

Why former English majors shouldn’t write Yelp reviews - mecredis
http://ensignau.tumblr.com/post/13752720078/why-former-english-majors-shouldnt-write-yelp-reviews

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raganwald
Yelp are not in the review business. People who read and write reviews are not
their customers. Yelp are in the "Convincing businesses to pay Yelp to game
reviews" business. Businesses are their customrs.

Under the circumstances, a "false negative" like this is irrelevant to Yelp's
business. In fact, false negatives are good for Yelp: They have an incentive
to present mixed reviews to businesses who can then pay to filter the
negatives out.

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wisty
The problem is, a single review is more or less worthless. Unless you give a
variety of reviews (1 through to 5 stars), you are a pretty useless signal.
There's no way they can see if you are a discerning critic who only gives 5
stars if it's the best meal you've had in years, or a Homer Simpson type who'd
give 5 stars to Burger King the time they accidentally upsized your fries. Or
that the restaurant in question requested people review it if they loved the
experience.

The disadvantage to this approach is that only the pretentious wankers who
review every meal they have get any real pull. Funky places that cater to
people with strange tases will lose out, because OMG the garlic was almost
RARE!

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RyanMcGreal
Optimization-by-proxy rears its ugly head once again.

