Its all about self service - credit humans with some intelligence
Regarding the Yelp business model; having spent many years in the Directory industry, I know that as soon as you get sales people trying to sell, they are under pressure to beat sales targets, some will do anything to achieve this and that means fabricating the truth and bending any rules as far as they can. Unfortunately the result is a conflict- sales v’s users v’s businesses. As this post correctly identifies, one way to resolve part of this conflict is to remove one of the forces and that is what web 2.0 has allowed us to do… its all about self service.
Regarding reviews, I think we all have to credit humans with a little more intelligence and allow them to exercise a human judgment on reviews shown, if a business has ridiculously flattering reviews from EVERYONE it gets pretty suspect. It seems that technology companies always try to 'program' for every problem, forgetting that us human users can actually make a judgment. What happens in the real world? We listen to other opinions but we don’t just blindly follow them do we. So why is there a need to editorially filter reviews?
Whilst there are many of these ‘review’ sites, I want to single out The Brownbook (http://www.brownbook.net - yes, I am involved with this site, but that doesn’t mean my view is irrelevant) because there are none of these rules that say a business owner can’t join the conversation and respond to reviews. Indeed we try to mirror what happens in the real world - yes it’s a free-for-all, but that is reality, we shouldn’t have ‘review police’ stopping business owners from speaking back or their friends speaking out, this happens in the real world.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
