Related anecdote: a friend of mine left a 1-star review for a restaurant a few months back; I was there, and it was definitely worthy of a 1-star review.
It doesn't show on the Google reviews for me. He sees it, I don't. Another friend left a 1-star review as well, and that one does show (and he also doesn't see the "hidden" 1-star review).
I don't know what's going on here, but it was a genuine reasonably written review detailing the problems we had. He never received any notification it was removed: just got kind of "shadow banned" or something.
Google does some shadow filtering on their end. I had the same happen to a 1-star review - it showed fine to me when I was logged in but wouldn't show when searching for the business using an incognito tab in another browser. Had I not checked I would never have known that the review was invisible. The logged-in view faked the number of reviews (one higher than the incognito view), the aggregate score (0.1 lower) and showed my review in the info card.
The reason I suspect it's something automatic (at least in my case), and not something targeted by the business I was reviewing, is that I removed half of the review and it did start showing after around 10 minutes of waiting. I edited the removed half back in and it vanished again. I was eventually able to narrow it down to a couple of paragraphs. One of them contained swearing ("fucking" and "assholes", which the management of the business were), which I guess makes sense. The other was very innocuous so I have no idea why Google disliked it. Anyway, by that time I'd gotten bored of having to wait ~10 mins after every step of this bizarro dystopian binary search so I left it at that.
At this point it's received a handful of likes, and I received an email notification that a hundred people have seen it (and that I should register as a "local reviewer", yeah right). So I guess it's going to stay up for good now and don't need to check it daily out of paranoia any more.
And yes, this was the first and only review I've ever written on Google, in case that's part of the equation.
My biggest takeaways from this were that a) holy shit Google employees are a bunch of assholes and can go fuck themselves for writing code that shadow-filters a review instead of giving any indication that it violates their puritanical Christian policies, and b) Google is apparently not smart enough to fool me when I searched for the review from an incognito tab in a different browser but the same client IP, which almost seems like a mistake. Like, if you're going to make the effort to shadow-ban people, why not be thorough about it?
Wow, just checked a review I left, 1 star with video and phots of the issues, for an apartment complex. Yea, it's not visible unless I'm logged in. As for rep, it tells me i've left 174 reviews and am "level 6" whatever that means. Guess it's not high enough to leave 1 star
There's clearly reviewer tiers in Google Maps, with the lower ones getting shadow banning too negative reviews (I had some of my earlier ones appear after my rank got up)
Same thing happened to a few of my reviews on Google Maps - not sure what those few vendors did to get my reviews shadow banned but it was frustrating. I no longer log reviews now since the motivation to contribute to a catch-and-kill operation is low.
This sounds like a good idea; though I am not sure how it will work in practice when reviews are such a significant factor the consumer considers when deciding to patron a business.
When I worked in at a hometown pizza place (how stereotypical, right?) we were told again, and again, and again by the again, stereotypically 'Old Italian Man Owner' how important 'word of mouth' was to keeping his business alive after he inherited it from his own father. That was around...2015(ish) and...well, communities are aware of the local good spots to go and visitors are left to seek out online reviews when that word of mouth doesn't reach them to make their decisions.
Yeah, trolling can happen but you can also get a good opinion of the place if there are negative reviews. I'll follow with another anecdote.
Earlier that same year(2014-ish) I worked at another pizza place that was newer to the (small-ish but not really) city in a prime downtown location; throughout the 3 high schools a lot of the kids found that the owner was a piece of shit - I'll skim past the health code violations and focus on the prime thing he didn't pay his employees and as high school kids, we didn't really know how to be made whole so our option was to bombard the Facebook page, Google and whatever medium that was available to spread the word of the unfair practices of this owner to the town.
So its a double edged sword. I can't imagine the shithole would have chosen to opt-in when the reviews were used to highlight the problems.
> obtain opt-in consent from the person or business being reviewed
If I give you less than optimal service, I'm not going to volunteer my consent or a review token or however this works. If I give you it at the start of our interaction, you can hold me hostage as so many try to.
I recognise the problem but a receipt or proof of payment should be enough. And that's already more than what's currently required.
Who's paying for all the other stuff? If you're funding this service conglomerate why not just have paid reviewers?
> obtain opt-in consent from the person or business being reviewed
Do you feel the same for public figures who don't want to be covered by the media? If not, why?
I do think there are a number of issues with online reviews, but in the absence of other data (which might sometimes be available but might also be hidden by the businesses/institutions themselves), online reviews frequently turn out to be much better than nothing. This can be particularly true for infrequent but meaningful transactions (e.g. large financial cost or affecting one's health).
I've wondered about the opt-in consent piece because realtors seem to have kept themselves from being reviewed on Yelp. I have some mighty complaints about a couple that we've dealt with, who either misled or straight out lied. I know other people have had similar troubles, and I wish there were reviews of realtors on Yelp. But I'm not going to create a page for a realtor and submit a review because that would make me the target of his/her company.
We are only now beginning to understand the damage to society technology can cause if there is no basic moral and ethical guidance, and no knowledge of philosophy of technology (should be a required college course, IMO).
Interesting how the good ol' zealous litigation system never panned out for this. I remember all it took for companies to stop spamming people early on was some guy suing companies that ignored his request to end email correspondence.
I thought all it would have taken was for someone to sue Yelp or whoever to prove that the 1 star review was accurate. Something that they wouldn't be able to prove.
They sort of are. Restaurant inspections are done by the government and are pretty universally trusted by consumers. I’ve been surprised that restaurants don’t more readily advertise their scores to help offset reviews.
Yes, plus you are missing that each reviewer should also submit proof of purchase only visible to the company hosting the review and for validation purposes.
Indian scammers are such a scourge. Was watching some videos on Kitboga's channel. They're just horrible people with no conscience. People will try to say "But they're poor. If only we made them not poor they wouldn't need to scam." Learn enough about the nature of these scammers and you won't be apologizing them.
According to a recent post on HN, some of the scammers might actually be held captive and forced to scam people:
>Captives are subjected to violence and torture, which is sometimes filmed and sent to relatives to spur them to send ransoms. Some have been killed and their deaths reported as suicide, according to workers who have escaped.
Its kind of sad what unemployment can do to people. India's unemployment rate has always been high and has kept going up post COVID.
On the flip side, not all Indians are bad. I've got multiple chances to work with some of them in the past and they are just a refreshing change to work with.
Being poor doesn't make people evil. Inequality is the one that creates evil.
If one country has way more than other there is a big incentive to try to get that money. Australians are not scamming Americans, Swedes are not scamming Americans. There is no incentive.
I agree that the scammers are scum. But you will solve nothing without changing the economic situation. I do not apologize them, in case you wonder. I am just being realistic that blaming individuals in a system with millions of people will solve nothing.
Seems like a publicity stunt. The scammer's email reads quite unauthentically - like someone was contracted out to run this campaign.
"After selling this gift card, we can earn approximately $50, which is three weeks income for one family."
...yeah, hard to believe this message was written organically. Use a few soundbites like these, get some articles published mentioning a counter-movement to leave 5-star reviews. Smart business.
As a skeptic, this thought crossed my mind as well. But if you were trying to make your business look more sympathetic, the initial ask would be for more money. No one would fault you for not sending $2,000, whereas some might say $75 is like a small donation.
“Blackmail” refers to the threat of revealing information that is damaging or embarrassing to the target. I used to think that it referred to information that is factually true as this was the only context in which I’d heard the term used.
I only recently learned that the “information” does not necessarily have to be true, i.e., it’s still considered to be blackmail in cases like this where the perpetrator simply makes up bad reviews.
> To extort money or favors from (a person) by exciting fears of injury other than bodily harm, such as injury to reputation, distress of mind, false accusation, etc.
I find these stories amusing as I weigh the negative effect of the reviews vs. the benefits of getting a story "trending" and assume this event ends up being a net positive for them.
Obviously it doesn't make the scamming acceptable, but the "tragedy lottery" aspect fascinates me.
Doesn't Google track all of our locations? Why does it let people leave reviews of American restaurants when it knows they've never been outside of India?
We are progressing towards a ban on a sub set of reviews. We can for example require evidence that one actually purchased a product or service and we may group those reviews by price. If I remember correctly EU websites already require evidence the reviews are left by real people. I didn't see anything about disposing of bad reviews.
I do think the way we read reviews can be unproductive. Say there is a cockroach in your soup. An independent investigator wont necessarily discover how it got there. Would you still want to eat there? What if I hire 3 people to put a cockroach in their own soup 3? Wouldn't that produce a strong signal to avoid my competitor?
I never post negative reviews. If a place is really good I will give it a positive review, otherwise nothing. It is too easy to be a critic on the internet.
I'm also mostly in this camp, except when something particularly egregious occurs. In that case I'll try to be as reasonable as possible and avoid all hyperbole when describing the problems; to that end I won't post the review at the immediate time so as to avoid judgement being clouded by passion.
That seems like a really dumb solution, but Google is already getting wifi and location data.
Why not stipulate that you need to have been in that, say county, to make a review?
Yes I'm aware of GPS spoofing. It raises the bar for doing extortion attacks like that. Amrit the Dalit scammer who lives in Delhi has NO business in anything in Effingham IL... Unless they've been there.
It would make this sort of stuff harder to do. Not impossible.
You are assuming that everyone has a smartphone, everyone has it with them at all times and everyone consents to said smartphone sending their location data to the internet.
Well I'd wonder if you informed Google, etc. review services that you got a blackmail threat to do this, could you then sue the review service provider if they did nothing about it? I think you'd have a case. I'll have to talk to my lawyer about that.
Why do people post paywalled articles? Seriously I’m not subscribing to some bullshit newspaper out of Houston. If they don’t want to let me read it I don’t want to read it. Just. Ignore. Paywalls. We have plenty of open information. Let the closed stuff stagnate and die.
[+] [-] Beltalowda|3 years ago|reply
It doesn't show on the Google reviews for me. He sees it, I don't. Another friend left a 1-star review as well, and that one does show (and he also doesn't see the "hidden" 1-star review).
I don't know what's going on here, but it was a genuine reasonably written review detailing the problems we had. He never received any notification it was removed: just got kind of "shadow banned" or something.
[+] [-] Arnavion|3 years ago|reply
The reason I suspect it's something automatic (at least in my case), and not something targeted by the business I was reviewing, is that I removed half of the review and it did start showing after around 10 minutes of waiting. I edited the removed half back in and it vanished again. I was eventually able to narrow it down to a couple of paragraphs. One of them contained swearing ("fucking" and "assholes", which the management of the business were), which I guess makes sense. The other was very innocuous so I have no idea why Google disliked it. Anyway, by that time I'd gotten bored of having to wait ~10 mins after every step of this bizarro dystopian binary search so I left it at that.
At this point it's received a handful of likes, and I received an email notification that a hundred people have seen it (and that I should register as a "local reviewer", yeah right). So I guess it's going to stay up for good now and don't need to check it daily out of paranoia any more.
And yes, this was the first and only review I've ever written on Google, in case that's part of the equation.
My biggest takeaways from this were that a) holy shit Google employees are a bunch of assholes and can go fuck themselves for writing code that shadow-filters a review instead of giving any indication that it violates their puritanical Christian policies, and b) Google is apparently not smart enough to fool me when I searched for the review from an incognito tab in a different browser but the same client IP, which almost seems like a mistake. Like, if you're going to make the effort to shadow-ban people, why not be thorough about it?
[+] [-] gernb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
The higher tiers are more public, like for the 'local guides' for instance: https://maps.google.com/localguides/
[+] [-] abawany|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|3 years ago|reply
* obtain opt-in consent from the person or business being reviewed
* they must have a dispute resolution process
* they must have a call-center with real live people to field complaints
The silicon valley business model of "absolutely 0 support offered" needs to die.
[+] [-] dannyphantom|3 years ago|reply
When I worked in at a hometown pizza place (how stereotypical, right?) we were told again, and again, and again by the again, stereotypically 'Old Italian Man Owner' how important 'word of mouth' was to keeping his business alive after he inherited it from his own father. That was around...2015(ish) and...well, communities are aware of the local good spots to go and visitors are left to seek out online reviews when that word of mouth doesn't reach them to make their decisions. Yeah, trolling can happen but you can also get a good opinion of the place if there are negative reviews. I'll follow with another anecdote.
Earlier that same year(2014-ish) I worked at another pizza place that was newer to the (small-ish but not really) city in a prime downtown location; throughout the 3 high schools a lot of the kids found that the owner was a piece of shit - I'll skim past the health code violations and focus on the prime thing he didn't pay his employees and as high school kids, we didn't really know how to be made whole so our option was to bombard the Facebook page, Google and whatever medium that was available to spread the word of the unfair practices of this owner to the town.
So its a double edged sword. I can't imagine the shithole would have chosen to opt-in when the reviews were used to highlight the problems.
[+] [-] oliwarner|3 years ago|reply
If I give you less than optimal service, I'm not going to volunteer my consent or a review token or however this works. If I give you it at the start of our interaction, you can hold me hostage as so many try to.
I recognise the problem but a receipt or proof of payment should be enough. And that's already more than what's currently required.
Who's paying for all the other stuff? If you're funding this service conglomerate why not just have paid reviewers?
[+] [-] janlin1999|3 years ago|reply
Do you feel the same for public figures who don't want to be covered by the media? If not, why?
I do think there are a number of issues with online reviews, but in the absence of other data (which might sometimes be available but might also be hidden by the businesses/institutions themselves), online reviews frequently turn out to be much better than nothing. This can be particularly true for infrequent but meaningful transactions (e.g. large financial cost or affecting one's health).
Disclosure: I run a website that hosts reviews.
[+] [-] mikelward|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trident5000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comrh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papito|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leke|3 years ago|reply
I thought all it would have taken was for someone to sue Yelp or whoever to prove that the 1 star review was accurate. Something that they wouldn't be able to prove.
[+] [-] Guest42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbob45|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maindata|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinmhayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decremental|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjbgkagh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipython|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thorrez|3 years ago|reply
>Captives are subjected to violence and torture, which is sometimes filmed and sent to relatives to spur them to send ransoms. Some have been killed and their deaths reported as suicide, according to workers who have escaped.
https://maxread.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-all-those...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31949731
[+] [-] zakember|3 years ago|reply
On the flip side, not all Indians are bad. I've got multiple chances to work with some of them in the past and they are just a refreshing change to work with.
[+] [-] 8note|3 years ago|reply
I won't hold it against people to get back what the west stole. At least there's no beatings or killings in the retribution
[+] [-] hourago|3 years ago|reply
I agree that the scammers are scum. But you will solve nothing without changing the economic situation. I do not apologize them, in case you wonder. I am just being realistic that blaming individuals in a system with millions of people will solve nothing.
[+] [-] hm10|3 years ago|reply
...yeah, hard to believe this message was written organically. Use a few soundbites like these, get some articles published mentioning a counter-movement to leave 5-star reviews. Smart business.
[+] [-] gnicholas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wesleywt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Anthony-G|3 years ago|reply
I only recently learned that the “information” does not necessarily have to be true, i.e., it’s still considered to be blackmail in cases like this where the perpetrator simply makes up bad reviews.
[+] [-] everybodyknows|3 years ago|reply
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=extortion
[+] [-] IshKebab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
Obviously it doesn't make the scamming acceptable, but the "tragedy lottery" aspect fascinates me.
[+] [-] faldore|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
[+] [-] MerelyMortal|3 years ago|reply
The question is; did it take the article for someone at Google to fix it, or did their algorithm finally kick in?
[+] [-] josephcsible|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sithadmin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collaborative|3 years ago|reply
Part of our global community. Inevitably, reviews will end up being worthless
[+] [-] jmarneweck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6510|3 years ago|reply
I do think the way we read reviews can be unproductive. Say there is a cockroach in your soup. An independent investigator wont necessarily discover how it got there. Would you still want to eat there? What if I hire 3 people to put a cockroach in their own soup 3? Wouldn't that produce a strong signal to avoid my competitor?
[+] [-] jaclaz|3 years ago|reply
Does the internet have a 1 star review problem?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052666
[+] [-] _hcuq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richrichardsson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noasaservice|3 years ago|reply
Why not stipulate that you need to have been in that, say county, to make a review?
Yes I'm aware of GPS spoofing. It raises the bar for doing extortion attacks like that. Amrit the Dalit scammer who lives in Delhi has NO business in anything in Effingham IL... Unless they've been there.
It would make this sort of stuff harder to do. Not impossible.
[+] [-] erfgh|3 years ago|reply
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