
Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser - rmason
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/09/yelp-accused-hiding-positive-reviews-non-advertiser/
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Endy
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.

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melq
>A statement was sent along with a screenshot of 14 reviews Yelp claims came
from the same IP address belonging to Sinnott’s Yelp account.

Probably because they were all on the cafe's wifi network when they reviewed
the place.

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tyingq
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.

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DrScump

      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.

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calbear81
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.

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sctb
We've updated the link from
[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-
accuse...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-accused-of-
hiding-positive-reviews-for-non-advertiser).

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nielsbot
Fits the standard narrative (and I love to hate Yelp), but is there any proof?

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wmeredith
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.

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raguuu
Why did you hell ban me?

~~~
sctb
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
hn@ycombinator.com.

