2y ago

Yelp has a wall of shame for businesses caught paying for fake reviews

www.engadget.com

Yelp has a wall of shame for businesses caught paying for fake reviews | Engadget

Yelp has a wall of shame for businesses caught paying for fake reviews::Yelp has a new tool to help people track businesses that have tried to manipulate their standing on the review platform..

15 comments

Funny how a company that is known for extortion is parading itself as something that looks out for cheating in reviews.
- For real they are the shittiest company ever. Every time they call I block the number right away.
  
  Yelp calls?
- My first thought
  
  Same. I remember friends who owned a small restaurant early in the Yelp days who were constantly harassed and extorted. They survived but the threat to their business was palpable.
- I'm sure there's a price to get yourself removed from that wall.
That wall of shame is called yelp.com.
Yelp is a business engaging in shady tactics. So how can I ever trust anything they create.
Yelp are some of the worst telemarketers requesting you pay for better review control
Yelp has made this wall of shame incredibly hard to browse. It's not sorted in any clear way, and there's no way to sort or filter it. You have to keep clicking "load more" to get 15 at a time. They really do not want to help you find which businesses to avoid in your area.
- Because it's not about normal people browsing it, it's about them saying "we put you on our wall of shame "pay us instead of those fake reviewers!" And then removing the business from their tidy, alphabatized, excel spreadsheet that the esoteric algorithm the "wall of shame" randomly pulls from.
  It's about blackmail :D
I assume they want you to pay THEM for positive reviews, not someone else. Yelp sucks.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Since 2012, Yelp has caught nearly 5,000 businesses engaging in shady tactics, like paying customers for favorable ratings or hiring people to write phony reviews.
Yelp is releasing a new index that tracks every U.S establishment it’s ever caught engaging in “suspicious” activity to influence its reviews.
Yelp places temporary alerts on businesses’ pages when it discovers fake reviews, and regularly releases transparency reports detailing its moderation efforts.
“We'd love to get to a place where this new index develops into a regular resource for others, whether it's FTC, consumers, regulators or other sites,” Malik tells Engadget.
But she’s also quick to point out that the index is also meant to help Yelp users make “educated decisions” about where to spend their money.
While you may not think much about visiting a coffee shop with a history of paying people to leave positive Yelp reviews, your feelings may be very different if you’re looking for a contractor to remodel your home, or for a daycare or moving company (all of which appear in the index).
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- Good bot

15 comments