Matter Anti-Matter

Last weekend, after being inspired by a gorgeous, delicious meal I had at a new local restaurant called Bistro Petit, I decided to write a review on Yelp.

I’ve never submitted content to Yelp before. I use it as a guide, mainly when I’m trying to find some place to eat, but I’ve never gone so far as to create a user account and participate in the community. 

What led me to cross over from being a passive consumer to a an almost-participant (more on this in a minute) in the Yelp community? I’ve had many fabulous (and not-so-fabulous) meals before at many restaurants, and while I could have written reviews for any number of them, I never did. Reviewing something, for me at least, takes time. And when there’s only so much time in a day, it’s hard to take that leap and join another community. Nothing out there made me feel like I needed to participate. 

The reason I sat down and wrote a review on Yelp for Bistro Petit is because I felt like I’d made a positive connection with the not a place of business, but with the people who own it and run it. After my dining experience, the owner/chef seemed like someone who really, truly cared about the food he was serving, and a Yelp review could be a nice way to say “Hello! I liked your restaurant very much and wanted to go the extra mile to let you know by writing this review for others to see.”

That was my first mistake. For me, it wasn’t about just liking the food. It was about liking the experience and the people, and wanting to somehow communicate that with others. These are all highly editorial, personal motivations, which let me to my second mistake.

I treated my Yelp review like a real food review, which is how I’m used to reviewing restaurants. I went through each dish I ordered and described its contents, and the experience of eating it. I might have gotten a bit carried away gushing about the heavenly mix of kimchi and saffron that served as the base for my bouillabaisse. In the end, my review came out pretty long, and when I posted it, I thought, “Holy shit that’s really long. Woops!” But, I’d also spent a good 45 minutes writing and figured, what the hell, if somebody wants to know what aromas added to my enjoyment of a pan-fried striped bass, they’ll read on. If they couldn’t care less, they can skip it. I purposefully opened with a general recommendation/summary of my experience in the first two lines, thus giving those who don’t like to get carried away by food writing a convenient out.

A few days later, I noticed that my review had been filtered out by Yelp’s review filter. Their filter aims to get rid of the riff raff, the unreliable narrators that threaten to undermine the integrity of their business model. It’s a real problem, to be sure. There are unscrupulous businesses that pay mercenaries to write fake reviews, and those fake reviews are more threatening to a business like Yelp than any disheartened first-time reviewer that let herself get carried away by a good meal. Fake reviewers make it possible for businesses that are least deserving of customers to fake their way into legitimacy, and they create a hostile environment where it’s possible for businesses to target competitors with faked negative reviews. It’s a mess, and I don’t envy the Yelp team whose job it is to deal with the perpetrators that slip through and the he-said/she-said accusations that I’m sure come flying into their support desk.

How does Yelp’s review filter work? They’ve got a video that explains it here. They don’t offer any detail about the review algorithm, but it’s safe to assume that it uses data from tracking hundreds of thousands of entries and looks for specific data points that give you a high % chance of being a fake reviewer.

I’m only guessing, but I assume I tripped their sensors by:

• Creating an account for the first time.
• Submitting a review within an hour of creating the account.
• Submitting a 5-star review.
• Submitting a review that exceeded their average review length by too many characters.
• Using key words that are likely to appear when someone has been paid to write something that sounds authentic. 

So basically, if you’ve been hired to write fake reviews of restaurants, then you probably try to sound authentic by overcompensating with fancy food adjectives that might help prove you were really there. 

Unfortunately, that means Yelp’s review filter also squashed my passionate, overly-indulgent review of one of best meals I’ve had in a long time. My review still exists, but it’s not visible unless you click through to the filtered reviews on the bottom of the page. 

There is no way for Yelp to reverse the decision manually, as they’ve given their algorithm all the power. Well, either that or they’re blaming the algorithm so that their support team doesn’t have to fight with people all day long — an understandable, albeit frustrating, necessity. As someone from Yelp’s support team told me via Twitter, “since our inception we’ve always been a community review site, not a drive by one. Unfort not everyone out there is above board & the filter is an impt measure we have to take to ensure Yelp is actually a useful place.”

According to their FAQ, Yelp will release reviews back to the public once you’ve proven your human-ness by writing more reviews, spending more time in their community, and acting less, well, like me. 

My job involves a lot of theorizing about what might get lost when you remove human judgment from community moderation and rely wholly on automation and algorithms. In this case, you can see that a first-time user of Yelp could very easily resemble a fake first-time user because both are newcomers to the community and aren’t that familiar with the conventions. And even if Yelp were to teach new users how to be good community members (Don’t write too much! Don’t use crazy flourishing adjectives!), they’d also be coaching fakers in how to be better at faking it.

It’s a reminder that to really build an online community, you have to employ moderation, and you end up losing something no matter what approach you take. Unfortunately, the amount of friction I experienced as a first-time reviewer, and the homework I’ve been assigned (writing more reviews in order to release the first filtered review) just doesn’t seem worth it at this point.