Originally published at: Anti-vaxxers are destroying restaurant's ratings on Yelp | Boing Boing
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I hated how review systems were weaponized or misused pre-covid, and yelp is also known for setting up crude review pages for small biz services without permission or consent! Then try to pull some ‘extortion light’ shit by promising you some kind of control of unwarranted (or out of context) negative reviews if you fork over some money. It’s actually fucking gross.
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Whenever I hear of reviews getting taken down en masse because of some controversy, it is yelp doing the takedowns not google. Google seems to be overtaking yelp in number of reviews but not necessarily quality.
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Needs to be an organized counterstrike of 5-star reviews for any and all restaurants that require vaccinations.
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I guess I’m an outlier (again). I put no stock at all into reviews from Yelp or Google. Don’t even look at them any more. Because A) they’re so prone to manipulation like this, and 2) my tastes, I’ve learned, do not align well with those of the yelpers.
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Also… We could map those guys on LinkedIn and say their employers what the douchebags they are.
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Good to see the pitchfork and torch contingent doing thing the other pitchfork and contingents DON’T like. We don’t get it both ways. Mob action on one side WILL be met with similar from the other… And we won’t like it.
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in b4 “bUt MuH freEdUmB fRoM cOnSeQuEnCeS!!!”
AFAICT, this is just the free market, responding.
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Which “we” is this, exactly?
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Yes all of the review sites like yelp are nothing but scams.
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Years ago, some friends of mine ran afoul of Yelp’s actual business model:
If you give them money for advertising, they will probably move your 1-star reviews to the bottom. If not, fuck you. They refuse to even remove your place of business from their site.
I expect that’s still the same, and I expect that’s why Yelp is doing nothing about this.
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which ever “We” you choose… It really doesn’t matter because no one likes the result
Doing so for others unsolicited pretty much always guarantees that you will be in error.
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I actually find the negative reviews very helpful because they tend to reveal either the bias of the reviewer or actual quality/sanitation issues. If there are consistent one-star reviews about some specific quality of product or service, it’s more reliable than a 4-star review that is more reliant upon a reviewer’s taste or opinion. If half of the one-star reviews say that the owner is a bigoted asshole (or conversely, robbing mah freedums via mask), I can get closer to an unvarnished sense of the truth.
Edited to correct misspelling.
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Indeed;
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Yeah, I have to scoff whenever someone mentions yelp. It is essentially an extortion racket.
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You must be fun at parties because you’re no fun here.
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That’s quite the take. Seems equivalent to “people march for Black Lives Matter and other people march for white supremacy…clearly marching is the real problem.” 
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When I first got contacted by a vendor for a four star review (the waitress gave me an empty ketchup bottle three times before asking the guy behind the counter for one with ketchup in it.) I realized these reviews were nothing but a scam, a tool to force the vendors (retaurants, amazon, uber, etc.) to pay the reviewering system’s owners for business, and part of that has become a “5-star” culture – if you don’t give a perfect score, the business will suffer, so now there’s pressure to default to a perfect rating, and only mark it down if there’s a serious issue.
This is wrong.
The average rating should be about 2.5, because that’s how it should work out. Unless you’re driving a Bentley Continental or other decent sized luxury limosine you’re not earning a 5-star ride–no matter how many water bottles and car fresheners you have in there. Unless your meal is a feast for the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, it is not a 5-star meal. A greasy-spoon diner, no matter how comfortings the food, isn’t going to be a 5-stars, just like it would never get a Michelin star or a full rating from Mimi Sheraton. If I order your product, and it arrives broken or just wasn’t what it said in the listing, or even arrives after the promised delivery date, it shouldn’t getting a full star. Fail to deliver a perfect review in any circumstance, and you’re told your evil, that you’re wrong, that you don’t deserve what little service you got from the vendor because they didn’t get their hit of 5-star crack from you.
Now we have to sell ourselves to the vendors – imagine calling uber or placing an order for some underware, and being told “your reviews are too low, we won’t sell to you until your average review is 5-stars.” Why not, if you’re an uber driver, certainly in high-traffic times you’d prefer to pick up only those who’ll give you good ratings, and if bad reviewers means fewer sales, don’t sell to them.
I’m pretty sure that’s a recipe for disaster, but that’s capitalism for you: find the money, get the money, keep the money, damn the consequences.
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