

Ask HN: How to create certified or trusted reviews? - nkeating

My startup (currently in private beta) is brainstorming ways to implement some sort of credible review system into our site. While I cannot disclose the exact nature of the site, our review feature will be dealing with documenting customer experiences with salespeople.<p>The issue that we are struggling with is the prevalence of fake or deceitful reviews across the web. Does anyone have any suggestions/ideas/products that could help us in creating a trusted system?<p>Thanks
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jeffmould
Filtering "fake or deceitful reviews" is a complicated task to accomplish.
While you won't find the exact solution, you can research how companies like
Yelp and AngiesList have done it.

There are many factors in the formula, but a lot of it revolves around looking
at who the user is exactly. By looking at how often they contribute, how long
they have been a member of the site, and incorporating a rating system into
the review (helpful/not helpful) you can begin to determine which are the best
reviewers.

Verifying the user is real is another step you can take. You can do this by
adding a verification step into the account creation process (i.e. responding
to a email) prior to submitting a review. Setting default time limits to how
long the account has to be active before they can make a review also can work
(this avoids the random user in the heat of the moment writing a false review
or one that is not fully thought out). If your users have "profiles" in the
system, similar to Yelp, you can give more credibility to a user who takes the
time to fill out their profile info.

Another method is to track IP addresses and compare to where the place of
business being reviewed is. Although this will not work in all cases (i.e.
someone traveling or logging in from home for a vacation experience), it does
lend some credibility.

By giving each method you incorporate into your system a weight, you can then
add the weights up to come up a validity indicator. Each method could be
weighted on a scale of 1 to 10 and the higher the weight awarded for that
method the more credible. You then have to weight the methods in general. In
the end the formula combines all those weights together to get a total weight
which should give you an idea of how credible the review is.

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dools
Okay - here's where my mind went when presented with this problem: be like an
ombudsman. When I call up the TIO (<http://www.tio.com.au/>) to complain about
my mobile phone supplier, the first thing they do is give me a reference
number and a phone number at the company that is reserved for "high level"
customer service enquiries (ie. I get to speak to a "case manager" rather than
having to navigate the layers of support from the ground-up).

So give the company that the review is about a chance to respond _prior_ to
publishing the bad review. If they don't respond, publish it. If they _do_
respond, then you can still publish the bad review but the OP may edit it so
that it's not quite so caustic.

This could be regulated quite easily by requiring the OP to provide a valid
contact email address and URL for the company about which they're providing a
review.

Or you could do like the TIO does and provide the customer with a reference
number to contact the company they originally dealt with and allow the company
to login and use that same reference number to tell their side of the story.

Your company is then like, OmniOmbudsman :) (.com ... take it, it's available)

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duinote
are you looking for a product that you can integrate with your site now? or
you want an algorithm?

