

Yelp Increasing Transparency and Eliminating 'Favorite Review' - lid
http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/04/announcing-steps-to-avoid-confusion-increase-transparency.html

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tptacek
This actually doesn't seem to address the rumors floating around about Yelp,
which were that they would use (misleading) negative reviews as part of high-
pressure sales tactics for small businesses. The "favorite review" feature is
what Yelp themselves said they were selling. It wasn't the nexus of the
accusations against them.

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pak
I would love to know how they intend on filtering reviews successfully while
exposing the process behind the filter. It would seem any transparent filter
system would invite people to find reliable ways of bypassing and subverting
the things that get you flagged.

There's a reason Google won't give you a full look at a page's spamminess
rating, and a reason reddit is open source _except_ for the spam filtering
bits. With any blacklist filtering routine, transparency puts you at an
inherent disadvantage. Instead of a million trials to see what passes and what
doesn't, the answers are already there.

...or they aren't really, and this is just a PR scheme by Yelp to claim more
transparency with the illusion of fairness for review visibility. To me this
is the only real possibility here.

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mattj
If a spammer wanted to see what a site took down, all they'd have to do would
be to keep track of all the comments (including ones not by their accounts).
Then they'd have some idea how the filter worked.

If you make the list open then honest people can see too.

The only reason you'd keep the list of what's spam private would be to
maintain (perceived) infallibility. Every filter makes mistakes, only some
filters let you see them.

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aeontech
Still no way to request a manual review though. I already see several good
detailed reviews by people that I know personally that have been flagged. As
well as reviews filtered for businesses that I know personally and know for a
fact that they don't pay anyone for reviews. From initial appearance, looks
like a lot of innocent reviews get caught in the filter.

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ben1040
I looked around at some of the filtered reviews for restaurants I frequent.
For the vast majority I couldn't find anything wrong with them other than that
they were penned by users with less than 5-10 reviews.

I can understand why they don't offer any sort of manual review -- how is a
staffer who has never patronized that business capable of determining if a
review is spam or legit? I wonder if it would be any better if questionable
reviews for a given business would be put up to a vote by "more established"
users (by whatever metric they use to determine that) who have also reviewed
the same business. Let people who have actually been there determine whether
it's spam from someone who never walked in the door.

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aeontech
Well, the other weird thing that I see is that the reviews that have been
filtered, are overwhelmingly highly positive. Which leads me to think that
while their spam filter is agressive in filtering positive reviews, it is
still vulnerable to businesses posting negative reviews about each other.
Maybe that's just my limited sample size though.

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ben1040
I did come across a number of negative reviews by users who had limited
activity on the site. I guess this is an effort to block "hit-and-run"
negative reviews.

The downside to filtering out reviews by "less-established" users is that you
run a risk of angering new users who take the time to contribute a review to
the site only to find it doesn't appear. Are they really going to bother
posting a second, third, or fourth review that will also get filtered out, or
will they just walk away?

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adi92
This might be a pretty good PR move..

Most of the filtered reviews I have seen so far are, in fact, pretty spammy or
blatant advertising..

This will definitely make people appreciate the filter more

OTOH people, not machines (thanks to the captcha), could read tons of filtered
reviews and come up with cleverer ways to beat it

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bryanh
I hate to be cynical right out of the gate, but we'll see how it goes down.
Admittedly, its a better move than doing nothing.

Could be interesting to see what kind of reviews are being flagged anyways.
I've always thought that review stuffing is way more common than people would
think...

