Slashdot Mirror
Small Restaurant Out-Maneuvers Yelp In Reviews War
An anonymous reader writes Yelp has, for the past year or so, garnered a reputation for extorting businesses into paying for advertising on their site. Allegations include incessant calls for advertising contracts, automatic listing of a business, and suppressing good reviews should a business decide to opt out of paying Yelp for listing them. One small Italian trattoria, however, may have succeeded in flipping Yelp's legally sanctioned business practices in its favor. The owners of Botto Bistro in Redmond, CA, initially agreed to pay for advertising on Yelp one year ago apparently because they were tired of getting calls from Yelp's sales team. But even after buying advertising, the owners claim that they kept receiving calls. So they started a campaign to get as many one-star reviews as they could, even offering 25% discounts to customers. As of this writing they have 866, and a casual perusal of them reveals enthusiastic tongue-in-cheek support for the restaurant. One-star reviews, once Yelp's best scare tactic, is now this particular business's badge of quality. And they didn't even have to pay Yelp for it.
No not really, but here are some Yelp reviews anyway, just from this weekend:
(one star)
Your food seems delicious, but that you do not offer shipping to Canary Islands (Spain).... That I cannot accept...
C'mon what kind of service do you offer if you don't deliver to 10000km afar?
I better go to another place!
(one star)
Don't try the pizza, it's so good you will come back every day, it completely ruined my social life cause each night I only want to go there
I hate this place!
(one star)
Great food, great drinks, great service awesome experience overall. However...
- No pet giraffes or tigers allowed inside
- No shower in the bathroom
- No gym inside to work out after meal
- One time they wouldn't serve me because I was completely naked and very drunk
- Food is not free and I have to pay for it
- They always get your order right
So for these reasons I hate this place and will not return for a day or two.
(one star)
I have never been here before.
In fact, I have never heard of this place before. But, it is SO AWFUL that I am going to refuse to get within 500 miles of it. Therefore, all because of how bad this restaurant is, I am going to have to cancel my plans to visit the Bay Area. In fact, this place is so bad...so I have heard...that I may have to move out of the state due to the embarrassment of being in the same state as this place.
(one star)
Too much integrity. No thanks!
How can I be sure that you care about your food if you won't be manipulated by the Yelp powers-that-be?
How can I trust that you care about quality if you won't spend your time whoring yourself online for 5-star reviews?
How can I expect you to care about your staff and their families if you won't give money to Yelp instead of them??
(one star)
Can't stand this place. Came here and asked if I could substitute the pizza dough with cardboard... they could not accommodate me.
BRB going to Dominos.
Please mod Troll as sign of quality
Thank you
Yelp Tactic
Submit Yelp story on Slashdot
Profit
But they paid for reviews. So after paying Yelp! to shill for them unsuccessfully, they paid customers to shill for them.
I fail to see how anyone in this story acted non-shittily.
The submitter (or Timothy) talks about "The owners of Botto Bistro in REDMOND, CA ..."
The restaurant is in RICHMOND CA, methinks.
If I could just shoot them for being an annoying sack of crap, I would, but the damn government won't let me, so there is no free market solution to it.
...and no one knows what to do to fix it.
In 2010 the new Web was all about "user generated content". Today, the modern mantra is: "Don't read the comments"
Reviews and review sites have almost exactly the same problems as comment sections: there is no way to filter the ignorant and/or malicious from the informed and sincere. Case in point: there are currently exactly two reviews of my book on Amazon. One from a reasonably thoughtful reader (3 stars) and one from a troll who apparently has given Charles Dickens the same rating as me (2 stars).
There was a five-star review which was from someone who had read the book and genuinely liked it, but Amazon determined it was from someone I knew (likely because I bought her a book on the site a few years ago) and removed the review. This is a ridiculous practice--it would invalidate a huge number of reviews in traditional publications--but is made necessary by authors who try to game the review system in the stupidest possible way.
If there is a solution to these problems it's likely some kind of reputation system, but as near as I can tell no one--not Amazon, not GoodReads, not TripAdvisor, not Yelp, not anyone--is even thinking along those lines, which suggests there is no money in building a site that provides honest peer-to-peer feedback. This is a shame, because the Web should be enabling us to help each other, not increasing our distrust of each other (we're plenty good enough at that already).
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I've never understood how the business model for 'free' review sites is supposed to work anyway.
You're in the *reviewing* business. If you're legit you can't sell ads - Consumer reports has no ads - They make all their money from subscriptions.
However, it's the internet, so you can't sell subscriptions. People won't pay.
So can't sell ads, can't sell subscriptions... How can you create a legit reviews site?
C'mon...
there is no way to filter the ignorant and/or malicious from the informed and sincere.
Actually, it is quite easy, the informed ones stick out as a linux deployment in a government agency. You can fall for the fake comments only if you're stupid, inattentive, or promoting a book in a slashdot post.
It's Richmond, not Redmond!
It's called the Michelin Guide. People have figured it out a long time ago.
Personally I love the slashdot moderation system but it cannot work in a review system. It works because there is a single topic piece that people then comment on and everyone has the same baseline information. When you are looking at reviews of hotels or restaurants you have almost nothing to judge the comments against.
The closest anyone has come up with is the "was this review helpful?" but that gets abused easily. With restaurants it is hard to even decide if someone should be a trusted reviewer and hence promote their reviews as they will tend to be geographically limited.
I have actually given this problem some thought for a website idea I have been working on and I haven't been able to solve it. Every system I come up with is simply too easy to game.
Search engines are absolutely awful at finding reviews. Try goggling "reviews for X", absolutely zero useful content. Into this void Yelp and other smaller rent-seekers stepped in. With their racketeering they poisoned the system to the point of being useless.
So Yelp's tactic is, pay us for advertising or we will give you a lot of negative reviews. Sounds like extortion, no?
"The Evil Plan is working" -- Botto Bistro
"Totes!" -- Yelp
True peer-to-peer communications of any kind is extremely dangerous to the state and those that it serves. Divide and conquer is still a fine art, and so easy to use. This creation of "distrust" is no accident. It's a good way of discrediting whistle blowers, for example, or any other "unauthorized" communique.
Slashdot's system works because nobody can gang up on a single comment, +5 -1, though some tail the user and mod their whole comment page. But the absolute best thing about Slashdot is that comments can't be edited, and so far I can tell, aside from the famous incident, they aren't deleted. And they still allow ACs.
Soon all this will be gone, swallowed up by reddit... Woe to planet Earth when Slashdot disappears.
Pay no attention to the fact that what they're really doing is strongly diluting the actual poor reviews.
Honestly, the FAQ on their website makes them sound like complete fucking assholes. You don't have to bend over backwards for customers, but you really don't need to go around insulting the hell out of them.
Please help metamoderate.
Is this still happening?, I wonder because I hope to find all the information I need about this tech issues and posts. Thanks - Ambiente Mexicano Regalos
Checkbook.org, co-founded by Consumer Reports, uses a system that is difficult to game. To come up with ratings the site sends out a survey every year asking customers to respond with ratings. To game the system you have to pay for a subscription. Each subscription must have a valid mailing address. The downside is that you have to pay for a subscription to use the site and they only review local businesses.
Looks like Yelp learned from the Better Business Bureau.
The BBB is fully funded by dues from member companies. They are even franchaised so each BBB is locally owned and operated.
The incentive to join the local BBB is that unresolved customer complains ("bad reviews") are deleted from the public record of member companies after a certain amount of time, it varies by franchaise but usually 1-2 years. While unresolved complaints against non-member companies are never deleted. So if you file a complaint against a non-member company, that isn't something that will necessarily help you but it is a sales-lead for the local BBB office.
This business model leads to the perverse result that you can't trust the records of BBB members but you can trust the records of non-members.
If the system is too easy to game, don't reveal the details of the system.
Want to get to the top of Google? Sure, it's possible to game the system, it's equally possible to get your site shit-canned for gaming the system.
TripAdvisor displays red text for any establishment that they believe has bogus reviews. Make the system reasonably complex, include some kind of penalties for people acting in bad faith, and you're good to go.
And yet everyone is commenting here
Michelin Guide slants towards a certain style of restaurant (chefs who try to make something 'original' or 'interesting'). If you aren't interested in that kind of food, or you want something good for lunch, then there might not be anything in Michelin guide for you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Pay no attention to the fact that what they're really doing is strongly diluting the actual poor reviews.
Honestly, the FAQ on their website makes them sound like complete fucking assholes. You don't have to bend over backwards for customers, but you really don't need to go around insulting the hell out of them.
Unless you have a sense of humor. Although I get a few dumbass customers like that, I just smile and take their money.
I see what you did there...
Basically Yelp isn't a neutral observer and can't be trusted.
So I can't see valuing their opinions on restaurants and other businesses in the future.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I can understand giving the place one star because that's what they want, but most of the reviews are from people who've never been to the place, or the reviews are all nonsense, like "I went to this Italian restaurant expecting to eat Chinese". I could see Yelp turning around, deleting all the reviews and starting this shitfest all over again.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Pay no attention to the fact that what they're really doing is strongly diluting the actual poor reviews.
Better than being extorted by Yelp to pay them to do the same thing.
Given the disconnect between the number of calls Botto says they received from Yelp and the number of calls Yelp says they placed (of course they wouldn't be lying, right?) I can't help but wonder if Yelp has at least one dodgy reseller pretending to be them. How hard can it be trawling the business listings on Yelp looking for ones that aren't registered/paying Yelp customers?
When you are looking at reviews of hotels or restaurants you have almost nothing to judge the comments against.
I think the idea is to tie their reviews into the larger ecosystem of online comments.
So if they are assholes in the comments section of [online news article] and get downvoted,
then that would be reflected in the data your site gets from the "third party reputation system."
Then it's up to you how you want your site to weight their asshole behavior.
Ideally, this system would support one identification, but multiple user names,
in the sense that I can be Bob on one website and Alice on another,
but the reputation reflects all my online comments.
That said, while I see how it could be useful, I actually hate the idea.
Having ALL my online comments concentrated in 1 easy to hack/subpoena place is discomfiting.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This can work once or maybe in one or two places per region, but the reality is that many people will use services like yelp to narrow down their new eateries by a simple sort-by-rating.
Also this somewhat depends on people being connected to local media to be informed about this reversal. Most of my technology friends have zero interaction with local media. That is they don't listen to local radio, watch local TV, read local publications; thus they are more likely to read about this place far far away than to read about a similar even locally.
But this all raises a much larger issue and that is we almost need a yelp to rate the rating services. Especially as time goes by these crowd sourced rating services will either begin to alter their ratings for pay or they will be largely gamed by various unethical players who usually have financial motives to game the system.
For instance in my town most restaurants don't have more than a few dozen ratings at best. Thus it would not take a competitor much effort to set up a series of shill accounts and trash their overall average. "I was served beef that had 2 cooked worms and the salad had a maggot in it, the owner laughed when I pointed this out and said that he has paid off the health inspectors so go ahead an call."
Not to mention that there are professional services that will do this sort of shill voting for you. As an example when certain companies are brought up on slashdot there is an instant onslaught of comments that basically are talking points written in a style that only a PR company would use. "Those spurious allegations were never proven in court, with all court actions dropped, and the publications that conjured up that story don't even rate as tabloids. This civic minded company has given over $2,000,000 to women's shelters in the local area alone."
But as more and more companies come to realize that crowd sourced rating or communication systems can be gamed for profit then they will put more and more sophisticated efforts into gaming the system. I love the slashdot system of quazi randomly assigning moderator points but very simply if you have 1,000 slashdot accounts run by a group of interns then a huge number of points and comments could be brought to bare on any issue that is desired.
If you want to run a simple experiment. Go onto reddit, go into the appropriate area and trash talk a fortune 50 company using a classically known wrongdoing from recent history. In most cases your topic will not only be voted into oblivion it will have many comments that are the above mentioned talking points. Some issues are so powerful that it can overwhelm the mathematical capability of their PR firms if they don't get onto the issue fast enough or if reddit happens to have nullified one of their voting cadres recently.
So unless someone comes up with a mathematically sound system of voting/rating that is invulnerable to manipulation these systems will only remain viable for as long as the people running them are able to maintain their ethics and outsmart the professional and financially motivated manipulators.
I agree. Google and Facebook are probably the only entities that would come close to being able to achieve this. But if Google or Facebook started sharing ratings about people across broader networks I think they would get hammered. Both in people leaving them and potentially privacy lawsuits.
That said though I think that could be a very flawed system. If you take Reddit for example (and slashdot to a lesser degree) a non-confirming post can get you downmodded to oblivion. Quite often there isn't anything wrong with what you said you just are not following the groups preference. Think how many people here get called shills here or the weird moderation that happens in anything apple v android.
Two restaurants I visited in Berlin did not have a Tripadvisor post. When I asked about this, they asked to please not add them to Tripadvisor because of extortion.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I hate you fucking conservative racist pieces of shit.
No worries. The rest of the world sees you Americunts as the same.
Why not have each reviewer's rating for a given item/location be statistically compared/weighted to that reviewer's history of ratings, e.g. a 5-star rating from someone who consistently gives 5-star ratings for everything could be valued less than someone who only does so some of the time, with weighting for older reviewers, anonymous reviewers, etc. Basically the equivalent of a bayesian spam filter, except for reviewers instead of mail. Yes, it won't be perfect, but can it at least be better than what we have now?
Slashdot's system works because there is not much at stake here apart from people's egos or opinions. If businesses depended on comments on slashdot, I think we'd find way more trolls and mod points for sale. The problem would be in a different league altogether.
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
They seemed to imply it's an Italian thing but I've been to Italy and I'm pretty sure they had ice there.
It would need to be a full on classification system, similar to how Netflix does ratings. That is, it would have to put both the reviewer and the review reader into groups, and weigh the rating based on the reviewer's similarity to the reader.
"People with similar ratings to yours gave this restaurant 2 stars, while the general public gave it 4 stars."
The problem with this is that you would need a whole lot more ratings in order to get any kind of reliability.
I meant the concept. Never been to a Michelin venue myself. Prefer italian pizza.
How can you know that you prefer it, if you've never tried the other?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Now every geeky friend who reads slashdot, which, there is a lot of us, we're everywhere, will trash a yelp review.
'Oh, yelp said it's bad? I don't use that site, they just use extortion or else they won't publish positive reviews. So it's not reliable, you might get a good restaurant with bad reviews because they didn't pay yelp, or a bad restaurant with good reviews because they paid for them''
And slowly, yelp loses any power it has.
I know if someone comments to me on it now I'd say it.
I also generally refute any online review from most places. Generally I only accept personal experiences or from people I trust.
the weird moderation that happens in anything apple v android.
I'll never understand how attached some people get to a corporation. The corporation will never love you back.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Many people prefer what they know over what they don't know.
I wonder what kidn of web we would end up with if adblockers were installed by default on every system. Certainly.. PC vendors would reduce support costs. The user would be shielded from malware java/flash ads and useless resource-hogging "analytics" scripts. Yelp-type parasitic companies that make money by just taking content other people have created and layering a shit-ton of ads on top would disappear overnight. I think that a virtual tip-jar that people can anonymously give to would be a great way to finance the real content creators..
It's called the Michelin Guide. People have figured it out a long time ago.
Now that I think of it, Lonely Planet does a really good job reviewing places. Might be worth getting a copy for your own local town.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Richmond California
Perhaps enough crud will accumulate in the current system and the pendulum will swing back to professional reviewers.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
That's called neophobia.
Digital Mafia hits an Italian restaurant. The Italians hit back. War starts. Something about this sounds familiar..
The proposed Consumer Review Freedom Act bans businesses from penalising you for posting bad reviews.
Would this also bar restaurants from effectively penalising customers who want to post postive revews? Could part of this restauran't business model be made illegal?
So basically you want censorship so people will buy your book. I find that morally corrupt. Censor that. And grow some.
It's typical of companies with an aggressive commission based sales team. It reminds me of a headhunter where my resume matched on a certain position, and I got various calls from employees who don't know each other.
The reviews are only diluted on Yelp. That's the idea. It makes Yelp worhless. They will have reviews on other sites. Tripadvisor has a negative review amongst 4 good ones.
The FAQ is an acquired taste. I think the idea is that if you don't like that you probably won't enjoy the restaurant. Businesses don't really like unsatisfied customers. They're more expensive to deal with and they dn't get repeat business.
Are you sure the /. system have a good reputation system? It seems to me it's really hard to come in as a new user and get good enough reputation to actually be listened to these days. Stack Overflow seems to have these problems too. Early adopter with good reputation, on the other hand, will not have any problems.
discus needs to fucking die. it's fucking horrible.
Tracks you all over the fucking place, worse than fucking facefuck
Pretty neat... I thought the online reviewing space was going the "reputation" route, becoming more "social" by allowing more highly weighting reviews from people in your group of friends (as well as entries in your "feeds" when friends visit a place). This seems to be the route of stuff like Foursquare... and... well, other similar services that I ignore because I don't have a very extensive network of friends who dine at the same sorts of places I go to.
The other route is to just have a place with reputable journalistic integrity do the reviews, which works OK in big cities. But then you pretty much have to know which journal to use in each major metro area, and deal with the reviews possibly being a year or two out of date. And, of course, probably little to no app integration with your favorite map search engine. http://www.washingtonian.com/s... is a great example for the DC area; we'd pretty much cycle through the entire "Cheap Eats" and "Dirt Cheap Eats" section for nearby neighborhoods, and maybe a few of the "100 best" for special occasions.
Other than that, I really do like Yelp for local recommendations, and have had great experiences using it. So much so that I downloaded the app when Google Maps switched from Yelp to Zagat for local search.
As an aside, I tried to like Zagat, even paid for a subscription back in the PalmOS days. But ultimately, Zagat reviews and ratings always seemed to be biased too much towards decor and not at all enough towards food quality, authenticity, and "interestingness", which Yelp excels in.
So it does suck to hear that Yelp is starting to extort business owners for listing good reviews, since I do make go/no-go decisions based on relative rankings. I dunno, maybe Yelp could start charging users extra for "journalistic integrity" mode that turns off some of their extortion effects, while the "free tier" of user gets rankings based more on advertising.
Anyway, articles like this do make me upset with Yelp. But a lot of places do seem to have yelp sticker on their window, so perhaps it's just part of the cost of doing business these days. I applaud this italian joint for lashing out against it in an entertaining way, and I'll start searching for some of the lowest reviewed places too, since I mostly use Yelp to find the exceptional places anyways.
Anyway, articles like this do make me upset with Yelp. But a lot of places do seem to have yelp sticker on their window, so perhaps it's just part of the cost of doing business these days. I applaud this italian joint for lashing out against it in an entertaining way, and I'll start searching for some of the lowest reviewed places too, since I mostly use Yelp to find the exceptional places anyways.
I suppose it had to be an Italian restaurant that recognised a shake-down when they saw one. A lot of people put their lives on the line to challenge mafia extortion, so a website with no guns is hardly a threat.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
the weird moderation that happens in anything apple v android.
I'll never understand how attached some people get to a corporation. The corporation will never love you back.
The problem are not people who supposedly 'love' a corporation. The problem are people who think someone loves a corporation just because he likes some of their products.
Why not have each reviewer's rating for a given item/location be statistically compared/weighted to that reviewer's history of ratings, e.g. a 5-star rating from someone who consistently gives 5-star ratings for everything could be valued less than someone who only does so some of the time,
Why? Maybe I simply only review things I like. Why would that devalue my reviews?
I've no problem at all with comment systems. I know the pitfalls. I filter and only read negative comments (positive comments are useless) Then look for things that would bother me. The idiots (which is most of them) I barely read at all. "This was incompatible with my ASUS motherboard!" THATS what I'm looking for. Books? Reviews aren't that helpful for books... At best, I look for books that there people bought along with books I really liked.
That's called neophobia.
That's called knowing WHAT you like, and knowing what you DON'T LIKE.
Some might call that wisdom, others might call it experience. Ancient Greeks used to call that "knowing your shit".
Or do you also call anyone who is not outside, in the open space, 24/7 an agoraphobic?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"...an agoraphobiAc."
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well said! Somebody should make it a .sig.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Slashdot's system works because there is not much at stake here apart from people's egos or opinions. If businesses depended on comments on slashdot, I think we'd find way more trolls and mod points for sale. The problem would be in a different league altogether.
Oh no, that might lead to business-promoted article selection by the site's editors or even 'Slashvertisements'. If worst came to worst the slashdot management might even start to think of site users as "viewers" waiting to consume a publication and no longer see them as "commentators" here to exchange opinions.
So it's a might good thing that businesses don't depend on slashdot comments or articles...
.. anybody really rely onYelp reviews for anything?
What makes bad Yelp reviews so scary?
I ran a review site a decade ago for infomercial products. I'd get helpful reviews (both good and bad) of products and a bunch of shills. This was back when the shills were easy to spot. All of a sudden, a dozen positive reviews would show up from "different people" all of whom coincidentally had the same IP address. There were also reviews that seemed suspicious to me, but I had no way of telling if the reviewer really was enthusiastic about the product or if they were trying to boost the ratings.
As an aside, the site mainly failed because I had to manually approve every review. Combine that with lack of free time when my first child was born, and the site quickly died. Had I kept the site running, I would have needed automatic publishing of reviews and would have had to develop some way of spotting possible shill reviews. I am still sad that I had to shut it down (it was the first major website I made), but I am happy that I don't have to figure out the difference between a positive semi-anonymous review of a product posted because the user liked the product and the same posted because the person was paid to increase the products' ratings.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Concur. On a fan forum for a game (Thief), every released fan mission gets so much praise that I really lack motivation to make more fan missions. Even though you as a mission author make the mission the way you want it, putting in a lot of effort to iron out bugs etc. seems a lot less meaningful when a hastily put together mission with bugs that can make it impossible to complete also gets "superb, fantastic mission, a joy to play, 5/5"
Any players of fan missions (for Thief or other games): The best way to reward an author for a mission is to write an honest and - perhaps even more importantly - detailed review. What you liked specifically, what was your opinion about such and such a puzzle/enemy/storyline... Really, the missions are (as they should be) free but that doesn't mean you can't do something to encourage authors to make more but your praise has no value if you praise every mission.
This. One reason really low and really high reviews are much more common than they ought to be is that people only bother voicing an opinion if they feel strongly (positive or negative) about something. Another is that once they do, they'll tend to exaggerate their evaluation to really drive home how they feel.
My suspicion is that the only stable scale is a simple "really liked it/really disliked it" up/down system. Then somehow weigh that according to the proportion of customers or buyers that actually bother to review. That depends of having a decently good estimate of that proportion though. The likes of Amazon have that for their products; for restaurants it'd be hard to impossible,
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The solution to this is called "morality" and requires that everyone accept that there are universal truths, and a concrete standard of right and wrong. Then you can develop a culture wherein lying (saying or writing something that is factually inaccurate with the intent to deceive another) is frowned upon, or even punished. But without a cultural acceptance of universal truth, you don't get to a permanent standard of right and wrong, and without that, you won't be able to make lying something that is even frowned upon, much less shunned or punished.
Religions tend to offer pretty settled standards of morality, with an appeal to a higher authority for their explanation of "what is the source of universal truth?" But folks on Slashdot tend to be down on religion.
Too bad. Technology will not solve human nature.
It panders to its dues paying members. It's worse in some areas than others but I've had absolutely no resolution from some places where the BBB just auto-deleted the complaint after awhile, automatically siding with the business.
The BBB has no gov't oversight and is not accountable to anyone, but it poses like it is to give a false sense of control to consumers.
There is of course no complete fix for false/malicious reviews but there are a few mitigating measures that could/are/should be taken. I think some sites have a "confirmed buyer" note on their reviews that point out who has actually purchased the item being reviewed (at least from the site in question). There should be more cases of prosecution for groups/companies who sell false/misleading reviews.
...and no one knows what to do to fix it.
Yet there are enough dumba** in /. proclaiming that regulations are no longer needed because customers can rely on reviews to tell good businesses from bad ones.
Where to find them? Look for comments in any Uber related articles in /.
...and no one knows what to do to fix it.
In 2010 the new Web was all about "user generated content". Today, the modern mantra is: "Don't read the comments"
Reviews and review sites have almost exactly the same problems as comment sections: there is no way to filter the ignorant and/or malicious from the informed and sincere. Case in point: there are currently exactly two reviews of my book on Amazon. One from a reasonably thoughtful reader (3 stars) and one from a troll who apparently has given Charles Dickens the same rating as me (2 stars).
There was a five-star review which was from someone who had read the book and genuinely liked it, but Amazon determined it was from someone I knew (likely because I bought her a book on the site a few years ago) and removed the review. This is a ridiculous practice--it would invalidate a huge number of reviews in traditional publications--but is made necessary by authors who try to game the review system in the stupidest possible way.
What do you think about something like Angie's List? As I understand it, you have to be a paying member to rate service providers which is supposed to make the reviews more trustworthy. I don't subscribe to the site though so I don't know exactly what it's like.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
where can I go for trustworthy reviews when I'm looking for someplace to eat? I'm not sure if there is an alternative...
This is pretty damn funny but it illustrates the problem of mixing business with social media. Unless you are big enough to afford to hire someone whose only job is to monitor social media and fight the trolls, you have no chance of controlling your business message. Now trolling is sanctioned by the gumint, that task is even harder.
I had a VERY bad experience with a dentist here in San Antonio TX and I submitted a review to yelp on three different times the first one showed up within a day but a week later it was gone and the other two never made it at all. It just shows that you can buy your way out of anything.
Word of mouth is still the best. Some of the best movies I have seen have been recommended by friends, not strangers. Same for the best restraunts. My record to date is I have driven 126 miles one way to go to a great annual dinner. It is a great harvest cowboy dinner with fire brewed coffee. The event was never publicily advertised as they had a full house every year. It was a great pit BBQ with beef, lamb, pork, spuds, beans, etc. I go every year.
The truth shall set you free!
It is well known (including a peer-reviewed study) that Slashdot's reputation/moderation system produces "B"- or "C"-level responses at best. Slashdot even linked to the study at one point.
Tribalism is almost as rampant on Slashdot as it is on the public comments sections of CNN.com or ESPN.com.
You do have to sort through a bunch of junk but you can often find at least a few good reviews of a product based on a simple search. You just can't pay attention to any of the "this product is great!" or "this product stinks!" boilerplate reviews. You need to find one that is a full article of pros & cons for a product, most of the paid for stuff is either very simple (paragraph or two) or very obvious (a flashy page with a glowing review and few if any cons).
That said though I think that could be a very flawed system. If you take Reddit for example (and slashdot to a lesser degree)
Lol? Mention religion in a positive light, climate change in a negative light, or socialism/big government in a positive light and see if you still think this site's rating system is so great. The quality of your post is not relevant; it will get modded -1 Troll almost instantly.
There is no good comment/review rating system; every site like this eventually falls victim to groupthink and cronyism. Only moreso once money gets involved.
Unfortunately, I don't have a solution to this. I posted mostly because I cannot fathom how anyone can think /.'s rating system is any better than all the other flawed attempts out there.
OK, so Yelp cannot be trusted. And they have gone to court so they can become even less trustworthy. Would anyone care to nominate an alternative site that is trustworthy?
The problem are people who think someone loves a corporation just because he likes some of their products.
If you fit in the category of fanboy, or if you start getting irrational and saying your choice is better than everyone else's, then you are the problem.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why should it do that. Just because something saysd "On the Internet" does not mean there is anything new going on. This is true for pattents and this is true for anything else.
When I book a hotel via booking.com I first make a selection on what I want. Price, location, parking, ... and then when I have e.g. 5 or so places, I will start reading the comments and see what other people thought. I especialy read what they disliked. Often this is about no coffee maker on the room or no elevator. Small rooms ins Amterdam? Well DUH!
When I look for a restaurant, I use tripadvisor. Again I make my first selection and then read what others disliked and base my chocie on that.
I also look at the nationality in both cases. e.g. Americans have different expectations a lot of the times, (Nobody spoke English. Lousy restaurant/hotel). This is all not differnet when I ask my friends if they know a new restaurant. It is also not different when asking for a restaurant in a bar.
The advantage of the Web is that you are able to compare different opinions. However I NEVER look at the points because there is never a basis on the points./stars/whatever.
In the Guide Michelin, there is. 1 star is aworth stopping, 2 stars is a worth adeviation of your trip and 3 stars is wotrth a trip. (Hey, They make tires and maps, what did you think it was?) For hotels there also is a clear classification (which might differ per country). So if I give 3 stars, it might be somebody elses 5 stars or 1 star for the SAME experience and the same idea how good/bad it was.
Over the years I was heavily involved in "customer satisfaction" and know first and on how difficult it is to measure the customer experience. As a company you can set some parameters so you can compare one answer with another.
The problem with Yelp is that they take away the possibilaty of doing my own analysis. Does that man I never have a bad excperience? No. But not more or less that before I used these sites. All in all it is, for me, a positive experience. I now go to more differnt restaurants and not just the ones for tourists.
That said, I also like to walk around and just walk into a restaurant when I am hungry. Many a pleasant surprise. Also the most imporatnt thing is who you are with, as eating out is not just about the food. It is the whole exprience, including the company you are with. Probably left from when we were sitting around in a cave around a fire.
Because of that, even if I detest McD, Pizza Hut and the like, with the right people that can be great as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That is the only work I think about when I think of Yelp
I find the Michelin Recommends more my style. There's a restaurant in Chicago Area that feels like you were just dropped into Tokyo (Renga Tei in Lincolnwood, IL). Nothing super special, just very very solid Japanese food with very attentive servers in an inviting space, as inviting as a spot in a strip mall with drop ceilings can be.
It has no stars, but it's good stuff, and it's both our comfort food place, and our "lets take people from out of town there place." Michelin has changed their website a bit and I can't find it, but you can probably spelunk the site a bit and find the list.
Yelp has, for the past year or so, garnered a reputation for extorting businesses into paying for advertising on their site.
Yelp's reputation has been garnered over a longer period than the past year or so. E.g., http://www.eastbayexpress.com/...
They both are from Florence. There is hardly any mafia in Florence. Unless you count in the democratic party. But that's not the kind of mafia you are have heard of...
I completely agree... and yet there is one prominent counterexample: Wikipedia. When Wikipedia came out I was absolutely certain it would not work. And yet, somehow, it does. There are trolls, and controversial pages have to be locked down, but overall the site does astonishingly well. It's the go-to source for general information on the Internet, at least as good (and in many ways better) than expensive curated sources.
I don't completely understand what it is that makes Wikipedia work. I'm sure it's a lot of things, and at least some of the things also contribute to dysfunction (like deletionist moderators). I don't know if that can be adapted to review sites, which are at core about opinion, while Wikipedia's guiding principle of objectivity gives it a touchstone that all non-trolls more or less agree on.
The trolls don't, of course, but somehow the fact that the non-trolls outnumber the trolls makes them relatively easy to spot and manage, though there are still problems. Especially in out-of-the-way places, which is the other difficulty with review: most places will get relatively few reviews and won't have millions of eyeballs on the lookout for trolling.
Still... the reason I brought this up is that somehow, Wikipedia works, and I would have sworn it wouldn't. So maybe, just maybe, there's some hope for review sites as collaborations. It won't be as simple as reverting the many different kinds of bad reviews (from outright trolling to "I hate spicy food so you shouldn't go to this Mexican restaurant"), but I'm uncharacteristically optimistic that there might be a route forward. (I'm certain, though, that Yelp hasn't found it.)
Better yet, instead of using the star rating system, rate everything relative to a competing product or service. For example, if you're rating a restaurant, you would need to decide whether it's better or worse than another restaurant you've visited.
Then the rating system would use something like Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet to sort everything in order from lowest to highest rated. It would then score each item as a percentile according to its position on the scale. A score of 95 means that the restaurant is better than 95% of all restaurants.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
There is a way to fix the review systems.
Topical trust networks. I want to CHOOSE whose reviews i actually trust on any given subject. I trust Bobs opinions mostly on movies, but he knows nothing about gardening tools. I want an easy option of removing Bob and his likes out of the rating for gardening tools that gets displayed for me.
Same deal with Bobs taste and expertise in indian food.
When i start researching a completely new topic, say like 50ies italian vintage cars, i prefer to start with an auto-created small trust network comprised of community voted experts. Also, what my facebook "friends" think of any subject has absolutely no value to any of the reviews, so its not a "social" subject.
Also, reviews and opinions on some subjects should decay in weight pretty rapidly. Pastel painting reviewed 20 years ago is totally up to date. Small thai food joint at the corner reviewed 20 years ago is not.
All this is implementable, and i'm surprised that most review sites still keep using a stupid one dimensional "average" of scores.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Not really.. adjust it so that people who rate a lot of things (earning themselves an ebay-like reputation) would be weighted differently than the person who just came in and rated one item.
That would significantly cut down the paid shilling abilities as you couldn't just start up 1000 new accounts to post a single review each for your site, but not eliminate it. (You could do the same thing but also pick 10 random listings to post random reviews on in order to flesh out the numbers.)
Add a temporal aspect to it though -- ie: measure the average time between reviews and if its too low, drop the user's weighting) -- and it becomes harder to game the system yet again as the shills now have to maintain their shilling accounts over time in order to build up enough reputation for their reviews to matter.
Not that it couldn't still be gamed.. but it would require a much more substantial investment by the shills in order for their shilling to be of marketable value. But that also makes them semi-trackable -- set up a fake company listing, hire a known shiller to promote it and then ban any account that posts a glowing review. Because those accounts have to be curated over time, this would be a significant risk for the shilling firms and would at the very least require them to invest enough time/effort to try and determine if your fake listing is actually fake (and of course you could go the next step and create an actual fake company with a fake website and a fake email address/phone#/etc if you wanted.)
Even without the tracking it's fucking horrible. I dislike it, and find myself bewildered by its popularity.
The big problem with the helpful/not helpful dichotomy as a means for rating reviewers is that it fails to take into account why the reviewer didn't find it helpful. What the system needs, IMO, is to ask a second question at that point:
Did you find the review not helpful because (check all that apply):
A review marked with the fourth one will get flagged for review by a human, and if verified to be crap, will lower the reviewer's reputation for everyone, and will be removed.
A review marked with the third one (factually incorrect) will just lower the reviewer's reputation, but at least initially by a smaller amount than a "Helpful" vote increases it. The more reviews this occurs in, the more negatively each negative impacts that person's score, so if a person consistently lies, the negatives count more and more, until they greatly outweigh the positives. However, that balance should only tip when those negatives come from unique users (so that one user can't just mark every review by a particular reviewer as unhelpful and have a bigger impact than marking a single review that way), and those ratings should be cancelled out by a sufficient number of positive reviews, ensuring that a small number of people can't attack a reviewer by each reporting one of his or her reviews as factually incorrect.
A review marked with the first two options ("not interested" and "I disagree") will lower the reviewer's reputation, but only for that reviewer and other people whose "not interested" and "I disagree" ratings on other goods and services are statistically similar to those of the reviewer. This allows users to get better, more individualized reviews that are more likely to match their interests and concerns, without adversely penalizing other people who might be interested in and concerned about the same things as the reviewer in question. To that end, instead of "44 out of 50 people found this helpful", it would say "44 out of 50 people whose tastes match yours found this helpful", such that other users of the site might well see completely different numbers.
And users who frequently give "not helpful" ratings with more than two boxes checked, but rarely give "helpful" ratings, should have progressively smaller impact on the overall helpfulness rating for the reviews that they rate, until at some point their helpful/not helpful ratings end up getting thrown away entirely (except in their own view).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
it would only work if you're Italian. Never, ever try this if you're Irish.
The major problem to this that I can see is your critical mass of reviews becomes very high and you would almost need people to be professional reviewers. Unlike movies and TV I don't think restaurants or hotels quite create the same level of fandom that will see people review them in detail.
It's like looking for reviews of a dishwasher. Basically people only put a review online if the machine broke.
But that only works if the restaurants are in the same food / experience group. How would you rate your favourite sushi train against your favourite French Restaurant vs your favourite theme restaurant show.
You would have to have so many relationships set up that the raw numbers of comparisons in each case would be tiny.
But that is what I am saying. Neither system is perfect. The reason I think Slashdot's system is better though is there is only a -1. Nothing more than that. Which means that it is possible to come back from that (though unlikely).
Also I have posted before things that have polarised people and been marked combinations of troll, flamebait, insightful and interesting all on the same comment.
I think slashdot's decision to have randomly allocated mod points and an inability to comment and moderate the same thread works well. It's far from perfect but it's about the best I have come across.
Unfortunately, Lonely Planet will only ever review a handful of places even in the biggest tourist centres. Maybe a hundred or so restaurants in a city like London or Paris - compared with maybe 50 times that number that are actually there. That's how they can afford to be independent - they don't try to be complete.
If they tried to be complete and up to date, they'd soon fall prey to the same kind of 'gaming' as other media.
Yelpie Mother F-ers.
Oh, I suppose I'd better go and find out.
Well, that sounds really completely uninteresting. Next question?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
the weird moderation that happens in anything apple v android.
I'll never understand how attached some people get to a corporation. The corporation will never love you back.
Which incidentallly explains a lot about Apple vs. Android. Apple's operating system is attached to a corporation, while Android is free software. This means you don't need a corporation to "love you back". If you don't like the Google Play ecosystem, you can jump ship to any other Android distribution, such as Fire OS or CyanogenMod or whatever.
What is your rating worth if you have nothing to compare it to? See, your argument also works against the star rating system.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I'm almost certain you can get italian pizza from some michelin venue. Would be super weird if no italian michelin restaurant served pizza.