
A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp - hardtke
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/07/EDKN1NGO74.DTL
======
unoti
Yelp has really let me down. I'm new to San Francisco, and initially used Yelp
to help me figure out where to eat and hang out. Over time I learned that some
of its 4.5 star places are dirty Taquerias that really suck, and some of my
favorite places to be are poorly rated. (Note: I've got nothing against dirty
taquerias, but the food better be good if it's a dirty run down taqueria with
5 stars.) I'm not sure what services are better than Yelp.

I've heard people say in casual conversation that Yelp is "over" and all the
people in the know have gone elsewhere. What services should I be using to
know where the best places to eat are in San Francisco and Marin?

Sol Food in Marin county, for example, is just worshiped on Yelp with 5 star
reviews. But I go there, I wait in line for 30 minutes, get crammed in on a
bench with 5 strangers, and get served a steak sandwich that's too tough to
chew. What's up with that? I feel like I'm better off using Google Maps and
just guessing than looking to Yelp for advice. Anyway, are there better
services than Yelp to help me figure out what's actually worth going to?

~~~
jcampbell1
My advice is to stop trying to optimize every event in life, and live more
serendipitously. Pick places at random, have low expectations, and spend your
life constantly being pleasantly surprised.

~~~
unoti
Would it be considered bad, then, to ask my friends where they like to eat,
and discuss it? All my friends live in North Carolina.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with talking over ideas of where to eat
with friends. It doesn't mean that I'm living my life wrong.

But let's just say for sake of argument that it's best to always be random and
spontaneous. Tonight, you should randomly pick a channel on TV, and watch it.
Or randomly select a movie. Maybe you don't watch TV or movies. Then a random
book off the library shelf?

I do in general terms like your suggestion about being spontaneous, and living
in the moment, and embracing chaos and randomness. And here's a suggestion for
you: don't tell other people how to live; it's unseemly.

It's a nice suggestion, to live in the moment and be spontaneous, but it's
highly impractical. Sometimes it makes sense to work with more information
when it's available. Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A
TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse? Sometimes it makes
sense to be discerning with limited resources. I'm as zen as the next guy, and
live in the moment. I just got to this town, and I'd like to start my search
with what people think are the most awesome places to eat. Is that so wrong?

It's surely not as wrong as you guys thinking I'm conducting my life
improperly for wanting information about where cool places to eat are.

~~~
efsavage
Yelp is not a substitute for your friends. It's not even nearly as good as
asking a random person on the street. If you're really stuck, go to a hotel
and ask the concierge, they generally don't even care that you're not a guest
if you're asking for something as simple as a restaurant recommendation.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
On NPR recently, there was a guy talking about a startup that works like
Tripadvisor, but only shows you reviews within your social circle. This
eliminates shills and only shows you opinions that have a known value to you.

Maybe someone can steal that idea and apply it to restaurants.

~~~
bigiain
I think there's a golden opportunity that's less about "social circles" and
more about "revealed common preferences".

If there's somebody on your review site, who ranks highly several of my highly
ranked coffee shops, and ranks low a subset of my lowly ranked coffee shops,
I'd be much more prepared to consider their other coffee shop reviews as
relevant to me. Even better, location based services like 4Square of Facebook
checkins could expose their "revealed preferences" to the algorithm as well,
someone who rates Fourbarrel and Ritual highly, but checks in to Starbucks
four times a day is less likely to be someone who's reviews I'd want to read
than someone who perhaps rates Fourbarrel and Ritual lower on an absolute
scale, but checks into both regularly as well as, say Sightglass and
BlueBottle.

I'd really like a time and event aware as well as just venue aware review
function. Zeitgeist on a Thursday night, or after a critical mass ride - is a
_vastly_ different experience than Zeitgeist on a sunny Saturday afternoon
when it's full of slumming sunset and marina crowds. DNA Lounge really needs
separate review categories for Death Guild nights, Bootie nights, and out-of-
town dubstep artist nights - people who love (and hence rate highly) one of
those events are significantly less likely to enjoy the other two as much -
which makes a Yelp-style single rating for DNA Lounge not particularly useful.

~~~
jacobr
There is a Swedish movie review site (<http://filmtipset.se>) which gives you
a predicted rating determined from your previous reviews. They are venturing
into books and wine, using the same algorithm. Unfortunately they seem to be
better mathematicians than web developers, so all of their sites are pretty
crappy and they seem to have problems with monetization.

Another problem is that if your taste is not really mainstream, you have to
rate quite a few movies to get accurate predictions. After I reached a couple
of hundred movies, the predictions were nearly always completely accurate.

------
parfe
A single helpful Yelp review lays out what happened with this establishment:
_It ain't what is used to be. They've moved from North Beach to a new location
closer to Fisherman Wharf. They probably get alot of tourists. The food is
okay...but not as delicious as it was when the other "Italian" owners had it.
Where are the Italian waiters who brought so much harm and courtesy to their
customers._

Instead of acknowledging these changes as the source of discontent, he blames
customers and the review site for pointing issues out. Instead of penning op-
eds he should be training his staff, buying higher quality ingredients, and
listening to customer complaints.

Owners who hate Yelp ignore the near real time feedback they would never get
in person. Complaints posted Fri - Sun more often than Mon - Thur: maybe it
you need to look at who works what shifts? Calamari rubbery: Did someone
properly train the line cooks? Food called bland, mediocre, bad, or
unremarkable: Maybe you should go back to the higher quality ingredients you
decided to skimp on to "make more money"?

Yelp looks to be a great way to avoid the death spiral restaurants commonly
find themselves in.

Not making enough money? Buy lower quality ingredients. Still not making
enough money? Raise prices. Repeat until you lose all regular business and
rely on unsuspecting first timers who begrudgingly pay and never return.
Eventually close it down.

~~~
ericb
Really? Is it possible that an analogous review exists on a competitor who
advertises with Yelp, but on that page the "review" is filtered?

It is entirely possible that the food is exactly the same, but this person's
perception is entirely colored by the ethnicity of the staff.

~~~
jrockway
That could be the case. Customers are unpredictable and you will have to work
very hard to please them all.

But if all your reviews are negative, it's possible you are doing something
wrong. Restaurants are one of those professions where you have to be good at
more than one thing; you have to design great menus, you have to buy good
food, and you have to hire and manage good staff. As a chef, you may consider
your ability to make a great menu the only thing that matters. Unfortunately,
your customers disagree, thus causing the restaurant to fail. Sorry, that's
life. (Same goes for great doctors that hire incompetent staff. I've had to
stop going to a doctor I liked for that reason.)

------
jpdoctor
Consumer Reports was way ahead of their time.

Any site that accepts advertising is automatically tainted. (CR never takes
advertising.) Yelp wants its reviews to be believed and for establishments to
pay for advertising.

Maybe they're good at balancing the two, but when it comes time to close the
quarterly report, you know which one is going to win out.

~~~
ericb
This is very interesting. Perhaps this is Yelp's Achilles heal. A non-
advertising based review site could be far more credible. Maybe some sort of
freemium model could take them down by virtue of being more credible...

~~~
twoodfin
Isn't that what you'd call Zagat's? (Bought by Google a while back, somewhat
surprisingly.)

------
danso
I've been a Yelp user for years, and I was even an "Elite User" for
awhile...and I had never heard of "filtered reviews" until now. In fact, if
you go to the page of the OP's business, once you actually find the "Filtered
Reviews" link (which is in very light gray), clicking on it brings a
CAPTCHA...

<http://www.yelp.com/biz/fior-d-italia-san-francisco>

What the hell??

Even as a user determined to see what the fuss is about, I don't even jump
through this hoop. So I'm guessing __nobody __actually clicks through to the
filtered reviews, whatever they actually are.

I love that Yelp helps me find interesting places in a dense area like NYC,
but their business model is appalling.

~~~
NameNickHN
> Even as a user determined to see what the fuss > is about, I don't even jump
> through this hoop.

I just did and I'm astounded that this filter even exists. From what I saw I
got the feeling that the filter mechanism is broken.

------
cletus
Yelp is fundamentally flawed.

Firstly, they have a clear conflict of interest, which has been discussed many
times, when it comes to selling advertising. Buying advertising (anecdotally)
seems to make bad reviews magically disappear.

Secondly, and this has always been the problem with "local", is you need a
certain critical mass for it to be usable. You can argue that Yelp has reached
this point in many cases (although see the next two points) but there are many
businesses with <5 reviews.

Third, there is too much friction in asking people to review (and even rate
things). Most people simply don't and probably never will. This exacerbates
the "critical mass" problem but also introduces a selection bias. The people
who comment and rate aren't necessarily representative of general opinions or
you (the personalization problem).

I've gone to eat at some places in NYC that are 3.5+ stars that have varied
from average to terrible. In some cases I've gone with someone who shared this
positive review but--and I realize the counterargument to this is that it's
subjective--they're just _wrong_.

Fourth, there is a clear fraud problem with reviews and ratings. People are
clearly paid to give positive reviews (eg you see someone rate a given car
dealership in the Bay area on one day and then another in Maine the next day
and so on). Of any of the companies in "local", IMHO Google is in the best
position to deal with this particular problem (disclaimer: I work for Google).

Lastly, as such reviews become increasingly important, there is the issue of
extortion. If this hasn't happened already it will. Criminals already target
websites with DDoS attacks that go away if the site in question pays what
amounts to "protection money". There's nothing really to stop such criminal
enterprises shaking down businesses with the threat of a bad slew of reviews.

It's worth making extra mention of personalization. Many (Google included)
seem to view "social search" and "social recommendations" as some kind of
panacea to some or even all of these problems. I disagree. I know a couple of
people who, say, like Adam Sandler movies. I do not. Not even remotely. Their
movie recommendations are so diametrically opposed to mine that I can pretty
much take the opposite of what they recommend.

The way forward with this will be something like the Netflix model (IMHO)
where these great data mining systems will attempt to find people who are like
me and have similar tastes whose recommendations will likely coincide with
mine.

~~~
jonnathanson
I believe there's room in the local space for a service that combines check-
ins with reviews. In other words, only real people, who've physically been to
a given restaurant, are able to review it. While you'd still suffer from
selection-bias problems with this model, at least the self-selectors would be
people with a propensity to try a lot of restaurants and review them -- not
population-representative, perhaps, but at least dedicated to the task.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to game such a system. (You don't
_actually_ have to be at a restaurant to check into it, but you do need to be
within a certain geographic radius -- so this would cut down on bogus or
fraudulent reviews from people nowhere near the location). But those methods
are harder to pull off, and they necessarily apply to a much smaller subset of
potential gamers -- thereby making gaming a smaller-scale proposition.

Collaborative filtering would lend itself well to this model, too. Toss in
some sort of karma system, as well, and you've got a check against system
gaming and low-quality reviews.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Believing the device's idea of where it is isn't going to help against any
kind of serious criminal (get root, hook API, profit; and what about people
without smartphones, anyway?). Triangulating a phone via cell phone towers
might work, but that opens a whole new can of worms: you need the carriers to
cooperate; it's a privacy nightmare; conclusively linking a Yelp username to a
physical SIM card is not easy; and so forth.

~~~
jonnathanson
True, but at the very least, we're reducing the set of all possible fraudsters
and system-gamers.

How many of the fraudulent reviews on Yelp do we really believe are coming
from fraudsters with this level of sophistication? My guess is that it's a
pretty small percentage. Seems far more likely that most bogus reviews are
coming from competitive small business owners, paid-off users, and other
relatively average folk with a minimal level of technical understanding -- or
even sufficient malice to drive them to become more sophisticated. (It doesn't
help that Yelp may, or may not, be assigning greater weight to negative
reviews unless/until a small business owner buys into their advertising).

------
jeremymims
This issue comes up quite a bit. Since OwnLocal works with a number of small
businesses, we've heard many so-called "horror" stories.

What it boils down to is Yelp filters positive reviews for effusiveness (and
ALL CAPS), personal connections with the business owner or employees, rapid
review acceleration from first-time Yelp users, or users from the same IP
address.

What this article doesn't mention is that many small business owners
understand how important Yelp is and actively try to game the system in
blatant and unsophisticated ways. Their friends write five star reviews about
how wonderful the owner is and how they always have their anniversary dinner
there. They create multiple fake accounts and complain loudly that their
positive reviews have been filtered.

We've also noticed a certain tone businesses and their friends use. They don't
typically describe a particular experience, they describe a business in
generalities and will often refer back to what other reviewers are saying.
They also appear to take what other people think very personally.

The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the
waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other
reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people who
mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends.

A common looking filtered review (notice effusiveness, caps wording, and
referencing other reviews):

"This is a NICE restaurant - one that you go to when you want a quiet meal
away from the kids - it's definitely not family-oriented, but then again, not
every restaurant needs to be. If you're used to Olive Garden as your Italian
"go-to place", then you will probably be disappointed in Fior d'Italia. If you
want REAL Italian food, then ignore the naysayers and come here."

Yelp itself has rough stats for the breakdown of reviews:

5 stars: 38% 4 stars: 29% 3 stars: 14% 2 stars: 8% 1 star: 11%

Yelp's little secret is actually that the star ratings don't provide very much
granularity for the casual review reader to make a decision and that most
restaurants average out to ~3.75 or in Yelp parlance ~3.5 - 4 stars.

~~~
dbcfd
> The very first four-star filtered review this business has mentions the
> waitress and host by first name (she goes on to sign it). Many of the other
> reviews for this business are similar and come across as fake or by people
> who mean well, but go overboard on behalf of their friends.

Or they actually really like the business? It's not staffed by 30 different no
names, and you never get the same server? The owner will actually be present
and greet customers?

That's not gaming the system, that's providing great service in a fast food
lifestyle.

------
jambo
One of the problems with Yelp in my city is the "Yelp elite". To bootstrap in
my city, Yelp hired a community manager (part of their job is also writing
reviews), and enlisted a bunch of people to become "Yelp Elite", earning
access to parties in exchange for posting (it seems) daily reviews.

The result has been a high quantity of lengthy, some-times entertaining, low-
information reviews posted by people whose advice I wouldn't likely take if I
met them in person.

[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-
local_busin...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-
local_business/t/yelps-elite-epicurean-force-totally-free-labor/#.T1fFD5H5wng)

~~~
dlikhten
funny thing is that complaining about it is doing nothing. People use it, and
don't care for how schemy it is.

------
jrockway
I disagree with all of his points. You shouldn't be able to opt out; if I want
to post a review of your business on the Internet, that's my decision to make,
not yours. (What's next, politicians opting out of news coverage? Yeah right.)

Review filtering is similar; Yelp is allowed to express editorial oversight
over their website. Specifically, they try to reduce fraud. Your credit card
company doesn't discuss their fraud detection algorithms, so why should Yelp?

All I see here is, "I like my own restaurant, but other people don't. Shut
down the review site so nobody can tell anyone else!"

~~~
Steko
So you're cool with the "we're going to filter primarily good reviews" and
"advertise with us at just about the worst rates in the free world and we'll
clean up the bad reviews?" extortion angle?

~~~
jrockway
Convince me it's extortion and I might agree with you, but I've read many
filtered and unfiltered reviews and it seems that Yelp does a fine job
filtering. The filtered reviews sound like morons or shills; the unfiltered
reviews sound like customers sharing an experience. Paying Yelp to advertise
doesn't seem to be a factor.

I'm just not feeling the hate. My main problem with Yelp is that the star
ratings are useless because everyone else's standards are different from mine.
I don't care if something is expensive; I'm happy to pay money for good food
and good service. But for other people, that's an automatic negative eight
billion star rating. So Yelp becomes essentially useless unless I read every
review. (I understand Zagat has controls for this, but I've never actually
used it.)

And now for the statement that's going to get me in trouble: whenever I see an
ad like a Yelp ad or an Adsense ad, it implies a certain amount of shadiness
to me. The businesses that are good don't need to buy ads, leaving most ads to
be from businesses with some problem.

~~~
freshfunk
Same here. I've read filtered and unfiltered reviews and my conclusion is that
Yelp does a good job with its filtering. It's not perfect but does a pretty
decent job.

WRT your problem: Have you tried filtering by price ($, $$, $$$)? Perhaps if
you did this, you would find good restaurants that aren't just rated highly
because they are cheap.

On your last point, I disagree. I used to think that only bad restaurants
would need to advertise. But then I ended up going to a restaurant that I saw
had advertised heavily in the past on Yelp. I went there because they were in
my neighborhood. The restaurant and food were absolutely fantastic (which
matched their overall rating). So advertising is good for 1) new restaurants
and 2) residents who don't know all the restaurants in their neighborhood.

------
arscan
The lack of transparency isn't surprising to me, as that's basically industry
practice when it comes to the "special sauce" algorithms that power these
recommendation engines (google, tripadvisor, whoever).

But the extortion part does surprise (horrify?) me. I'd love to see some more
concrete proof that advertising on yelp results in a friendlier filter
function for that business. I assume that there is enough publicly available
information (just by scraping their site) to establish some kind of
correlation between advertising and filter-friendliness, if one exists. Any of
you up for the challenge?

I'd settle for seeing those communications w/the sales team referenced in the
article, though.

~~~
aamar
If that correlation existed, it wouldn't still indicate causation, i.e. that
advertising causes the filter bias to change. Maybe the companies who eschew
planting fake reviews are also the ones who are willing to pay for
advertising.

Yelp has repeatedly, strenuously denied the extortion claims, yet the
accusations continue to come. I think a phone recording by one of these
accusers would be an excellent smoking gun. Or if someone here calls on behalf
of a restaurant or other business (that they have a stake in and has filtered
reviews), they could report back to us on what happened. In the meantime, I'm
inclined to apply the "innocent until proven guilty" principle in favor of
Yelp.

~~~
arscan
Very true! Thanks for gently pointing out that hole in my logic. The leap from
correlation to causation is a very big one. Anyhow, like you, until I see
something other than restaurateurs complaining, I'll give Yelp the benefit of
the doubt here.

------
dminor
I think his worry for the investors is misplaced - the BBB has been running a
similar racket for years and seems to be doing just fine.

~~~
ebbv
Exactly what I was thinking. And the BBB has been doing this so well for so
long that lots of (stupid) people think that it's an actual government agency
with power to get businesses in trouble.

~~~
learc83
Back when I used to work retail, we constantly had customers who thought that
the BBB was a government agency that would force us to do what they wanted.

------
ericd
Interesting view from the restauranteur. I don't think Yelp would be wise to
use his advice directly, though. Allowing businesses to opt out of Yelp would
be a terrible idea, because Yelp is much more useful when it has everything.
Also, there is doubtless a substantial amount of attempted gaming with the
reviews, so attempting to catch this and filtering it out is very important if
Yelp is to maintain a reputation of being a trustworthy source of reviews.
They should try to reduce false positives, but saying they shouldn't filter
anything is silly.

The implications of only being able to help the restauranteur with his bad
reviews for money are really terrible, though. I wonder if they still do this
after all the bad press surrounding that a while back.

~~~
gergles
I think he meant "opt out of having reviews filtered", not "opt out of being
listed on Yelp".

I think that would be a more valuable thing.

~~~
ericd
Perhaps. But the filtering isn't just to protect the restaurants from fake bad
reviews, but also to protect the viewers from fake good ones by the
restaurant.

------
mLewisLogic
So... I _might_ be a bit biased (co-founder at Fondu <http://fondu.com>), but
this really is a major problem.

Most restaurant owners we've talked to are afraid of Yelp and the power that
it wields. From an investor standpoint it does a great job monetizing it's
community. The problem is that Yelp essentially weights the scales, depending
upon who is paying them ad money.

Whereas Google did a great job by separating church and state (search and
ads), Yelp happily blends the two together. The end result is a little bit of
fact and a little bit of fiction.

YMMV, but we think discovering through trusted friends rather than group
averages is how the future looks.

------
RayJR
I cannot believe the coincidence! My father owns a small pizza business (small
as in 1 store, 22 years) and yesterday a yelp power user got upset because I
didn't give her free jalepenos. She knew we charge extra for things like ranch
but still expected jalepenos for free. She got so mad she changed her review
and said there was a "hair" in her pizza "months ago." She is obviously saying
this to damage us because she was treated the same as all customers and
expects special treatment. Extortion? That's how it felt but I don't care
because our true customers know better and are great people. See the whole
thing here: <http://www.yelp.com/biz/rays-pizza-irvine>. Sort by date, most
recent review.

This was yelps response when I reported this user: Hi there,

Thank you for inquiring about the reviews of Ray's Pizza on Yelp.

We've looked at Jayne L's review, and since it appears to reflect the personal
experience and opinions of the reviewer, we are leaving it intact.
Unfortunately, we don't take sides on factual disputes, and suggest instead
that you contact the reviewer again to clarify any misunderstandings.

We think it's important for businesses to be part of the conversation, and
have created a suite of free tools to help business owners get the most out of
Yelp. It looks like you've already unlocked your business page. As a reminder,
you can: \- Communicate with your customers via private message or public
comment \- Track how many people view your business page \- Add photos and a
detailed description of your business \- Convert Yelp users into customers by
posting a Yelp Deal to your listing You can login to your account here:
<https://biz.yelp.com/>

Regards, Summer Yelp User Support San Francisco, California

I am a yelp user and it was great but for businesses its getting out of hand
when there is no transparency. What if people are paid to yelp a lot and then
use their influence to sell reviews? It could happen.

~~~
dbcfd
Good luck getting a power user (or god forbid, a community moderator) review
removed.

A number of them feel they deserve preferential treatment because of their
Yelp status, and will go out of their way to bash you when that doesn't
happen.

------
syeren
I'm really looking forward to the day that this 'business practice' of Yelp's
comes to a broader audience.

While I agree that you can say this is a business model, I can't agree that it
is morally correct in anyway, even in a world of capitalism.

------
crikli
Nobody gives a crap that the restaurant has been there 125 years, but that's
what the owner leads with in defense of his enterprise. Looking at the reviews
for Fior d' Italia, it looks like service leaves quite a bit to be desired and
the food isn't that good.

Maybe Yelp is polluted and biased...or maybe Fior d' Italia just sucks.
Occam's razor says it's the latter.

My wife and I travel all over the country on business, often finding ourselves
in cities where we've never been. Yelp finds us a great place to eat _every
single time_.

------
msg
I found this response elsewhere in the thread so interesting that I had to say
something.

 _PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in
spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching
on :(_

If you're trying to keep a taqueria to yourself, do you have incentive to
leave a bad review? After all, your interests are not aligned with the rest of
Yelp's customers. Or even, necessarily aligned with the taqueria's success.
Maybe it's to your codependent advantage that they always stay small and
delicious and hidden and yours...

preciouss.

This is the problem Yelp hasn't solved yet: how to align the interests of
Yelp, Yelp reviewers, Yelp readers, and restaurants. Yelp succeeds if
reviewers leave bad reviews because they are upselling bad review protection
(they say they aren't several times in the FAQ, but they protesteth too much
for me), or if restaurants buy ads. Yelp readers succeed if reviewers are
honest and they can use reviews to optimize their personal quality/dollar
equation. Restaurants succeed if Yelp drives Yelp readers to them, if
reviewers leave good reviews.

Reviewers have many incentives to game reviews. One of the Yelp FAQs is about
payola. If they review enough they gain community prominence through
badges/titles. If they review too much, their reviews look suspicious (because
they could be making them up instead of actually attending). If they become
untrustworthy due to a secret Yelp algorithm, their reviews are obscured from
prominent view. If they have a bad experience at a place everyone thinks is
great, they run a risk writing a contrarian review and being labeled
untrustworthy. And on and on.

------
tatsuke95
I've never used Yelp, beyond stumbling on the site when looking for restaurant
reviews through Google. But as a follower of technology news, I _have_ read
much about it and its controversies. Add this one to the pile. It definitely
calls into question their slogan, "Real People. Real Reviews."

But even if the controversies are unfounded...$1.5BB blows my &!%#ing mind. My
personal perception is that I'm not even sure I trust the reviews.

------
18pfsmt
I lived in roughly the same place for the last 20 years, so yelp is very
interesting to me. I often notice poor ratings where I believe high ratings
are deserved, but also low ratings where high ratings are deserved.

------
localhost3000
I have a product in the local restaurant space. As a result I talk to lots of
restaurant people - staff, primarily. It is overwhelming the vitriol I hear
from them toward Yelp. Many people downright despise it.

------
dbcfd
As a business owner, I have also seen the extortion for advertising model.
Businesses that advertise with Yelp have low star reviews filtered, while
businesses like mine that do not, have reviews from valid customers (often
with friends and other reviews) filtered, to lower star ratings.

I have also seen reviews that are blatantly fake (e.g. reviews from Santa
Claus, comical reviews, etc.) persist, until a significant amount of time
passes. This indicates manual removal, and no actual Yelp filter.

------
bumbledraven
Filtering legitimate reviews is a big problem. Once I discovered that Yelp
filtered most of my reviews, I stopped writing them. It's not even like I'm
some anonymous coward (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course):
I have had a photo of myself on Yelp for a long time, my account is linked to
a few friends of mine on Yelp, and I even went to a Yelp event. I wonder how
many other people like me stopped writing reviews for the same reason?

------
damncabbage
Yelp really is the cool-startup version of the Better Business Bureau.

------
zephyrnh
I think this makes sense. Filtered reviews are reviews that yelp considers to
be fraudulent. They may be reviews created by multiple accounts from the same
computer to inflate a restaurant's rating. Or they may all be negative reviews
created by one person with multiple accounts to try to hurt a business they
weren't happy with. Either way, I think it's perfectly reasonable that such a
system of filtering should and does exist.

Now maybe their filtering system is so horrendous that it makes a 4-star
restaurant seem like a 2.5 star restaurant, but I find this hard to believe.

As for asking people to advertise with them to make "bad reviews disappear",
that would be terrible, so I can't speak to that, since all we have to go on
is this particular owner's word vs Yelp's. Is there any proof of this
happening?

------
peterwwillis
When I want to find a good place to eat, first I 1. ask somebody where a good
place is and what they liked that they ate 2. figure out what kind of food i
want and look for the best rated places near me 3. compare the menu with what
i know about the cuisine, pictures of the place and any details i can scrounge
up 4. then I just go and try to pick something I think i'll like.

Food isn't rocket science. Good places are open for a while and have lots of
people and you avoid chains and franchises. Don't complain about the service,
nobody cares. Don't complain about the prices, nobody cares. Don't complain
about the clientele or the ambiance, nobody cares. It's about the food,
stupid.

------
gphil
This is not the first time this has come up on HN:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yel...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=yelp+extortion&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

------
danbmil99
Funny story. I recently was going to order out from a Chinese restaurant that
I had recently ordered from before and recall enjoying. I had to google the
number, and in so doing came up with a couple terrible Yelp reviews. For some
reason I decided to listen to the toobz instead of relying on my own
judgement. Ended up ordering horrible greasy food from a better-rated, well-
known jaunt.

TL; DR: I let Yelp override my own experience, what's up with that?

------
sedev
I wish the article headline had said that the piece was by a restauranteur.
Most of what they have to say about Yelp falls under the heading of "more of
the same."

I think that restaurant and venue owners are _wrong_ to hate Yelp - but it's
understandable that they do. The reasons that they do are interesting. My take
on it is that Yelp is disruptive to a lot of the traditional restaurant
practices. Restaurant owners resent Yelp because it feels like they're adding
more work to what is already a job that requires 80-hour weeks. Previously,
restaurant owners had more message control about their venue's location,
because social information like "is the Foo Pizzeria any good?" had more
friction, it spread more slowly, and it degraded over time.

A Yelp review has low friction because it gets automatically ingested into
Yelp's data set, it spreads quickly, and it doesn't degrade over time - it
stays around on the site. If you're a business with a small number of reviews,
it doesn't take many one-stars to make you look unappealing, and Yelp's
attempts to be user-friendly mean that you're presented among a crowd of your
competitors unless you earn a clickthrough. Like being on a crowded shelf at
the supermarket, you're at the mercy of the visitor.

One interpretation of this would be to say that restauranteurs' reaction is
"Hey! Shouldn't my success be tied to what _I do,_ not to what a stranger on
the Internet _inflicts_ on me?" That's a reasonable objection - and that's why
Yelp has invested a shit-ton of engineer-hours into filtering reviews.
Filtering reviews is something that benefits both restauranteurs and users -
it's just that the former tend to be ungrateful pricks about it because
"filtering" includes "removing algorithmically detectable friends-and-family
five-star reviews." Which leads to the other big interpretation - that
restauranteurs are reacting badly to their customers' newfound ability to hold
them accountable. We humans are dumb monkeys with a truckload of cognitive
biases: we _hate_ being held accountable. I look at articles like this one and
I see big parallels to other whiny people who suddenly are brought into
accountability and are resisting it.

The thing is that the restauranteurs, like the MPAA or the newspaper industry,
_cannot_ win this one in the long term (at least not on the terms that they
now use to define "winning"). There's no way to keep people from talking about
your business. There's no way to keep people from talking about the things
they enjoy. There's no way to keep people from taking the easy way - "I feel
like pizza, I'll look it up on Yelp" - instead of a harder way - "I feel like
pizza, let's see which of my friends knows where the pizzerias are around
here, which of them are available, what their phone numbers and/or locations
are, or I know, I could go get the huge inconvenient yellow pages and make a
choice based on how much they spent on advertising!" Computing devices will
get more convenient to use, not less, knowledge will get easier to share, not
less, and the cost of querying the Internet's collective opinion will be
cheaper, not more expensive. The restaurant and venue owners are never, ever
going to win this the way they want to - again like the MPAA and newspapers,
the cat is entirely out of the bag.

Basically what I think they should do about it is

* Stop whining

* Read Seth Godin

* Compete instead of sue

As an aside, I've found Yelp very useful over time with the addition of a few
mental filters.

* Judge places by the review histogram, not by individual reviews

* Trust the collective opinion far more than individual reviews, especially for places with 100+ reviews

* Assume that anything at 3.5 stars or above is Good Enough, and use other sources when you want to have rarefied tastes catered to (Yelp started out as being mostly for foodies - I think it's moved out of that, and that if you are or desire to become a serious foodie, you should release yourself from caring about Yelp)

~~~
hristov
So you try to think of all kinds of speculative reasons why restauranteurs
hate yelp, but do not bother listening to what they say. Restauranteurs are
very clear and vocal about why they hate yelp -- it is because Yelp uses
reviews as a way to blackmail them into buying advertisements in Yelp. That is
pretty fucked up behaviour and has been confirmed by many people many times.

By the way most restaurants have always relied on customer satisfaction to
attract customers. This is true for most small businesses but it especially
true for small restaurants. And this was true before yelp and even before the
internet. A restaurant where each customer goes only once is usually doomed to
failure (the exceptions are places in tourist traps and high traffic locations
... these restaurants are usually reliably awful, but they are the minority).

If you are the usual non-franchise non-tourist trap restaurant, you cannot
afford much advertising or promotion. Your best hope for customers is someone
wandering in, being happy and coming back again. Or maybe even telling their
friends.

So the idea that restauranteurs now hate yelp because yelp somehow forces them
to up their game is silly. Most of them have always relied on customer
satisfaction as their main driver of business.

~~~
irq11
_"Restauranteurs are very clear and vocal about why they hate yelp -- it is
because Yelp uses reviews as a way to blackmail them into buying
advertisements in Yelp. That is pretty fucked up behaviour and has been
confirmed by many people many times."_

No, it's been _alleged_ many times -- by unreliable sources. It's never been
shown to be true, and in fact, the allegations that have made it to court have
been dismissed for lack of evidence:

[http://www.suntimes.com/technology/4622094-478/extortion-
law...](http://www.suntimes.com/technology/4622094-478/extortion-lawsuit-
against-yelp-dismissed-by-judge.html)

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020450530457700...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204505304577002170423750412.html)

------
micheljansen
I first read about Yelp's extortion practices in 2009 [1]. I thought that now
they have grown so big, the extortion would have stopped. Apparently not :(

[1] [http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-
of-e...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/yelp-and-the-business-of-
extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635)

------
sheraz
Mr. Larive is spot on in his opinion, and I think he offers good solutions to
the dilemmas of business response and participation.

Yelp is representative of a fundamental problem with so many review sites, and
our society at large -- namely that it attempts to coalesce many dimensions of
data (a person) into a single score.

And, just like FICO, and the SAT/LSAT/etc, Yelp and its predecessors (BBB)
attempt to do the same for businesses.

Worse still, they rely on the "Wisdom of Crowds" when it comes to qualitative
measure and taste. An average 2.5 stars tells me nothing, especially because
I'm an elitist prick and think the average Yelp commenter is an idiot.

I fear that people substitute a Yelp rating for their own critical-thinking,
and that is wrong. It is just as wrong that schools judge students largely
based on a single test score. It is wrong that lending happens based on a
opaque algorithm.

I fear that Yelp is just another symptom that our society is sick. Our brains
have atrophied to the point where we only look for one number that determines
the succes or failure of our education, our lives and our livelihood.

Or is that a touch melodramatic?

------
tmchow
Shameless plug:

We just launched Chewsy (<http://chewsy.com>) last year after years of
frustration with these aggregate business review sites. We're focused on
rating what you ate and sharing recommendations with friends. It's similar to
other food apps on the market but different in significant ways. For example,
it's not like a vertical instagram like some of those other popular food apps.

We're very much in growth mode, but San Francisco is getting some good
traction and our hometown of Seattle is thriving.

I encourage you to try it out and perhaps it can help you find your next best
meal (and help you recommend something to your friends).

------
jadc
Even though the article mentioned restaurants specifically, I believe the
point about Yelp being fundamentally flawed extends much beyond food.

I have heard similar reports from doctors saying that Yelp is filtering out
their 5 star reviews unless they advertise with them.

------
matan_a
This is my rule for Yelp:

1\. Listen to bad reviews. 2\. Ignore good reviews.

------
cft
I find that the star rating of places/reviews in Google maps in Android is
more reliable. Presumably, it does not suffer from the extortion bias either.

------
lhnn
Yelp apparently does what the BBB does: Extort people by offering "brand
cleanup" in exchange for advertising dollars. A disgusting business practice,
and I'm sure to pass this along to my "social network".

