I can't relate to the negativity I see here. I like Yelp quite a lot. There have been a number occasions where I've found an excellent local restaurant that I wouldn't have otherwise found.
Admittedly, you have to know what you're doing. If you're in a food desert, like some parts of the US, you'll need to take those 4 and 4.5 star restaurant profiles with a grain of salt. What I would really like: the ability to select other users whose tastes are similar to mine that Yelp would then use to influence the ratings I see. This might also protect against paid spam reviews and over-picky reviewers.
I don't know, I've heard an awful lot of people who aren't tech/privacy nerds joke about how Yelp allows you to pay to remove bad reviews or add fake ones. It seems to be a common belief in at least the food industry and that employs an awful lot of people who may hear and propagate it.
Same here; I know people who are tech-averse (willing to use smartphones, Facebook, etc. but not interested in knowing anything about how it works) refer to Yelp's unreliability, without bothering to explain it. In other words, it's a known fact not needing to be explained, because they assume everyone in the conversation already knows it. I think their reputation is probably a net negative, by now, and their technology certainly cannot help them with that.
And yet no one can produce any evidence. It's just an easy excuse for a manager or owner whose location is getting poor ratings. My personal experience is that Yelp has an agressive sales force, their fraud detection system seems to fairly frequently raise false positives, but a business can do great on Yelp without paying a penny if they have happy customers.
My point was that it was widespread. There are so many small businesses that you don’t need that high a percentage to have bad experiences with sales critters or be conspiracy minded for a lot of people to hear the claim.
I meant "most people on this thread", which is the context GP was invoking:
> I can't relate to the negativity I see here.
And yes, Yelp calculated that they could get away with their shady money-grabbing since they had no competition.
Very clever, but like most dishonest behaviors - quite short sighted.
As soon as a competitor emerged, Yelp was unceremoniously ditched.
Also worth mentioning: you didn't have to be aware of their past misdeeds to be affected by the resulting rating distortions, which are still affecting users to this day.
The thing Yelp has never understood is that when they hide, deprecate, or remove a review for no good reason, the person who posted that review gripes about it to a half-dozen of their friends.
I worked directly on the code that would have done the things you're asserting to be true. There's no code to support it, and in fact, there are tools in place to prevent what you're claiming.
If there were some top-secret internal conspiracy to use the other tools on the site to do what you're claiming, you have to be especially credulous to believe that I -- or people just like me -- wouldn't have noticed it.
Unless you have some evidence to bring to the table other than "I read it on the internet", my word is worth more than your theories.
If you don't believe that what I'm telling you is true, then feel free to provide some proof.
The typical criticism of Yelp was that you could get negative reviews of your business removed if you paid them.
I'm not sure how as a coder you'd be able to guarantee that's never been done, except if your code guaranteed that no review could ever be removed by a human moderator, which I'm sure is not the case.
I'm not sure how otherwise skeptical techy people imagine a conspiracy into reality with nothing to back it up. Don't you think that of the thousands of people who have worked at yelp, that one of them would have spread news about it with their peers?
The "shakedowns", floods of negative reviews, sudden filtering, etc. Every single instance is some anecdotal story online, and has never been backed up in court, by investigative journalism, a scientific study, any kind of material evidence.
The barrier to entry to create a business listing, get reviews, get a sales call from yelp, and study the change in review is really, really low -- and yet you'd think we'd have more proof to go on than comments on hackernews and reddit if yelp were as shady as is claimed.
There are third party services that are effectively shakedowns -- similar to what shady SEO people do to spam whois contacts -- they threaten you with worse rankings if you don't pay up. These things have no connection to yelp itself.
There are multiple accounts in the same results page, and even in this very page:
> Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.
> After I received my first positive review on the site they called me and tried selling me all kinds of advertising. Hundreds of dollars per month worth. I declined, and around the same time my review went from being on my business page to being buried behind a "View Reviews that are not recommended" link.
Etc, etc. This seems like evidence. Or are all these people lying? Why is everyone slandering poor innocent Yelp then?
They’re not lying, they’re just attributing a sales call as a cause to some effect they only started paying attention to after the call, or they do get shaken down by a third party who targets them. Try registering a domain, your phone number on the Whois info, and the search rank shakedowns from scummy SEO services will start rolling in, calling themselves variations of “Google Search Advisors” threatening your site’s placement unless you pay. Some folks actually believe these calls are from google, and I’d expect people who own restaurants are targeted similarly, are much less techie and much less accustomed to these scams.
Then there’s also the effect of people not paying attention to their ratings in an objective way and immediately after the call start attributing any event that follows to the call.
And then of course there are folks who get a sales call after their first few reviews, as their business is picking up, and as that volume picks up some more critical folks show up and organically give negative reviews.
I don’t consider a blog post about someone who’s relaying something they say they heard from their friends to be evidence. I’d believe it if they collected data both before and after the call in an objective and consistent way.
They're not lying, they believe it's happening. That doesn't mean it is, however. Chances are they're seeing things that can be explained in other ways.
People who say they've seen bigfoot aren't lying when they genuinely believe they've seen bigfoot. That doesn't mean bigfoot exists.
If Yelp actually did shake people down like that, there would very likely be concrete proof by now (recorded phone calls, documents, emails, undercover journalism, whistleblower employees). Just as there would be concrete proof of bigfoot by now.
"I'm not sure how as a coder you'd be able to guarantee that's never been done, except if your code guaranteed that no review could ever be removed by a human moderator, which I'm sure is not the case."
I don't need to prove a negative. You need to prove your claim.
There's no evidence of what you're arguing, anywhere, and I'm telling you that the code didn't have any ability to support it. If there were some system to allow advertisers to influence reviews, I would have known about it. Moreover, if there were some top-secret, non-code mechanism to do it, I would have seen it in the data.
I have never seen any such thing.
On top of all of that, if it were really true that you could get your business' negative reviews removed, there would be ample evidence of this. By definition, it's not something Yelp could hide.
There are multiple accounts in the same results page, and even in this very page:
> Yelp is utter trash. They've shaken down several friends of mine who own and run restaurants. Either you pay for their premium services or a bunch of 1 star reviews start magically appearing on your business Its a well known racket and they should be run out of town on a rail for it.
> After I received my first positive review on the site they called me and tried selling me all kinds of advertising. Hundreds of dollars per month worth. I declined, and around the same time my review went from being on my business page to being buried behind a "View Reviews that are not recommended" link.
Etc, etc. This seems like evidence. Or are all these people lying? Why is everyone slandering poor innocent Yelp then?
I mostly like and use Yelp, and I get the negativity.
What your saying about knowing how to use Yelp is right on, but it leads to some dissatisfaction, because a 4 star restaurant should be a 4 star restaurant. More importantly, they manipulate ratings. They pressure businesses to pay them to fix ratings Yelp broke. They let businesses improve ratings when they shouldn't, analogous to Glassdoor and Amazon users getting ratings they don't like kicked off or hidden. There are plenty of fake and misleading reviews. And they have lots of dark patterns e.g. pushing you to their mobile app from the web, requiring you to create an account, etc. Some of these are observable by everyone, others there are many anecdotes.
They're not going away. They provide value to people, me included. But some negativity directed their way makes sense to me.
I was a pretty heavy Yelp user when I lived in SF, but I found the ratings not really that helpful elsewhere, even in NYC.
I mostly use Google Maps these days, and while I don't necessarily trust the user ratings or it's personalized score that much more, the fact that it will link you to, e.g. Eater listicles that mention a place is a super strong signal that a place is good in an area you don't know.
Yelp suffers the same issues that Amazon reviews has. General public is easily influenced to give high scores to mediocre food/products. I'd rather have reviews from trusted reviewers or a Netflix type scoring system that matches my picks with other people who have the same taste.
I certainly like a world with yelp vs one without it. I dont get the hate in here either. They've done some shady stuff in the past but i think every single reviews platform has issues with fraud
> the ability to select other users whose tastes are similar to mine that Yelp would then use to influence the ratings I see.
Google maps started doing this a while ago, I don't think their algo is perfect yet, but the personal match % has been more accurate than the general rating of the restaurants.
In this instance, this observation is equivalent to saying that some of the false reviews that people complain about sound like someone's genuinely expressed opinion.
Admittedly, you have to know what you're doing. If you're in a food desert, like some parts of the US, you'll need to take those 4 and 4.5 star restaurant profiles with a grain of salt. What I would really like: the ability to select other users whose tastes are similar to mine that Yelp would then use to influence the ratings I see. This might also protect against paid spam reviews and over-picky reviewers.