Yelp - Trying to Fix a Problem that won't go away

Jeremy Stoppelma, the CEO of Yelp, wrote in Yelp's official blog that:

"User trust is the foundation on which Yelp is built and the reason 31 million consumers turned to the site last month to find a great local business. Today we're announcing two important product changes to reinforce that trust and make it even more clear that Yelp treats review content equally for all businesses, with no connection between advertising and reviews.

Specifically, we're adding the ability to see reviews filtered by our review filter and we're discontinuing the "Favorite Review" feature that's part of our advertising package."

Jeremy - what you need to do is to make certain that the reviews are from real people and are not placed there by companies; and to combat bad, spiteful reviews allow discussions on the comments (comments on the comments). This is not taking into account the "pay-for-play" perception where becoming a paid advertiser on Yelp enables you to remove bad comments and put up good ones.

Yelp is a good idea but falls short in execution.

Yelp is Having Problems

Yelp continues to have problems. They have an algorithm that purportedly decides which reviews are displayed and which are removed, and yet there is something not right about Yelp. I'm not the only one who has noticed that there are many "obviously" fake reviews and there is a lot of annecdotal evidence that if one buys advertising bad reviews can be removed. I have not experienced that but I have heard many first hand complaints.

According to Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp's CEO: "It's normal for a merchant to see the number of its reviews rise or fall from day to day, and for reviews to mysteriously disappear." "That's normal. It's part of how Yelp works," he said. The reason we do that is to show only the most trusted content. It's nothing nefarious.

"The timing of reviews that appear or disappear after a merchant accepts or declines an advertising contract is purely coincidental, Stoppelman said. He acknowledged that there can be false positives, in which legitimate reviews are removed.:

Yelp's credibility problem: Blame it on algorithm?

Yelp - What are they Going to Do?

There's been a lot of disturbing news about Yelp recently. Yelp, if you're not familiar with it, is a website which allows people to review stores, restaurants and other companies. The problem is that some store owners post bogus positive reviews and, so some allege, post negative reviews on their competitors.

If you’re interested in game theory the Yelp example is bound to be fascinated to see how this scenario plays out. Adding to the problem is that Yelp is removing bad comments should a store advertise on Yelp – or so some say. As someone who is affiliated with stores on Yelp I have to say that I haven’t experienced that.

This posses an interesting IA problem: How should Yelp, and by extension other review oriented sites, deal with this problem? You can never stop people from creating multiple accounts but you can give added weight for community participation and then give added weight to accounts which give more and more evidence of legitimacy.

There are sites which I’ve reviewed that have dozens of reviews. Each of these glowing reviews are from accounts with only one review. This makes the reviews more than a little suspicious. One way to stop the abuse is for sites to have no more than a few reviews from single review accounts. The second way was alluded to earlier – give added weight to accounts which are considered more legitimate by counting the number of reviews, friending other users and through general community involvement (at its simplest this can be done by noting the times the account logs in, page views and time spent in the community.)