Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
A restaurant owner who asked for 1-star Yelp reviews (thehustle.co)
264 points by kull on June 9, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 136 comments


What a guy though:

>Under the alias “Babghanoush I,” Cerretini posted 13 fake positive reviews for Botto Bistro, as well as fake critical reviews of neighboring restaurants — sometimes going so far as to disparage fellow owners.

......

>In the spring of 2014, after turning down another Yelp salesperson, Cerretini claims that four 5-star reviews were filtered from his page, and three 1-star reviews were suddenly catapulted to the top of the page. For the chef, this was the final straw.

>“Those 1-star reviews were from people who never even set foot in my restaurant,” says Cerretini. “One complained about our waiters… we didn’t even have waiters!”

Yeah, I wonder why you got fake negative reviews.


> Yeah, I wonder why you got fake negative reviews.

Are you saying that neighboring restaurants gave him bad reviews in retribution to the bad reviews he gave them? Or are you saying that Yelp themselves created fake negatives reviews because the owner turned away the Yelp salespeople?


More likely the idea is that there are any number of scummy people involved in the business leaving negative reviews on each other's restaurants.


Notably that information came from Yelp...

"Documented records shared with The Hustle by a Yelp spokesperson tell a fuller story of Cerretini’s actions."


Yes, but he himself admitted to writing good reviews and I have no reason not to believe Yelp in that case.


Two businesses each claim the other is full of shit. More at 11.


If that information is wrong, Yelp would be open to massive defamation liability.


You don't have to have waiters for the restaurant to be good.


Not a valid reason. Any business with integrity would not handle it that way.


I believe that parent commenter is saying that this guy wrote fake negative reviews against neighboring businesses and those businesses likely wrote them back.


I used to go a lot to a particular restaurant which I really liked which I remember had a bad review about a rude waiter. The review described that waiter in detail, and despite going there all the time I never saw him there. The review said that waiter was really rude, but I've never seen anyone be rude there. The staff was always quiet, professional, and polite. I couldn't imagine any of them being rude to anyone. Maybe that waiter had once worked there, but got fired or quit and was no longer there, but the review remained.

After some years the restaurant closed for renovation, and when it reopened there were completely different people working there, and the food was way worse. It was probably sold or went under new management, though they kept the name. So all the reviews this place had gotten over the years were really no longer relevant, as it was effectively a new restaurant. Yet all the Yelp reviews remained.


> all the reviews this place had gotten over the years were really no longer relevant, as it was effectively a new restaurant. Yet all the Yelp reviews remained.

The opposite is also a problem: a property management company I had issues with changed their name three times in the 24 months I was a customer. Each time they get a brand new slate, and can have reviews for the old company on the new page removed under the Yelp TOS, since if you say in your review you're not a customer, you're admitting to violating Yelp's review guidelines.


This is actually a pretty common strategy in Property Management. Multi-unit buildings owned by REITs are known to build this into their marketing plan. Sooner or later enough tenants will complain and the negative reviews will make it hard to fill empty units, so just "rebrand" and change your name. Common strategy by Essex Properties in the Bay Area.


Interesting. This wasn't a building though, it was a condo owned by a private landlord who contracted out management since they had a job that took them overseas.

(So you can't type in the address of the building and see bad reviews under different name for same addy. To be fair, the condo board and neighbors were nice, but as a renter I can't do repairs or replace broken appliances.)


A similar problem happens on Glassdoor. If you look at the salaries for pretty much any position at a big legacy company the bulk of the data comes from reviews submitted up to a decade ago...during the depths of the financial crisis.

At many smaller companies with only a few submitted salaries, the problem is much worse. I've received offers for 2.5X the quoted salary for the same position glassdoor supposedly had 10 submitted salaries for (bay area).

None of these review aggregators are incentivized to dump old reviews and make it look like they have less data than their competitors. Inevitably, consumers will start trusting reviews less and less...similar to what has happened on Amazon.


This is the same case with any review where the recent data and historical could be entirely different.

Steam solves this quite well by showing recent and all-time ratings. After all, one future patch can make or break a game.


comp.fyi and Blind are much much better for that sort of thing.


I've seem the first but what's Blind's url?


teamblind.com


>After some years the restaurant closed for renovation, and when it reopened there were completely different people working there, and the food was way worse. It was probably sold or went under new management, though they kept the name. So all the reviews this place had gotten over the years were really no longer relevant, as it was effectively a new restaurant. Yet all the Yelp reviews remained.

Well, it makes sense doesn't it? When you buy a restaurant you get to keep the name, location, word of mouth, etc. Makes sense you also keep the reviews.


It doesn’t make sense at all, but it is the way everyone is used to.


why do you think it does not make sense? Brand value is considered an asset and is usually part of the pricing evaluation. When someone buys a business, I would assume they also pay for the business brand value.. and that likely includes their online reputation.


"brand value", "online reputation", bah! Those are meaningless words for a customer who cares about the actual quality of something.

New owners not having the same standards and ethics is more common than not. (Can go both ways of course but nevertheless, the ratings should not pass over, it makes zero sense.)


I am a former Yelp engineer who worked on the review filter and had full access to Production. There is nothing in the code or infrastructure that allows sales to filter reviews. End of story. Any other position is for your own entertainment.

Users can and will be creative on the site. Making fake accounts in order to mislead others is not a creative practice that aligns well with typical users of Yelp.


Does it really matter? All that matters is what we perceive: from the perspective of both consumers and small business owners, Yelp looks like the bad guy--and that's probably only going to get worse. Nobody is ever going to be satisfied with their decisions.

Imagine if they allowed total anarchy and didn't police any of the reviews. Small business owners and consumers would be upset about all the fake reviews. Yelp claims they attempt to filter out these reviews; opponents claim they either go too far or filter as a form of extortion.

Who am I, as a consumer, to trust here? My only solution is to avoid using Yelp: then I don't have to worry about either of these problems. If I'm traveling, I ask the locals where they like to eat.

I'd argue that Yelp's whole business model is flawed; it doesn't scale for this very reason. No matter which path they take, it's going to be a PR nightmare. Unless they're able to both avoid filtering and disincentive fake reviews, somebody's going to be unhappy (and vocal).


>Does it really matter? All that matters is what we perceive: from the perspective of both consumers and small business owners, Yelp looks like the bad guy

nope! you don’t need to believe the truth. a lot of people don’t. but the hacker news community tends to like to surface technical truths even when they defy popular sentiment.


> Does it really matter? All that matters is what we perceive [...]

Right on point.

Right now we can only trust Yelp words, and the way their software behave it's far from transparent. And it gives exactly the opposite impression.

"Caesar's wife must be above suspicion"


It definitely matters.

'Fake reviews' or 'modifying display' in an uncsrupulous manner are essentially unethical and breach the nature of the system.

But in the end the real issue is I think that reviews by random people don't help that much at all.

We only need basic review by some competent person and more than anything: map, address, phone number!


Salespeople, though, whether for Yelp or anywhere else...are generally motivated and creative. I'd be surprised if none of them ever used their own friends, family, or fake accounts to punish reluctant sales leads. You don't need admin access to screw with people on Yelp.


Yes, from time to time people use their friends and connections to write fake reviews. And those people get caught.


by what mechanism are genuine and well-written 5-star reviews removed if owners refuse to pay Yelp, in your opinion?


Is there any proof that they are actually removed? How many genuine and well-written 1-star reviews are removed alongside them? I enjoyed the story but policing user content is hard.


If I was Yelp and acting in good faith that data would already be public


There’s a thing called yelp sort. It’s on by default. They refuse to say how it works so it can work any way they like. The sales person marks the restaurant as ”owner didn’t pay” the top reviews get removed from yelp sort and the star calculation. The negative reviews get prioritized, the top positive reviews get ignored, hidden or just plain buried. The business goes from four and a half stars to three and a half stars. (I’m sure the actual name of the flag more deniable) Business drops noticeably. Sales person calls back a week later. This practice has been documented at least five times in the press. Yelp is a know extortionist company. I’d love to see a hactivist or disgruntled sales person publish the code or screen shots.


Negative reviews in Yelp can be removed. That is what the flag is for. So the review removal infrastructure is in place.

I had a favorite sushi restaurant who would get the shakedown calls from Yelp sales. I was a regular and I remember the Mom+Pop owners complaining about the shakedowns.

But what Yelp does is apparently legal.


The flag is to report reviews that violate a policy, not bad reviews.

I’ve reported reviews in the past that stayed up.


Yeah I've reported reviews before because they were clearly purchased by the business (which was nose-diving and the real reviews showed it).

Yelp didn't pull the reviews because they couldn't prove that they were by people who are related to the business owners. They were all fresh accounts with no other activity, and all used the same style. Silly that yelp tags real reviews as fake but doesn't yank the truly bogus reviews.


Sales people don't need special access to write a fake review that they know will slip past the filters. Since they work with the people who design the filter rules and know them better than the public.


Damn, really trust this coming from a brand new account called “xyelperTTFs”


part of the username is derived from the now-defunct password for pushing updates to the website.


I’m sure they also have no mechanism to lie about their tactics on social media sites like HN.


Maybe you shouldn't use a fresh HN account if you want us to believe you.


> There is nothing in the code or infrastructure that allows sales to filter reviews.

That's sufficiently weasel-worded to mean nothing.


Have you gone through the entire codebase in great detail? If I wanted to engage in these clandestine hard bargaining tactics I'd purposely obfuscate that portion of the code / infrastructure, only revealing it to those senior enough to be trusted.


Why should we believe a greenbean account saying this? Why does anyone have "full access to Production", whatever that is? Yelp does health care stuff too; sounds like a HIPAA violation...


Yes Yes without filter code theirs no way to remove some piece of data from a website.... such as:

delete from reviews where id = ?


Which you're boldly claiming... oh wait, anonymously.


That's not the only way Yelp can mess with your business though, as e.g. Louis Rossmann's case showed. Yelp sent him internal details about a friend's business just because Louis told them the advertising deal didn't help his friend. Then after he published this he got threatening phone calls and negative fake reviews.

> Making fake accounts in order to mislead others is not a creative practice that aligns well with typical users of Yelp.

Which only matters if typical users of Yelp can tell it's fake.


To be fair, that wasn't Yelp-- it was a Yelp salesperson who was fired the next day. (edit: OK what difference does it make, but anyway "at least" they didn't stand by that person or their mistake) The "threatening phone call"-- I don't remember Rossmann actually referring to it that way-- wasn't from Yelp, it was from a law firm where someone in the (former) salesperson's family is apparently a partner. The fake reviews weren't from Yelp, they were just thinly veiled revenge from that person's friends who were not Yelp employees but 'elite' reviewers (whatever that means, TFA implies Yelp Eliters are an unpleasant bunch).

Rossmann's conclusion was that this probably isn't anything that Yelp secretly condones or instructs, but they declare their expectations, and their people will succeed by whatever means necessary. Obviously that doesn't include doxxing other businesses who already pay for advertising. :facepalm:

I can take the revenge bit at face value, though it would be hilarious if Yelp really was playing everyone who couldn't believe that a company would actually encourage that. They made it possible at least, fertile ground, etc.

Disclaimer: I really don't care about Yelp. At all. I don't know, I wasn't there, I didn't do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hhL15yJUnI


This reminds me of someone I used to play with on Starcraft Broodwar. When victory when inevitable, he would always quit the game to give himself a loss. He considered it better to have mostly losses on his record so other players cannot gauge his skill level.


Or so he could constantly play below his skill level as the matching system would think he was worse than he is.

If he was doing that on ladder, that’s generally considered to be bad form.


If I remember correctly, there was no matching system in BW.


Brood War had (has) a ladder system and then there were external leagues such as ICCUP that has ranking as well.


There's a term for this: "sandbagging". It happens across lots of rated competitive platforms, from pool to chess to Scrabble to stocks...


Haha I remember my dad teaching me this term during sports teams tryouts, the kinds where you would be drafted onto a team at the start of the year. I was a decent player, but definitely did not try my hardest during tryouts -- if I had, I would have been the worst "first pick", making my team bad.

Game theory to 9 year olds?


It was also because in the Battle.net chat rooms, your icon would have a higher number if you were ranked lower.

So if you wanted to be rank 9999, you just forfeit all your ladder matches.


When I used to play there was rampant abuse of the system by script kiddies who were using hacks to increase their latency to get auto-dropped from the game, which wouldn't count as a loss.


> ...a clear violation of the platform’s Terms of Service.

What can Yelp do to you if you invite their worst punishment as a badge of honor?

This is brilliant.


I know, right?

What? Will Yelp remove me from Yelp’s listings and search results?

Oh, darn!


This was Yelp's business plan - get so big, aggregate so much demand, that you _had_ to play by their rules to get business.


Careful, Yelp can easily invent a new punishment from which there is no escape.


Special offer! Free egg roll for yelper’s!


So many business people I know have their own Yelp horror story. How is this company even still in business?


Yelp's practice of intentionally biasing their reviews (and search results) was protected in court a few years ago[1], so unfortunately businesses have no legal recourse.

If we want to kill Yelp, we have to switch. My cousin works for Likewise[2] and recommends it. It solves the fake/biased reviews problem by letting you as a user select who influences your recommendations (including friends and family). I've never tried it, so I can't vouch for it myself.

1. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Yelp-can-give-paying-cli...

2. https://likewise.com/what-is-likewise


There's plenty of review action on Google Maps. My impression is that it's surpassed Yelp already, at least in the markets I'm active in (Denver).

Oddly I see lots of hipster businesses with signs mocking yelp, but none of them seem to register that GM is similar.


Google maps reviews are of way lower quality compared to both Yelp and TripAdvisor. Lots of 3-word reviews or barely English reviews. I’m sure there are more of them but I don’t value them at all.

I think there’s a weird culture around yelp reviews especially of people who openly label themselves as yelpers. I haven’t met them but it’s an easy group to mock. I’d bet a lot of those restaurants don’t realize how many visitors end up at their business because they saw something they liked about it on yelp despite not being some kind of power users of the site.

Frankly I like the platform more for discovery than reviewing, but generally most restaurants at 4 stars or above are pretty consistently good, while those between 1 and 3 are pretty consistently trash. It’s also nice being able to search reviews for menu items and things like “happy hour” or “patio”.

Lately I use Eater a lot more than any user-driven service though.


A few year ago my wife and I decided to look up all the restaurants we regularly go to, and we were surprised to find that pretty much all of them rated 3.5 stars on yelp. Perhaps that rating helps ensure we won’t have to wait for tables. Works for us.

But more to your point, I’ve noticed that when friends/family refer to “5 star restaurants” these days, they’re almost always referring to 5 stars on yelp. To them, it goes without saying that they’re using yelp as the measuring tool.


My experience is that the places that rate 4.5 or five stars on yelp deserve it. Every once in a while, I do discover one that I would consider excellent that has 3 1/2 or four.


That's not my impression. I seem to see very few reviews on Google maps compared to Yelp or even trip advisor. And when I do, they tend to be mostly negative. Presumably because the only ones leaving reviews are those that are mad enough to go out of their way to post there.


My experience is that the “match” feature on Google Maps does a very good job of suggesting places that appeal to me.


The last thing I'd want to do is give Google even more dominance.


It’s not really up to me. In reality, the only restaurant review app that is useful for me is ‘find me gluten free’, which is based on yelp.


The first article you linked does not conclude what you’re implying: that they’re intentionally biasing ratings (for paying customers or otherwise).


I didn't say that it did, only that it's completely legal for them to do it and for them to do it secretly.

I have firsthand experience with them biasing ratings from helping friends manage Yelp listings. I don't know how widespread it is, but it does happen. While possible, it seems unlikely that thousands of people have reported the same pattern (good reviews buried after declining to become a Yelp customer).

You can see this yourself on many listings. Click on the reviews that Yelp has hidden because of "quality issues". That's what they use for plausible deniability. My own positive reviews have been hidden from businesses (no personal connection to them, just places I liked) for being "suspicious".


A lot of those folks that are hidden have 0 connections or linked accounts, few reviews, and/or all reviews being the same star rating. I’m not saying it’s a good system but I see a variety of ratings hidden in that section.

All of my wife’s reviews were being hidden until she added established accounts as friends on yelp. Not sure why anyone treats it as a social network but so it goes.


Darn, it's not available in the UK :(


In term of restaurants, at least in London, quite a few are tested by michelin and can be seen on viamichelin website. It's not the same but at least it focuses only on positive reviews and there's no room for fake ones.


In London, i used to rely on Harden's guide, because it uses reviews from diners, but a diner had to fill in an actual paper form to review a place, and the reviews were filtered and curated by editors who knew their stuff, and visited as many of the restaurants as possible themselves (what terribly hard work that must have been).

Then the internet came along, and it was so much easier to google than to look in a little book. They have a website, but it never seems to work properly (completely broken in Firefox right now). The data is presumably still good, though.


1. Incredibly aggressive salespeople

2. A constant stream of new small business owners

3. A good story (pay us and we'll make you more money)


Because many people use yelp (including me).


Seemingly unpopular take on my experience with various review sites:

1) In the US, Yelp's reviews of restaurants have a significantly higher correlation with reality than any other review site. Google reviews are okay.

2) In Europe, Yelp reviews are mostly by American tourists and are sparser and higher variance quality-wise. Google reviews seem to be generally the best in Europe. (Canada might be a toss-up between Yelp and Google.)

3) In both continents TripAdvisor reviews are pretty much meaningless. I've been to multiple restaurants on TripAdvisor with ~4.5 that have absolutely sucked in terms of both food, service, and atmosphere.

I don't have much experience with reviews for local businesses that aren't restaurants or outside of the US/Canada/Europe. But in the US, for all of Yelp's supposed manipulation, their reviews are noticeably better than other sites'.


>claiming he was exchanging reviews for “incentives” (a discount on pizza) — a clear violation of the platform’s Terms of Service

That doesn't seem all that different than what yelp itself does.


How does Yelp's Terms of Service matter? Does the restaurant owner even have a Yelp account?


Exactly. Terms of service don't mean a thing unless you explicitly agree to them. And checking a box upon sign up is not necessarily enough to constitute agreement either.


At this point I suspect that simply knowledge of a website means you agree to the ToS.

Or just existing does the same.


Yelp’s own practices violate its terms of service. Therefore under their own rules their service must be terminated. Wonder how that would play in court.


Here's his Yelp page: https://yelp.to/qTKq/2I1Y0WkNnX

All the wink wink 1-star reviews are gone - many 1-star reviews left, but only those that seem somewhat believable. There are also only a few hundred reviews, not the thousands mentioned by the article. I'd guess that Yelp watches his page pretty closely and deletes any reviews that are obviously fake.

That said, I'd bet that the majority of the 1-star reviews, even the ones that appear believable, are still fictional.


I've noticed that any organization or process that serves as a "gatekeeper" inevitably has a lot of resentment directed at it. Business owners resent Yelp. Software developers resent the interview process. Aspiring entrepreneurs resent VCs. College applicants and their parents resent Ivy League admissions.

In all of these cases, people love to complain about the injustices and imperfect heuristics being used by the gatekeepers. A lot of these complaints are very valid, but a lot of them also seem to miss the bigger picture entirely. These gatekeepers and their heuristics serve a very valid purpose in society, which is why they wield so much power to begin with. The only productive complaints are those that suggest viable alternatives or improvements - suggestions that don't simply trade-off one set of bad outcomes for an even worse set of bad outcomes. It's hard to take Grotto's "burn Yelp to the ground" ethos seriously, because I've lived through the pre-Yelp era of Yellow Pages and tourist traps, and I'd never want to return to that world again.


We've heard again and again that Yelp harasses small businesses for ad buys. In itself, not a problem. But we've also heard that their mystery secret sauce "algorithm" then by sheer coincidence puts down 5 star reviews in favor of negative ones when they say no.

If Yelp was really interested in clearing the air, they'd show how their algorithms are making the decisions they're making. It's not like they'd give away their entire platform or market space by doing so, there's such immense network effect at play with Yelp that they'd likely never be unseated.

But they won't, and I suspect it's because they do manipulate it, even if slightly, because they have have every single solitary financial and business reason to do so.


That would have exactly the same result as a search engine publishing their complete ranking algorithm. It would instantly be gamed and worthless. I find Yelp useful and generally accurate.


You could make the same accusation against any gatekeeper. The linked article quotes a unbiased professor and his peer reviewed study which found no evidence of review tampering by Yelp as a means of extortion. Any accusations at this point are pure speculation.


Except there's no way to review Yelp's process without intimate involvement of Yelp itself, which, if you assume for a moment that they do have levers and strings into their algorithm, means they would be pre-prepared to change how data is presented to those conducting the study, with minimal impact to their ongoing business.

Or, even if they don't manipulate them directly but simply have baked that behavior into the algorithm, it wouldn't even look that different. It's not as if Yelp wouldn't assume this behavior would attract complaints and regulatory attention, so they'd be motivated to make sure it's as subtle and undetectable as possible, which when you have total and complete control of a closed-source codebase, is easy.

Do we have proof? No, and that's why Yelp won in court, they couldn't be implicated beyond a shadow of a doubt of manipulation. But considering how much of their system is nothing but shadows and doubts, I don't find that all that exonerating.


> Dan Neves, a waiter at a fine dining establishment in Austin, Texas, created YELP BULLIES EXPOSED, a private Facebook group that tracks down rude Yelpers and sends them a one-pound bag of animal feces procured from poopsenders.com. In a little over a month, the group has attracted 278 members.

With this kind of publicity poopsenders might soon go public


This will backfire though - poopsender will get negative yelp reviews and people will no longer go there to eat.


If only Yelp behaved a little like the late Jonathan Gold, who'd only give _favorable_ reviews to restaurants he really enjoyed, skipping negative/mediocre reviews for those that could improve.


The problem is then Yelp filters your reviews to be lower on the main page- their algorithm features reviewers who leave "balanced" reviews so more even % of 5-1 star reviews. People who have only positive or only negative reviews get pushed onto the non-featured reviews/reviews we don't recommend page. One thing that helps your reviews stay on the front page is having a lot of friends on yelp, as well as being on of the first to review for places.

I always feel bad leaving a mediocre review for small businesses, so I generally will only do that for places that it doesn't really matter (random gas stations).


I’ve started ignoring yelp reviews. The quality as a whole is about the same as Amazon reviews, which I find close to useless.

That said, I still use the app. I use it for pictures, especially recent pictures of menus and food. I also use it for basic business info like hours, address, phone number, and (sometimes) map.

If I were to own a business that would be a natural yelp candidate, I would definitely incentivize one-star reviews.

First, I think that good yelp reviews attract some (perhaps many) pathological customers, many of whom are not from your natural customer base. These folks will put an effective service tax on the business, and they will make the place not what your regulars want it to be. Think a minor version of the Michelin Star hug of death.

Second, I think that there are much better / more effective outreach methods than yelp and similar apps to target the audience you want.

What I would do is keep an up-to-date collection of images of the menu and food on the site, and the business information would be accurate. I would be tempted to muck with the business information if yelp tried to go to war, but I imagine taking the high road would be the correct choice even if yelp didn’t.

I would not create accounts to post to about any restaurant, including my own. I also would not advertise on the platform.

I fully believe that a lot of these “social” sites seeking growth with questionable ethics practices will end up biting themselves in the ass. The tech isn’t that complex. I (naively?) believe that companies that make an effort to delight both sides of the marketplace (purveyors and potential customers) without trying to make VC-level returns will eventually marginalize predatory sites and apps. I hope this comes sooner rather than later.


I wish we could boil restaurant reviews down to “did you like it?”

I usually use some combination of TripAdvisor, Google Maps, Yelp, and OpenTable to get an idea of what’s going on. TripAdvisor tends to have less millennials which is nice.

Actually, what would be ideal, is filtering out the prolific reviewers in any of these platforms.

Other things to get good data would be more general questions, like “what are some places you like to eat in your neighborhood” or “what places stood out to you on your recent trip to _____”

... and then some incentive to respond or something.


> The quality as a whole is about the same as Amazon reviews, which I find close to useless.

Agreed, I think that any crowd source review of anything is so open to massive gaming that you can't trust it.

That said you can't really trust (as an example) the general technology press reviewing most things either since they all have interests in one way or another (call out Foo vendor for something and suddenly find yourself no longer on the VIP list at Foo's future launch events).

Not sure what the solution is though.


Yelps real value is the metadata. Lots of microgenres make it easy to find specific types of food/venue.


A lot of startups focus solely on exponential growth. It's probably only a matter of time before they resort to extortionist tactics like this and somehow justify it as a l perfectly valid strategy.


This is why Consumer Reports doesn't take ads. In any ad-funded review platform, corruption is inevitable. And we could solve it with a simple (but difficult) law: that review platforms may not receive any income from whoever they're reviewing.


This is genius tactic, and should become a coordinated movement.


Why? If all rating systems are driven to ground then what did we earn in exchange?


We don't need such ratings systems for restaurants.

We need a rough idea of what's there, some photos of the place and food tell a lot of the story. And prices.

Maybe some 'editors choice' for the one's that stand out.

A 'guide book' made by a small, decent team is as legit as any public review system, probably more so.


Well, for example Paris has a few thousand restaurants. If you know the locals then it's of course best to ask them. But if you come for a day or two it's pretty nice to be able to check that you are not falling into some sort of tourist trap.


Yes, a small team of professional reviewers could handle Paris.

20 reviewers x4 restos a day (most are little brasseries, don't need tons of time) is 80 / day, 800 in 10 days only.

It would only take maybe 4-5 people to do it ongoing, once most were established.


I don’t know. Like with all reviews, one would first need to find a reviewer with similar taste. For movies, for example, I don’t trust journalist reviews at all because they all have to go see all the movies, whereas the public pre-selects and more or less only goes to see movies they might enjoy watching.

If some reviewer smashes a restaurant because the food is too spicy it makes it of no value.


Optimistically, critical thinking.

More likely, something else useless to take its place.


When did rating systems become essential? Have we as a society become so fragile we can't even take the occasional bad meal in stride?


> When did rating systems become essential?

Some time around the point when our society grew large and mobile enough that relying on personal experience and word of mouth wasn't enough, because a sufficient number of people ate in areas to which they wouldn't return any time soon.


We killed the extortionist.


On his blackboard the fourth line seems to say, "We have no god". Am I misreading? Seems a little incongruous for a restaurant to have a public position on such a historically controversial topic...


He compares Yelp to the Mafia and hands out discounts in exchange for one-star reviews. This seems rather mild by comparison.


It's the last of 4 lines of various "we have no <whatever>".

I'd read it like:

"Yes, we are godless heathens for not having lemon, ice, ranch, butter, etc. Get over it."


Plus he's from near Pisa. Historically, modern Tuscany had the reputation of a communist/leftist stronghold where people might go to Sunday Mass, but still swear a lot and not follow the church blindly (when they weren't outright atheists).


He's in the Bay Area, where that is the sentiment.


When I see an ad for a contractor that has the Christian fish on it, I avoid it. I'm not sure why but maybe that it's unattractively pious, it suggests they somehow have a conflict of interest.. Wonder whether anyone else does that.


I've noticed that as soon as I start wearing my morality as a badge of honor, that I'm most likely covering up for some other sin.

So as a Christian, I don't view the Christian fish as evidence of ethical business practices.

Christ speaks the divergence between appearance and action in Matthew 7:22-23:

"Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’


Yelp has always been a thinly veiled extortion platform, overrun by spam, yet surprisingly quick to filter legitimate five-star reviews.

I tried their paid advertising for a client in 2017, and have avoided it like the plague ever since.

Not only did the trial yield no leads, but Yelp billed substantially more than the defined monthly campaign spend.

It took repeated complaints and escalation to a sales manager to even get part of the overage credited.

My experience was:

* Near zero detail or transparency in campaign reports

* Deceptive and confusing budget rules

* Absurd cost per click (even compared to Google Ads)

* Sudden filtering of all the legitimate 5-star reviews on one listing, after we declined further sales efforts


Bad Yelp reviews can safely be ignored most of the times. Some of the best tasting restaurants I went to have 2 to 3 stars, and they are hugely popular. It seems they don't care about the rating and relying on providing the best food and best service.


When it started, crowd-sourced ratings seemed like such a great idea. But I now think it has either failed or is doomed to fail. I have noticed, for example, that some movies rated on IMDB split into 9 or 10 star and 1 or 2 star. These are generally movies that, in my opinion, are bad: poor writing, wooden acting and so on. I get the impression that the 9/10 are all paid for. Well written, but somehow wrong. The 1/2 always ring truer to me.

At least in the golden days of paid movie critics (or even restaurant reviewers) I could decide whether or not my tastes (in movies or restaurants) were similar to the critic. Crowd reviews make that impossible.

Call me old-fashioned, .... please.


IMDb definitely seems to be on the take when it comes to new movie reviews. Almost any summer blockbuster will be in the top 10 for a number of weeks before eventually being edged out of the top 250.

Friends and I have a tradition of picking movies from the top 250 list and we always skip these as a result.


"We won't tell you how our filter works but we pinky promise we're not extorting you!"

Not sketchy at all


“I came from Italy, and know exactly what mafia extortion looks like,” he says. “Yelp was manipulating reviews and hoping I would pay a protection fee. I didn’t come to America and work for 25 years to be extorted by some idiot in Silicon Valley.”

I love this paragraph so much!


For some pretty good satire on Yelp reviews, check out Yelping with Cormac - Yelp reviews in the style of Cormac McCarthy...

https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/

Bitingly funny.


Isn't it a ridiculous joke that yelp is threatening "a clear violation of the platform’s Terms of Service", when it seems he is no longer a user of the service?

By his own admission, he is no longer paying yelp for any service so there is no contractual agreement between the two entities right? A punishment where they delist the business from their site is giving him and other businesses exactly what they want? So.....?

From a conceptual level, an unrelated entity lists the details of you/your business on their own accord and then threatens you with "terms of service violation" when you do something or share information it doesn't like? Seems insane.


Intentionally targeting someone like this (or yourself) with a flood of abuse in order to discredit/drown out real abuse is a plot point in the new Neal Stephenson book!


This story an be copied on to the onion. And no one would know.


"We don't have ranch"

Good Lord people, it's an actual Italian restaurant. You wanted the real deal? You got it.


The truth is people don't want reviews!

They just want a rough idea of what to expect.

Frankly - you should be able to tell by the pictures of the place, and photos of the actual plates (if they're legit).

That's 90% of right there.

The odd bit of bad service or extra great service I don't think is a huge deal. I've never thought poorly or great of a place because of the service, I always just assumed that was the individual server.

All we ever need is for 2 or 3 people with decent taste to walk in the place, have a taste, take a few photos and 'tell us what it is' - maybe point out what's good, what's bad a little bit.

And then maybe some 'editors choice' for the one's that naturally stand out.

That's it.


Completely agree. YouTube videos have basically replaced written videogame reviews for most people - nobody wants to read paragraphs about what someone thought and felt, they want to see what you actually do in the game.

I'm interested in reading professional food critics, but well-organized food photos (plus objective caveats) would surpass anything that could come from Yelp randos.


“People don’t want [this thing millions of people use, around which entire industries exist. And which is the only effective way of assessing a restaurant you’ve never been to personally.]”

If I could reach through the internet right now I would.


Your comment defeats itself.

"is the only effective way of assessing a restaurant you’ve never been to personally"

That's why they use it, not because it 'has reviews', but because it's a comprehensive directory, it has the address, phone number, photos, and the 'reviews' give a rought idea of what's up.

If the reviews were replaced with a simple star rating, then people wouldn't care.

There is also Google Search, which shows images, price.

I haven't used Yelp in a few years, it's simply unecessary.


There's a site like this. Have you heard of Yelp?


Yelp is a site fully of irrelevant nitpicking and noise making.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: