Francis › Likes

Pics, or it didn't happen! - coldbrew

Yelp would benefit greatly from structure and user credibility. By structure, I mean separate scores for various attributes. For restaurants, these might be taste, originality, quality, ambiance, service, value. Free-form reviews like "This place is the best ever. 5 stars" or "The wait staff are rude. 1 star" are barely useful. A hundred-word recounting of the waiter's every nuance might be interesting to some, but a simple Service score fits the bill in most cases. - Amir Gharaat

This structure also allows attribute search filters (I care about taste and quality, and not sensitive to service or ambiance.) - Amir Gharaat

By credibility I mean peer "helpful" ratings and the ability to filter/sort by most helpful reviewers, not just those with the most reviews or friends. The Elite program is flawed... Yelp staff decide, not peers, and they encourage wit and wordiness. This doesn't scale. - Amir Gharaat

Sounds like decent feedback, but has nothing to do with the article at hand. - coldbrew

I read the article. Despicable if true. Seems like it should be pretty easy for a business to document more substantially some of these allegations, though. If I see more evidence, I'll personally boycott Yelp. - Stephen Mack

I agree, I was really bothered by the article. If it's true, I'll boycott as well. - Georgia Diehl

Pretty ugly if true. - Ken Gidley

Sounds like the verdict *here* is across the board, "If true" :-) I'm guessing there would be complete agreement, as well, on the ease of taking screen shots? Come on... - coldbrew

Also, this just occurred to me. Yelp has an API, and its content gets pushed elsewhere (like here on FF). If they were to remove reviews, this data would still remain. Archive.org also seems to have quite a cache. - coldbrew

coldbrew, the main issue from the article is the order, prominence, and absence/presence of reviews on the yelp.com page about a particular business. Doubtless the RSS feeds are not altered. But you're right that it should be possible to put together some smoking guns. - Stephen Mack

jwz seems to remember them shaking him down: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269... - Robin Barooah