined by 3rd parties and if there are bad actors it’s probably overeager salespeople who will say anything to make their quota.
I also tend to believe that fraud detection is also playing a big part in the form of false positives in identifying untrustworthy 5-star reviews. I’m a Yelper myself and my SO is Yelp Elite and it’s not very commmon that good reviewers write reviews on the spot (using cafe wifi) for restaurants. I’m sure some store owners prod their customers to create Yelp accounts to rate them or have a sign up with “Rate us 5-stars on Yelp” which is fine but would make these reviews from new members more suspicious.
Whether due to official policy or unofficial policy (company culture) Yelp has an antagonistic relationship with small business owners on behalf of their customers and it’s gross.