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.
...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.
Sure, but yelp shilling doesn't also provide a good laugh or two.
That's not fair to the restaurant, considering their other options were to pay Yelp off repeatedly (and in increasing amounts) or to have an undeservedly negative mark on their public image. The restaurant gave discounts to customers to take the power away from their blackmailers.
"The damn government won't let me" is just an excuse for the weak. A really annoyed liberal anarchist is not afraid to use the ammo box.
The restaurant's response of incentivizing 1 star reviews on Yelp IS the free market solution to the Yelp problem.
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.
I believe their plan is to deliberately violate Yelp's terms of service - by paying for reviews - to force Yelp to enforce said terms by removing the listing entirely. Which is what the restaurant wants - to not be listed at all.
It's a very clever plan. At best, they get everything they want, and at worst, "real" bad reviews get buried in amongst the snarky ones.
The key to successful anarchy is ethical behavior.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
No, they are posioning the well to give Yelp a deserved middle finger.
The business merely turned Yelp's tactics against them. Yelp strong arms businesses into buying advertising to bury negative reviews and push positive reviews up. They simply told Yelp to fuck off and had people give them a bunch of negative reviews. What the business did is pure genius.
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.
I fail to see this as a problem. They beat yelp at its own game. Good for them.
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.
Giving discounts to people who are going to prevent someone from extorting money from them isn't shitty behaviour.
Extortion isn't acceptable in a free market any more than it is in a decently regulated one.
As well as getting lots of free publicity from this stunt. And also being known as a rebel, which makes it a "cool" place to go in some people's eyes. This is a genius business move, if nothing else.
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.
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
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.
That's why there's no successful anarchy.
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."
It's worse than that! The company I work for has one negative review on Yelp, but several positive reviews "pending" that they won't publish unless we pay them! And the negative review was over the fact that they didn't yet have a quote from us for custom work for which they hadn't provided us the requested details. Looking at the page now, it does look like they published two of the positive reviews, but there are still a handful held in limbo. How long between the authoring and publishing of the negative review, though? No time at all.
This is enough reason right here to distrust EVERY review on Yelp. So what are the best anti-yelp sites? Has Yelp bought YelpSucks.com yet?
The best anti-yelp sites are sites like this and others that help spread the word about yelp's unworthiness of trust.
Give it a few more years and yelp simple won't matter any more; they'll have scammed themselves out of relevance.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
BBB seems to be like the various state medical and dental boards, a group-help thing that suppresses complaints for members.
The complaints around Yelp are that it's a protection racket run by a third party.
I'm hoping we don't get to a point where a corporation has such a right. It's bad enough that they get to choose a religion.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think that it is hilarious they are going against their own terms in order to defend against removing them entirely.
That is priceless and more or less just confirms Yelp are a bunch of bullies.
It's bad enough that we have so many laws that it is advantageous to a corporation to claim one.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!