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I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a re
by bkbleikamp 15y ago
I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months.
It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate.
The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—it's not a trivial piece of software, it takes a full time team to maintain, edit, update, fix, improve, etc. Whether or not a business is an advertiser is never taken into account.
Yelp puts consumers first - that means sometimes they remove legitimate reviews. Everyone on the product and engineering teams knows this, realizes it sucks for businesses, but would rather err on the side of all reviews being legitimate. The reason they keep working on the algorithm is to improve this and make it more accurate.
The sales staff has strict rules on what they can and can't do, they do not have access to editing, managing, or deleting reviews and I never once saw an email come to product asking for a review to be removed or added.
Thousands of businesses work with Yelp, are happy with Yelp, and have happy customers. Even businesses with 5 stars get negative reviews sometimes. You cannot please everyone.
- yoda_sl 15y agoIt's hard to believe that so many business are complaining about Yelp if nothing was wrong... If what you are saying is true then the only conclusion is that the algorithm used has a major flaw but Yelp doesn't want either to acknowledge it or fix it. I believe that they rather don't want to fix it so it help their true business of selling ads. Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is flaky at best, and a scam at worst. "freedom of speech" has not the same meaning when you are at Yelp.
- megablast 15y agoI don't think so, people running businesses hate seeing negative reviews about themselves. No matter what Yelp did, nothing is going to change that fact, and nothing will put it right in the minds of those being criticized.
- bkbleikamp 15y agoThere are significantly more stories of businesses having a great experience with Yelp than a bad one. But it's not exactly a great story for the Chicago Tribune to highlight all of those businesses. What does it say to you that a judge threw the case out?
- josephcooney 15y agoReally? I've only ever heard bad things. Can you provide examples?
- pbreit 15y agoIt's not hard at all to believe that businesses would complain about a review site that is working perfectly. Would you be willing o disclose your parents' business so hat we can analyze the hidden reviews?
- rorrr 15y agoThen how do you explain this? http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-yelps-own-filtered.html http://jamiehdavidson.blogspot.com/2011/09/exploration-of-ye...
- bkbleikamp 15y agoI am not sure what you mean. Why would filtered reviews distribution match up to the unfiltered reviews? Typically a "fake" review is either going to be someone who is raving about a business to try to boost the rating or someone who for some reason wants to bad mouth the business (e.g. a competitor) so it makes sense that 1 and 5 star ratings are the most filtered.