The “dammit” is mine.
This article from Fast Company lets Yelp Consumer and Mobile Products President Eric Singley pass on some of the ways they improve the content reviewers provide them.
My favorite quote:
“…we don’t tell users that they need to write X number of reviews to be elite or that we consider a high-quality review to be 150 to 200 characters. It’s important to keep the objectives a little bit fuzzy. You don’t know exactly what the bar is, but you should know that the bar is high.”
And my second favorite quote:
“If your profile is a picture of a pony and your name is like PonyGuy72, you’re less incentivized to have something that you’re really proud of….You’ll never see content on Yelp without a name and a photo next to it. ”
Predictably, the comments section filled up with the usual haters who “cannot wait to see the day they go belly-up.”
Here’s one now:
“Yelp is a criminal enterprise that empowers know-nothings to lie about a restaurant experience, then extorts the merchant with offers to moderate the fabricated reviews.”
Yelp itself doesn’t always get great reviews.
