Comments on Citizens Market: Should crowdsourced ratings websites publish their...

LOL. Your ordeal is unsettling... and hilarious! ...

2010-06-03T10:38:13.223-07:00

LOL. Your ordeal is unsettling... and hilarious! I'm glad it had a (sort of) happy ending. Well told!

Update: After sending an email to Yelp bitching a...

2010-06-03T08:20:16.093-07:00

Update:

After sending an email to Yelp bitching about their nutty filter I received this reply yesterday from Gail @ Yelp HQ:

"We appreciate your feedback. While we don't have the ability to manually reinstate reviews that have been suppressed, please note that reviews can reappear over time. Our filter takes a conservative approach, and we are constantly working on improving our algorithms so that we can present more trustworthy and useful content to our users.

Regards,
Gail
Yelp User Support
--------

Then later last night, all the filtered reviews have been released from their quarantine at "Yitmo" and returned to their original unfiltered state. Whether it had anything to do with my "feedback" directly to Yelp I'll never really know.....

All I can say is thanks Yelp, you sure are mysterious and so are your Al Gore Rhythms. I certainly feel properly hazed & initiated. You can put away the Goat masks, flowing robes & fraternity paddle, but I won't ever stop asking, "Thank you sir, may I have another....."

Strange.

Wow! That seems a shame. I had no idea Yelp was f...

2010-06-02T17:20:42.457-07:00

Wow! That seems a shame. I had no idea Yelp was filtering that many new posts. Definitely makes me think twice about posting myself. Even if this is part of a deliberate "quality control" strategy, I wonder how they define quality and why they have chosen to filter/delete posts instead of de-emphasizing the impact of those posts. Either way, this is a good argument for transparency of algorithms. Thanks for your comment!

In the past week I discovered Yelp and enthusiasti...

2010-06-02T15:34:24.581-07:00

In the past week I discovered Yelp and enthusiastically posted 14 reviews. I was so pleased that as a consumer, I finally had a place to give proper credit or criticism to businesses. Unaware that my reviews may be suppressed randomly, I took the time to write thoughtfully about each business rather than grunt out a few monosyllabic declarations. Of those reviews over 50% of them were filtered and suppressed within hours of posting them. Little did I know my independent reviews posted in earnest with no ties to any business whatsoever were considered suspect by the mysterious Yelp algorithms. When questioned, Yelp offers no answer other than the typical "we appreciate your input" crap.

Additionally I noticed a new Yelper and perused her account out of curiosity. Out of her 17 reviews, a whopping TEN had been suppressed & filtered from view.

As a consumer, a user, & a contributor, this type of excessive suppression of honest reviews really makes me wonder what the flying Fark is Yelp doing?

So, what really is Yelp doing? A dopey patronizing video aimed at their perceived knucklehead users is insulting and leaves more questions than it answers.

Of course yelp gives the user the illusion that all their reviews are visible as they always appear on one's profile page. If contributors were aware of how much of their donated content is being suppressed they might think twice before continuing to help Yelp be a viable business and contribute regularly.