This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Yelp, the popular web-based recommendation site, is supposed to be a digest of disinterested consumer reviews. The way the site bills itself -- and the way other sites, like Amazon and TripAdvisor have set up their recommendation features -- is as a collection of random critiques. Critiques from ordinary folks. Critiques you can trust.
Critiques, it turns out, that can be bought. From NYTimes:
As online retailers increasingly depend on reviews as a sales tool, an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung up to buy and sell raves for a pittance.
“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”
And it turns out that it's hard to tell when someone is lying. At least, it's hard for humans. Researchers at Cornell have been developing an algorithm to do just that:
The Cornell researchers tackled what they call deceptive opinion spam by commissioning freelance writers on Mechanical Turk, an Amazon-owned marketplace for workers, to produce 400 positive but fake reviews of Chicago hotels. Then they mixed in 400 positive TripAdvisor reviews that they believed were genuine, and asked three human judges to tell them apart. They could not.
“We evolved over 60,000 years by talking to each other face to face,” said Jeffrey T. Hancock, a Cornell professor of communication and information science who worked on the project. “Now we’re communicating in these virtual ways. It feels like it is much harder to pick up clues about deception.”
So the team developed an algorithm to distinguish fake from real, which worked about 90 percent of the time. The fakes tended to be a narrative talking about their experience at the hotel using a lot of superlatives, but they were not very good on description. Naturally: They had never been there. Instead, they talked about why they were in Chicago. They also used words like “I” and “me” more frequently, as if to underline their own credibility.
Well, for $5 what do they want? Perfection?
I'm not sure, though, that a person who's posting a fake recommendation for money is all that much more unreliable than someone posting a real recommendation for whatever it is that people post things on Yelp get out of it.
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Jul '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
"Ricochet sets the standard by which all others are measured."
That'll be $5 please.
Dec '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Movie studios do that all the time. I seem to recall there was some sort of scandal in which a media conglomerate (Sony?) had its own properties give its movies rave reviews.
I do know that movies will often advertise "4 stars" or "2 thumbs up" reviews either from the Daily Shopper or some critic who loves everything just to be quoted in the ads or Leonard Maltin, in an effort to hide the pannings from honest reviewers.
May '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Jimmy Carter: "Ricochet sets the standard by which all others are measured."
That'll be $5 please. · Aug 27 at 6:28pm
$5? What are you saying, that is a fake opinion?
Jun '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Recommendations are $3.58 at the flagship Ricochet office in California.
Jun '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
The practice is at least as old as Opera, where they were called claques. Indeed the practice may be as old as funerals, the English word for a paid mourner is moirologist.
Example sentence: A clique of claques clapped in a cluster.
And, no, Johnny Carson was on about clappers and capers as in the great clapper caper.
Your high dudgeon should be moderated, Rob, you do after all come from the land of the laugh track.
Edited on Aug 27, 2011 at 8:57pmRe: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
But I rely on Yelp for most everything. Seriously. It's how I found my church in San Francisco. It's also how I found my physician. And Yelp has not yet let me down...
May '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
San Francisco has churches?
Jan '11
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Diane found a physician in her church that I recommended for $5. Win-Win-Win-Win
Jul '11
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Cas Balicki: The practice is at least as old as Opera, where they were called claques. Indeed the practice may be as old as funerals, the English word for a paid mourner is moirologist.
Example sentence: A clique of claques clapped in a cluster.
And, no, Johnny Carson was on about clappers and capers as in the great clapper caper."
That's a hell of a lot of alliteration.
Jun '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
"Great service", "the coq au vin was delicious," "our room was spotless" etc should be weighted much less than the negative comments about an establishment. The positive experience is the default expectation, so the failures to meet those standards are the most useful insights.
If it comes to light that advisor-type web-sites can be induced to edit or delete the "pans" they would be useless
May '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
IF YOU READ ONLY ONE POST
This here's the one to read. Full of cogent insights into the website Yelp , it both enlightens and entertains. The author clearly knows his business. I turned to the missus (pictured here) and said hey honey, you have to read this incredible post! Wow, she said, that's really awesome! I feel smarter already, and enjoyed every word of it. Take it from one who knows, you will not regret reading this excellent post, and will learn a lot along the way.
[um, OK, so I didn't actually read it...]
Aug '11
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Next step: Develop an algorithm to generate fake Yelp postings which fool the algorithm to detect fake Yelp postings. And so on and so on ...
Dec '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Michael Labeit
San Francisco has churches? · Aug 27 at 11:26pm
I'm wondering if Diane is posting a fake recommendation for Yelp...
May '10
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
There is already a postmodern sociology essay generator that would fool many people. Every time you refresh the page it generates a shiny new essay.
It was inspired by the Sokal Affair, where a professor of physics submitted a flattering but nonsensical parody essay to a postmodern sociological journal and fooled them into publishing it.
Mar '11
Re: This is the Best Ricochet Post Ever! I Give it 5 Stars!
Nothing wrong with using the service, just always keep in mind the reviews on the site are worth exactly how much you paid for them.
Yelp facing class-action lawsuit over extortive "ad sales"