Imagine a world where anyone, anywhere, can voice their opinions on anything (pertaining to mostly businesses and locations) for the whole world to see. And then, based off of these, say, "reviews" an overall score was given to said establishment.
That's Yelp in a nutshell.
Yelp.com has existed for a few years... at least as long as I've had my iPhone, which has been about two years. I've been a reviewer for about that long, coming and going as I please. To me, my relationship with Yelp is love/hate. I love being able to review and read reviews of places I either have frequented or plan to visit (a new coffee shop or bagel place for instance...) respectively, but I hate the aspect that ANYONE can write a review for a place.
Let's focus on my hate, first: It's terribly irksome to me, that someone from out of town can swoop in, try a place out, and based on that snapshot, five minute experience, decide to give a local business a shitty review. As we all know, I live in a tourist-based summertime community, where most of these businesses are only open for a few months out of the year, and even then, hire high school kids or kids from overseas on Study Abroad programs to help out during the rush hours. Of course, that's when Johnny Tourist is going to walk in, demand his needs are met expertly on demand, and be disappointed. He then logs into his Yelp account and leaves a scathing, unwarranted review.
Granted, I've been known to do this as well, as my reviews range from Angelic to Acidic. But when I sit down to pound out 250 words on why I didn't enjoy my experience at a particular place, I try to find issues with my experience than can only be attributed to the business itself, not it's staff or customers.
I also try to keep in mind that if it's my first time at a particular place, to try to give it a break. No business, especially small, locally owned businesses (chains are exempt from this rule. A cup of coffee from Dunks in Boston should taste just as shitty as a cup of Dunk's coffee on the west coast...) can't be firing on all cylinders 100% of the time. That's just impossible.
So my solution for these snapshot bad reviews, is have Yelp only allow reviews from patrons who have "checked-in (a feature where a person who has a Yelp account can use their GPS-enabled smartphone to log in to a particular location just as long as they're within a certain proximity)" no less than three times. This will allow people to maybe get a full spectrum view of the business before tossing down a 1 or 2 star review.
Understandably, if a person had such a terrible experience with a business that they'd never dare go back for a second and then third visit just to write the review, I would say, allow a solid week to go by without a check-in before unlocking the review feature. This would help curb trigger-happy bad reviews made in the heat of the moment.
Another advantage to having users check-in "X" amount of times before leaving a review is the eradication of the "spam review." A business can be helped or hurt by these types of reviews, which take place when either the owner of a business creates a number of false accounts or gets friends to create accounts and leave biased "outstanding" reviews to help float the business's profile. This can also be used to hurt a business, as someone with a grudge can do essentially the same thing, but in reverse, leaving tons of really bad reviews to trash a business's site. Making it so actual real deal people would have to check-in to a business before leaving a review would make spamming to much of an effort to be followed thru upon.
Another unfortunate aspect to Yelp is that business owners can be a touch thin-skinned at times, especially regarding poor reviews. Some businesses owners are not even aware their business has a profile on Yelp (anyone can "create" a profile for the business in question, tho Yelp does offer a special profile tool for business owners that allows tracking of stats and other doo-dads). However, those who do, and did not like what people have said about their business in the past, have gone so far as to take legal action against certain reviewers, citing "harassment" and "obstructing the normal operations of the business" with a bad internet review.
While these cases are extreme (I can't seem to find the corresponding articles in the NY Times), it goes to show how much persuasion a business owner can be put under by a Yelp review.
Which brings me to my next issue with the website: the reviews.
I consider myself fortunate enough to live in an area where there are not many reviews for places on Yelp that I frequent, other than my own. If I lived in NYC or Boston or any other major city, I'd likely be flooded with reviews for places.
Reviews can be helpful, but you have to know how to read thru the bullshit. If I see a reviewer giving a negative review and he's not from the area, I disregard (mostly for the above mentioned reasons). If a review looks like it was written by a five year old or was typed using a mashed fist on the keyboard, I disregard.
A lot of the reviewers I find on Yelp are articulate, at times funny and usually fairly flattering, even with negative reviews. Unfortunately, some reviews come with only one word: "Sucks" "Great!" or "Ok."
If it sucked, why? If it was a great experience, tell us more! Like, actually try, people!
The people working behind the scenes at Yelp do a pretty good job policing the antics. Some comments and reviews will get filtered out, and from what I understand, it's pretty hard to dupe Yelp with spamming reviews. I myself have been alerted that one of my reviews was being taken down because I had admitted to working for the business I reviewed while in High School. Oops.
All in all, Yelp works for the greater good, and I feel that it's doing more harm than good.
(You can follow my reviews on Yelp by checking out www.itsjim.yelp.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment