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The Internet Technology

Bay Area Woman Is On a Crusade To Prove Yelp Reviews Can't Be Trusted (sfgate.com) 59

Posted by BeauHD from the she-might-be-on-to-something dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: A strange letter showed up on Kay Dean's doorstep. It was 2017, and the San Jose resident had left a one-star review on the Yelp page of a psychiatry office in Los Altos. Then the letter arrived: It seemed the clinic had hired a local lawyer to demand that Dean remove her negative review or face a lawsuit. The envelope included a $50 check. Dean, who once worked as a criminal investigator in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, smelled something fishy. She decided to look into the clinic, part of a small California chain called SavantCare. By the time her work was done, she'd found a higher calling -- and SavantCare's ex-CEO was fighting felony charges.

Since then, Dean, 60, has mounted a yearslong crusade against Yelp and the broader online review ecosystem from a home office in San Jose. Yelp, founded in San Francisco in 2004, is deeply entrenched in American consumer habits, and has burrowed itself into the larger consciousness through partnerships with the likes of Apple Maps. The company's crowdsourced reviews undergird the internet's web of recommendations and can send businesses droves of customers -- or act as an insurmountable black mark. Dean follows fake reviews from their origins in social media groups to when they hit the review sites, methodically documenting hours of research in spreadsheets and little-watched YouTube videos. Targets accuse her of an unreasonable fixation. Yelp claims it aggressively and effectively weeds out fakes. But Dean disagrees, and she's out to convince America that Yelp, Google and other purveyors of reviews cannot be trusted.

"This is an issue that affects millions of consumers, and thousands of honest businesses," she said in her YouTube page's introductory post on April 30, 2020, facing the camera dead-on. "I'm creating these videos to expose this massive fraud against the American public and shine a light on Big Tech's culpability." "I don't do it lightly. If I put a video up, it's serious," she told SFGATE in May. "I'm putting myself out there." Dean is particularly motivated by the types of small businesses that she's found gaming Yelp's recommendation algorithm. She has spotted seemingly paid-for reviews on the pages of lawyers, home contractors, and doctors' offices -- high-ticket companies for which she says she'd "rather have no information than fake information."
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Bay Area Woman Is On a Crusade To Prove Yelp Reviews Can't Be Trusted More

Bay Area Woman Is On a Crusade To Prove Yelp Reviews Can't Be Trusted

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  • I give her quest 2 stars.

  • Yelp is Shit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Perhaps it's different for San Francisco-area restaurants, but in my metro Yelp is an absolute joke. If you want to find something or read reliable reviews, you use Google Maps. The people who leave Yelp reviews here seem to be batshit loco (but at least there's not many of them) or paid off.

  • Well... duh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @07:27PM (#63603736)

    It's actually very funny to see these naive people realizing that everything you see online is a lie. That's been true for a very long time now. The Internet's innocent years are long gone.

    • Re: Well... duh (Score:4, Funny)

      by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @07:41PM (#63603750)

      There was an article in The Atlantic a few years ago about adults who keep stuffed animals around and "ventriloquize" through them...with other adults. The writer was a woman whose boyfriend had at one point had a habit of using a stuffed turtle to make disparaging remarks about the writer. The killer line in the article was something like:

      And then I had an epiphany. It wasn't the turtle calling me a bitch, it was my boyfriend!

      As far as I could infer, the writer was a grown-ass woman at the time of this revelation.

    • Re:Well... duh (Score:5, Funny)

      by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @07:48PM (#63603770) Homepage Journal

      I saw this online:

      everything you see online is a lie.

      Is it true?

    • The internet had innocent years? Adorable.

      • Oh, you poor child, yes the internet had a few innocent years. well, maybe not innocent, but definitely without the scum who are on it today.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ghoul ( 157158 )
          Duh the Internet was invented as a tool for total nuclear war. It was never innocent. It may have been nerdy but these were nerds creating WMDs.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by clovis ( 4684 )

            Duh the Internet was invented as a tool for total nuclear war. It was never innocent. It may have been nerdy but these were nerds creating WMDs.

            Well, nuclear war is what they promised us so we would get on board. Sigh, another lie.

    • True, but does that mean all open forums are equally bad - that making an effort doesn't matter?

      Maybe things will revert back away from crowdsourcing. I'm going to take this opportunity to put in a shameless plug for Project Farm on youtube for reviews of tools and other mechanical stuff. One person with a brand image to maintain (or is it simply integrity!?) does have its advantages.

      • Yes I agree, Yelp and its ilk aren't forums, they're advertising platforms that "gamify" people into working for them for free. YouTube is different from crowdsourcing in that they share a substantial portion of the profits with the content creators. This gives them the opportunity to build a brand and in the case of Project Farm (I love that channel as well) you have one man who has built up a reputation by creating quality content for years. Exactly the opposite of crowdsourcing, really.

        Back in the innoce

    • They're not lies, they're opinions. Some people have strong ones & those are the most likely to go to the trouble of putting them into words & posting them online. You can't really treat anything said in the fog of indignant outrage or gleeful delight as objective & factual.

      • Re:Well... duh (Score:4, Informative)

        by mrfaithful ( 1212510 ) on Thursday June 15, 2023 @09:36AM (#63605040)

        There's a well known review site that regularly grooms the place where I work. We have a 3.5 rating on it and the reviews seem genuine. Handful of 5 stars and some 1 star reviews from customers where we know a staff member screwed the pooch and have been severely berated for their lack of, well, anything qualifying them to be customer services. But I am of the strong opinion that the site itself is deeply untrustworthy. Why? Because the rating has held steady at around 3.5 for years and years and years. Except for brief periods when it mysteriously becomes a 4.5 and all the 1-star reviews get hidden. We will get a phone call telling us we should totally subscribe to their platform and put the badge on our site because customers will love us and we'll get so much more revenue. We tell them to fuck off and lo and behold it's now 3 stars, 3rd place on google under our actual site and the facebook and the 1-stars are floated to the top. We can usually guarantee a phone call later telling us how we can "manage" the reviews.

        "Manage." I left a review once on a site that proudly displayed the logo, complaining about their shoddy mail order service. It got "managed." i.e. deleted. So that's why I strongly believe that if a site is proudly displaying its high rating on said review site it's - almost, but not completely - lies.

        Thanks to them I assume that all review sites are the same. Engaging in a practice of "managing" reviews so that paying businesses get a good experience and people who fail to pay the tithe get equally dishonest ratings in the other direction. And they avoid legal troubles because the reviews are genuine, just perhaps not representative in aggregate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      It's actually very funny to see these naive people realizing that everything you see online is a lie. That's been true for a very long time now. The Internet's innocent years are long gone.

      Quite... The thing is, only the savvy realise that most reviews online are nonsense. The problem is that review sites are effectively standover men, pedalling negativity until businesses front up some cash to "guarantee" some positive reviews. Yelp doesn't really exist outside the US so for most of us, TripAdvisor is the worst culprit, it's almost literally a case of they contact you and say "that's a nice hotel you've got there, it would be a shame if someone were to... negatively review it" and for a nom

      • This is why I mostly just use them to spot any major red flags that haven't been censored, or to look for customer pictures to get an idea for the general scale and nature of something.

    • It's still possible to use Yelp ratings if you apply a bit of psychology. If someone is paying for reviews, they will pay for five-star reviews, nothing else makes sense. Practically speaking, all five-star reviews on Yelp are fake. Any business with an average rating of over 4.5 stars is almost certainly gaming the review system. Don't go there.

      • I gave up on reading yelp reviews long ago, and thought I had figured out the system. I went to restaurants and looked only at the food pictures to decide if I wanted to go there or not.

        Recently the yelp food pictures have become slim pickings indeed. 90% of the user photos are gone, replaced by a handful of professional close ups of individual dishes, sometimes many shots, even pages, of the same dish, perfectly framed and obviously staged. RIP workaround.

    • It depends. Some reviews can be trusted to a degree, but you need to have a legit bullshit detector to tell the honest reviews from the fake ones. You also have to understand how your requirements may differ from others. And keep in mind that the best of any thing is going to be nearly impossible to actually measure even if there are objective reviewers.

  • "Caveat emptor" is one of them.

    • Assume the worst. Be pleasantly and genuinely surprised when it isn't bad.

      Also, for service industries, call out good service to the management. They deserve to know who does fantastic as much as those who suck. This, and an extraordinary tip with a nice note.

  • is being gamed?

    Next you'll be telling me that 4 out of 5 doctors in toothpaste commercials are just actors and not licensed physicians! Inconceivable!

    • I always want to ask what the concerns the 5th doctor who did not recommend the product were.

      • I always though it was because they were hawking their own brand of what ever and they just dragged the surveyor into some meeting to market their toothpaste that's also is a shampoo. Reality is never that entertaining, its lies and BS all the way down.

  • So.... basically like the ENTIRE internet.

  • Yelp reviews? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @08:14PM (#63603822)
    There are actually people out there who believe Yelp reviews? That astonishes me.

    • There are actually people out there who believe Yelp reviews? That astonishes me.

      They actually can be helpful for restaurants. Even the negative reviews can be helpful. Especially helpful are the ones with photos and a description of what they ordered. If you're going to post photos with no description and it's not possible to identify the dish because it could be one of many different things that look similar, that is useless. But you'll see some reviews that will say something like a group of 4 people ordered 4 different things and here are the photos with a description and 3

  • Sure, there are people who review a lot and try to be honest.

    But most people are lazy. They will mostly only review when they've had a negative experience, and sometimes when they've had an exceptionally positive experience. Otherwise, most folks will not review because hey, it just takes time to review just a so-so experience.

    To counter this skewing of reviews mostly towards the negative, organizations will purchase good reviews since people may not leave reviews, but they will use them to make purchasing

  • I only use yelp to see if the restaurant is still open.

  • I have my small collection of sites I generally trust. None of them are crowd sourced. Too large a percentage of the public is made up up people who maybe should just shut their traps.

    All you have to do to learn about the validity of human opinions is peruse a recipe forum. It's laid bare there. "I made your recipe, but with almond flour instead of whole wheat. My cousin is lactose intolerant so I skipped the cream. That much salt is unhealthy so we cut it in half. Turned out bland. One star. Would not make

  • See title.

    Anyone who trusts Yelp reviews is in for a wild ride. Sometimes they're spot on, sometimes they're so far off that it's comical.

  • I used to work for Yelp (Score:5, Informative)

    by kribtun ( 10433402 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @11:09PM (#63604118)
    I was hired to write reviews for Yelp when they were trying to establish themselves in a new country, and they wanted the site to actually have some content already present at launch. We were a team of about 30 people who each had to write something like 50 reviews a week. And we were not allowed to write anything negative. So the job quickly turned into a bullshit-contest where I just made stuff up about businesses I had never visited. The reviews had to be a specific length, so I would make up more and more elaborate stories which often went far into the land of surrealism. Most of the insane reviews I wrote are still up, even though they are obviously nothing but fairytales.

    • Re:I used to work for Yelp (Score:4, Informative)

      by The Other Neo ( 6845338 ) on Thursday June 15, 2023 @03:40AM (#63604444)
      It may have been three years ago where there was an article of some restaurants who were unwilling to pay the Yelp extortion fee. They kept on receiving calls form Yelp to pay the monthly fee for their service. When the restaurants refused their pages were flooded with negative reviews, many of them not even relevant to their establishments.

  • Seriously, reviews CAN be trusted.

    Another thing is that you DELIBERATELY decides to throw away common sense: ANY review is:

    1) An "in MY opinion", which might confront directly with your POV; or

    2) An "paid review" (directly, IMHO should be banned; or indirectly, a company giving better support for "influencer" rather than "all users"); or

    3) An "stupid human", who says "why not boom the real opinions instead?" (for good or bad review).

    Therefore, it is MOOT (and rather ridiculous) that anyone, in their common

  • "Dean, who once worked as a criminal investigator in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General"

      "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have fucked with? That's me."
                    -Grand Torino

  • Your Mileage May Vary Applies (Score:4, Insightful)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Thursday June 15, 2023 @05:51AM (#63604550)
    I went to a collection of new doctor and medical facility that turned out to be not so great. I went to Yelp to post reviews and discovered that other had already posted the same complaints I did. I wish I would have looked the Yelp reviews before I made those appointments. Yelp does work, at least sometimes.

  • I predict this ex-investigator's quaint, home-based hobby of tracking fake reviews on hand-written spreadsheets will be quickly drowned under a tsunami of BS, courtesy of the various chat AIs.

    So this is what SkyNet will really look like: machines spewing out sunny and cheery fake reviews for paying customers, and dystopian why-are-you-hurting-the-animals fake reviews for those who haven't coughed it up yet.

  • I haven't used Yelp in a very long time, and the same is true at least among my group of friends. I don't think Yelp is deeply entrenched in American consumer habits these days, and I'm not sure it ever was.

    Either way, it shouldn't be a surprise that Yelp and its ilk are game-able and unreliable. This isn't news, but I applaud this person's determination to root out people/businesses that are gaming it.

    My policy with reviews: read the worst ones. If there's a common complaint among them, then that complaint

    • Also, actually read the 5* reviews. A genuine 5* review will give the reason why they were especially delighted by the product / service. Does that reason seem credible?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by thomn8r ( 635504 )

        Also, actually read the 5* reviews. A genuine 5* review will give the reason why they were especially delighted by the product / service. Does that reason seem credible?

        It does not. If you had read any of the rest of this thread you would know why.

        • I've only left a few yelp reviews, and mostly 5 star ones. Unless I really loved the service or food, I don't feel inspired to leave a review. I doubt my 3 or 4 yelp reviews changed much, but they were legit loved-it reviews.

  • They'll hit up on business for subscription to ensure that only good reviews gets promoted, and buried the bad ones. If you don't pay up, opposite.

  • So often, I'm about to spend some money on a service and I want to do the research. Is shop X really any good,or are they overpriced or incompetent? I absolutely take Yelp, Google, Amazon or any other reviews with a grain of salt. But in aggregate, you hope you can get at least a general, fuzzy sense of who is really good and who to avoid.

    All of these scammers pollute the ratings and reviews with a lot of noise. Unfortunate, but probably impossible to avoid.

    If Yelp is found to be especially bad because the

  • I barely trust any 'review' I see online, but who still thinks Yelp is legit?

    But I had to laugh at this line from her:

    If I put a video up, it's serious,"

    Whoa, a VIDEO online? I mean, it MUST be serious for someone to take the seconds of time and energy to post a video online!

  • I trust the reviews of some of my friends and I also trust their judgements of others. So if a friend trusts someone and that someone trusts someone else I would probably trust that person's review more than a complete stranger. I trust the judgement of maybe 30 of my acquaintances. (I have some close friends who I would never trust their judgment). At 2 degrees of separation there are probably 5,000 people in my demographic range, living near me. That's probably enough reviews on a popular site to hav

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