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?
Personally I'm quite happy if the app filters out reviews with profanity. Not because I care about seeing profanity, but because, more often than not, people who leave reviews with profanity are jerks and I'd rather not be exposed to their opinions.
There's a difference between "Sorry, your review violates our guidelines point XYZ because of the sentence ABC and cannot be posted. Please edit it and try again." and "Your review was successfully posted. (haha not really loser, but imma set up a comically elaborate charade to make you think it was.)" Both of them keep the profanity out of your eyes, but only one of them makes you likely to get the honest review in the first place because it doesn't treat the reviewer like an outcast.
> There's a difference between "Sorry, your review violates our guidelines point XYZ because of the sentence ABC and cannot be posted. Please edit it and try again." and "Your review was successfully posted. (haha not really loser, but imma set up a comically elaborate charade to make you think it was.)"
There is. The difference is that in the first case, the ranter will tweak their language and continue ranting about the fvcking a55h0les, while in the second case, they will go away quietly. The second outcome is _clearly_ the best for all concerned.
Even better, just shoot all undesirables. Why do we need prisons anyway, and what is rehabilitation? Just kill everyone the second they break the law, so they'll all go away. This outcome is _clearly_ the best for all concerned.
I'm not saying I agree with the parent commenter. But their point was not that they didn't want to see profanity, it was that they don't want to see anything at all from the type of people that use profanity. If that's you're position then shadow banning works well, whereas getting them to post reviews with profanity taken out does not.
And I'm saying that the profanity was not the only problem that caused the review to be shadow-filtered. Regardless of whether the system filters profanity or not, the fact that it filters them while pretending otherwise is the problem. If one supports the system that shadow-filters profanity, they're also supporting the system that shadow-filters "some other unidentified thing that seems perfectly fine", and thus leads to them not seeing reviews that contained useful information.
You think I can't write a review without profanity? Of course I can. I can be extremely polite while pointing out the issues I had with the business. That's exactly what I did when I realized this was happening. I just didn't know I was going to be held to that standard when I posted the review, and the system lied to me that what I wrote was acceptable so I had no reason to believe otherwise.
If you were relying on not reading reviews like mine because my use of profanity implied I was a jerk, well I'm sorry but your heuristic isn't going to work any more because I know now. It wasn't even hard for me to figure out, so I'm sure most of the jerks have figured it out too. So sorry if you were relying on that, but you probably can't any more.
Shadow-anything seems wrong. But the argument here is: "I don't want to see the reviews made by people who are vulgar" with the implied "I also don't want the system to ask them to remove profanity and post again, because I still think the review won't be useful to me".
The heuristic reasoning being: a review is of low value if it's written by someone who's default attitude is vulgar, regardless if that person is willing to correct self when requested.
The discriminator being: If a review has profanity initially, don't display it even if the review is improved. Also don't display other reviews by that person.
Not something I agree with, but it seems that's what user esperent meant.
> If you were relying on not reading reviews like mine because my use of profanity implied I was a jerk, well I'm sorry but your heuristic isn't going to work any more because I know now. It wasn't even hard for me to figure out, so I'm sure most of the jerks have figured it out too. So sorry if you were relying on that, but you probably can't any more.
And that's the idea behind shadow banning - the banned person is supposed to never become aware of the ban.
The purpose of shadow banning is to make it hard for violators to work around the restrictions. If the feedback loop is in the order of seconds, then the bad actor can quickly find a way to just pass the filter while still dumping the crap they want. The more cost each iteration incurs, the more the bad actor is deterred from doing that.
Of course, delaying the complaint and doing full shadow banning are still different things, and the former would suffice, but they chose the easy way out I guess, because their main objective is to keep the bad guys out.
“puritanical Christian policies”
Based on the people I know who work at Google mountain view, and more general descriptions of the google workforce, “christians” are rare (or in hiding), I don’t think you can really blame them for those policies :)
But I agree with your overall point
Reviews can be measured on a number of relevant dimensions - positive/negative, useful/not useful, fair/unfair, etc. Vocabulary, grammar, spelling, typos are all information channels.
Honestly I can’t believe I’m defending Google, but it’s possible that they’ve determined certain language makes the review less useful. Evidence of that might be the other portion of the review which seemed to trigger the shadow ban without any profanity.
Yeah obvious example is nudity rules which are enforced just fine by completely secular people even though they’re likely derivative of puritanical Christian culture in the US
For reference, this was the paragraph (the business in question is an apartment complex I was renting at):
>Their "Courtesy Patrol" service is useless. I tried this service every night for a week but it made no difference; the noise still continued on that night and the following nights. Also, the people at the service told me that it takes them an hour to send someone over after you call them. So if you ever have a reason to call this service, you better be prepared that your problem won't get solved for at least an hour after you call.
How long was the review? It might just be that reducing the length/number of clauses helped. Honestly, if I was naively writing a restaurant review filter, length would be in there; if you look at TripAdvisor or similar, as reviews get longer the probability of the reviewer being a weird crank approaches one.
The length may have been a factor, but it definitely wasn't the only factor. When I eventually narrowed it down to those two paragraphs being the only difference, the attempt with the first paragraph in its original form and the attempt with that paragraph sanitized of profanity were basically the same length.
I'm here for a review, not an essay. I think Google was probably doing the right thing (as in, most useful for their users) with your review. Stick to a small number of quick, highly informative sentences, not lengthy speculation and opinion.
Google has a style guide for documentation that suggests that people do not include certain kinds of words. This does not imply that users posting content with these words will trigger policy violations.
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)
Interesting, because I think the people that leave 1 star reviews are typically pretty motivated to do so, especially when it is a single one. Possibly they want to see a balance between positive and negative reviews.
Online restaurant reviews (and doctor reviews) always skew negative because those who have had bad experience are left frustrated and impotent and a scathing online review is one of the few avenues open to them, while those who have had a good experience are unmotivated to write anything.
On a related note, I’ve been getting overwhelmed with “How’d we do?” after the fact online surveys lately - doctor visits, rental car, retail shopping - and I can’t help but wonder if along with actually trying to improve their services, these surveys act to manage the narrative. That if I can complain to them, I won’t complain to Google, yelp or TripAdvisor.
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.
Possible, but it could also be that the reviewing system considers them a high-signal user: very few reviews most/all negative would be a person who doesn’t care for reviewing but had such horrendous experience they were pushed to warn others.
I operate like that, but the other way. I generally only leave very positive reviews when I've had a great experience. I guess I'm fortunate that I've yet to have an experience so bad that I was motivated to leave a 1 star review despite my apathy.
I don’t even run a business, but I constantly get instagram ads for services that promise to delete bad reviews. I wonder if these services are spamming google so much that all flagged comments will get shadow banned until they are manually reviewed (which means never).
This is basically why I pine for the old web with very static code. It came with its own set of issues, but, in a sense, it was a lot easier. Now you have no idea what is happening. Only a big gate keeper does.
In social media, we call this the "bozo mode". If you are bozoed, only you can see your content. A sneaky but very effective moderation technique to keep things civil.
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.
Just a little riff, but I like to read both positive and negative reviews. Too many generic positive reviews count as a negative, clearly enraged negative reviews count as a positive (talking entitled, clearly in the wrong reviews).
I found a great veterinarian through Google reviews before. They had a smattering of negative reviews, but the reviews were all people who wanted to put their pets to sleep, and the vet refused since he thought they could be saved and live a few more years.
Basically all the negative reviews were either that or your typical "I kept canceling at the last minute and they said they wouldn't make any more appointments with me"
This is a really interesting point. I'm starting to find that you can gain meta information from the reviews. What does the profile look like; why are the negative reviews negative; is this a local with a loyal but undiscerning following etc etc.
> an't imagine the shithole would have chosen to opt-in when the reviews were used to highlight the problems.
Why would you shop at a place who doesn't have reviews? That'd be suspicious. Much like a credit report, retailers won't extend credit to you if you don't have a credit history.
> 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?
> 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.
Go read the post you responded to... nobody was talking about a patron getting a permission from an establishment to review it. It was about a review service getting a permission from an establishment to host reviews of them and some other requirements. Nothing about patron - establishment relationship.
I've seen QR codes (as well as URLs and input codes) on supermarket receipts in the UK. They're for reviewing the service, checkout staff, etc more than any product.
Google Surveys do a "scan in your receipt" thing to solicit place reviews.
Verifying customers only verifies that one thing. It doesn't stop fake reviews of "real" customers (happens a ton on Amazon), or influenced reviews "Leave us 5 stars and we'll give you a gift voucher", or all the other crap that spoils real reviews.
I occasionally wonder if state-funded reviewing might be a useful additional data point. "This does what it claims, appears well built". Obviously applying that to every product sold might be a stretch, but expensive essentials (eg white goods) would be a good opening target.
State-funded reviewing of food businesses already exists, and has for decades. Check for the health department certificate in a restaurant or cafe. It's usually posted near the cash register.
Another way of doing this might be to audit payments of consumers —card processors, banks or some government layer over the top— to select 50 customers a month from a business and offer them each £5 cashback for a review.
It's out-of-loop, some time after the incident, ideally anonymous (so no other kickbacks). They might be able to do the same for products.
Sounds like an ISO certification. ISO 22000 already exists for food safety, so it's not too far fetched to propose a voluntary service-based certification. But it would add cost and risk, with probably little value added for the business.
Hopefully enough people here read your comment and have already started :-)
I imagine the trick is going to be getting it to tie in with the PoS (Point of Sale) systems I think, so that it is seemless for the business owner/manager.
Seems like something PoS vendors could collaborate on. They don't need to own the review app, just be able to provide the tokens. Alternatively it could be some kind of add-on like cryptic looking codes restaurants in Québec have for their receipts: https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6856/...
> 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).
> Do you feel the same for public figures who don't want to be covered by the media? If not, why?
They already do that. They generally have a PR dept., or work with PR consultants. They pick and choose who they want to be their heralds. Apple is notorious for ghosting publications that don't kiss their butts.
Go to any Web site for a public figure, band, movie, game, corporation, what-have-you, and you'll inevitably see a top-level link, labeled "Press," or "Media."
This is their controlled and vetted material that is designed specifically to be distributed far and wide, and the PR people will use that as the fodder they send out.
Reviews (real ones) are wonderful. There was a brief window of time, when they were trustworthy. Amazon reviews actually gave you accurate information, and my wife used Angie's List to find some outstanding contractors, for work on our house.
Now, the whole industry is in the shitter. I'm so sorry that you have to deal with this.
I can't seem to find real reviews for anything, these days. Even trusted review sites have been corrupted.
The corruption ranges from badley-speld mass junk "fillers," to focused, vile, anti-competitive attacks, or petty, personal attacks, like trolling (I had one jerk from this site that got upset at me, leave a 1-star, insulting, weird review on one of my iOS apps. It was so bad, that I think it got nuked by Apple. I think I'm the only one that can see it), to brought-and-paid-for, completely legal, reviews on well-known publications.
I like to use an example of noise-canceling headphones. The names will be redacted to protect the guilty, and keep them off my ass.
There's one brand that has absolutely miraculous active noise cancelling. Switching on ANC makes me feel as if I've gone deaf. The sound quality is also excellent. I'm not an audiophile, but audiophiles won't use any ANC headphones.
There's nothing else out there, that I have found comes close. I own a bunch of ANC headphones, and can attest to this.
Yet, they seldom come up as a top choice, in many reviews. Instead, another corporation, that has good headphones, but a much less effective ANC, keeps topping certain review sites. If I switch on that brand's ANC, I still hear plenty of background noise, and I don't think the sound quality is as good. I actually fell for one of those "These are the best" reviews on a site that I [used to] trust.
Sadly, I think that we are forced to go back to what we had before there were reviews on product pages, or on sites.
> They already do that. They generally have a PR dept., or work with PR consultants. They pick and choose who they want to be their heralds.
There's a big difference between denying access and prohibiting coverage. A news outlet can still publish an unflattering expose of a company, even if the outlet will no longer get invited to the company's press events. exabrial seems to suggest that no one can write anything negative about a business or person unless that entity opts in, which is closer to prohibiting coverage.
No, I just like to make a habit of not saying things negative about specific brands or people, in general.
In the above post, I basically hint that a well-known brand, astroturfs reviews. I know that happens, because I've seen it in action, "behind the scenes." I'd rather leave things vague.
I try to keep my postings fairly positive and civil. Lots of others are much more able to do the criticism.
If I'd hazard a guess, I'd say the OP is referring to Bose. They tend to get shit on by audiophiles for... Reasons? I don't really know why, I'm not an audiophile. I've personally had 3 different Bose noise canceling headphones, 2 over ear and one on ear, and I've been happy with all of them. I still use the in ear ones routinely (QC35, IIRC), usually without the noise canceling on, even. The in ear noise canceling is quite good. Good enough I wouldn't recommend walking down the street with it on - you will be audibly oblivious to your surroundings.
I think Bose has always been an outsider in the audiophile community due to their more innovative and less ‘purist’ approach.
Re: their noise cancelling headphones- I understand that for many years their aviation headsets have been the market leaders in large part due to this feature and this transfers down to their consumer headsets.
Well, I'd rather not, because, then, it would be pretty simple to figure out which other brand I'm not-so-positive about, but it is one of the priciest, and they don't advertise much (and probably also don't butter up reviewers much).
Yes, scraping and selling data about people and small businesses and finding the sketchiest ways to monetize that without any recourse should probably be illegal. And if it favors incumbent sites and services, so be it.
On a side note, Google, Yelp or FB aren't small dogs going against the incumbent. They are the incumbent, and that's the sole reason they can get these things going with so little effort.
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.
Sounds like a market gap for a startup with a spine. And there's an easy exit — after you capture the market and deal with the legal issues (not actually difficult in this case, IMO as a former lawyer), Yelp acquires you!
More importantly, you can provide a valuable service by helping people avoid bad/unethical realtors.
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.
But what the government does is food _safety_ inspections, right? This is quite different from the quality of customer experience, ambiance, service, even how _tasty_ the food is.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK food safety ratings are displayed on or next to each establishment's front door (might be a legal requirement, I am not sure). They're also available online at https://ratings.food.gov.uk/
One Chinese takeaway near us hides their FSA score card on a little window high above the door; they had a 2 (out of 5, 1 being 'we're going to shut you down') last time I looked. They get loads of [I believe entirely genuine] recommendations on Facebook posts and they're always busy. I'd rate their food as mediocre.
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.
Right. The business owner choses whether they want to participate in any review. For each platform the choose to particpate they print a onetime code on the receipt, valid only for a day or 2. Only using such code a review can be posted. That should solve most problems with fake reviews by outsiders. But how to prevent fake reviews produced by the business themselves? That sounds harder to solve.
Well, in practice even the proposal with the review tokens wouldn't work for years. How would a small business get them integrated into their cash register? More complicated than putting a sticker "Rate us on trip advisor" to the front door.
A company could voluntarily create an opt in system, but the US government couldn’t mandate it. Not sure if it’s realistic to think any companies would though
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, perhaps because it's a slightly clumsy statement?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
What was obvious though is you meant that the 1st Amendment says the government can't restrict speech. Private businesses such as Google are perfectly able to set the rules for their platforms as they see fit.
Sure, but private businesses aren’t going to regulate themselves. Only way this stuff happens is if the government forces them, which they can’t in the us. Companies have nothing to gain from letting people opt out of being reviewed, and they certainly don’t want to hire more support staff.
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.
Not a new tactic. A classic way to cut down exploit attempts to something you can actually monitor rather than a firehose, for sites that don't need an international audience, is to blackhole IP blocks from China and Russia. Sites have been doing that since at least the early 2000s.
I will pop by and rob you later, I assume you have no windows, doors or locks and wont call the police after I clean you out because it would be futile.
I do wonder how many of the remaining 5% are Indians with VPNs. We’re in a niche industry so we ignore enquirers from people we can’t verify. So no big deal. Just a shame that we can’t really do business with India via a website.
Edit: I don’t have a Twitter account so was unable to see what was linked
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.
It is an awful situation. Sending money only perpetuates it though further enabling the real brains behind it to commit more egregious crimes. At some point, lesser evil is to say no.
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.
Why do so many rich people scam others? They're rich! It's certainly not because of lack of economic opportunities.
Some said in another reply it was common to say in the USSR if we paid the police more they'd stop being corrupt. To which the response was, if that's so then how come the politicians, being paid ever more, are still corrupt.
Doing bad has nothing to with being poor and everything to do with culture. A culture of entitlement, a culture of selfishness, a culture of lack of responsibility. To see what I mean, go to Japan, notice the poor don't steal. Why? Because it's not part of their culture. (PS: I'm not saying there is no crime in Japan nor am I saying there is no theft. I am saying that the poor general don't steal there, at least no compared to whatever places you're making excuses for).
The poor do not steal in India either. Do you know how many poor people there are in India? Do you know what miniscule percentage are scammers? You need to rethink how you see Indian culture.
Japan has a history with the untouchable. Again, access to jobs, access to economic opportunities, created the Yakuza.
Recommended to watch if you want to say that the system does not create criminals but it's a personal choice: https://youtu.be/SIsndKkasfI
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.
Eh, they have a sob story about potentially being exploited again all ready.
Plus, $75 in some sense is more shocking than $2,000 – you can perhaps visualize paying $75 to get rid of some negative reviews, and that combined with the lurid "this is three weeks income for poor people" catches your imagination.
I am on board with the parent comment, this sounds like a publicity stunt.
There are a couple of other sentences as well that stood out to me.
The overall apologetic tone, language, and phrases used in the email have some subtleties that are hard to imagine being used by a native Indian speaker, or by someone raised in India. It starts making more sense if you re-read it applying a western lens, i.e., how a westerner would imagine an Indian scammer to write, without being exposed to the nuances you find in regular Indian communication. What I'm trying to say is that if you're a native speaker of any Indian language, it is not difficult to see if a sentence originated by "thinking" in English vs in the native language:
"no other choice"
"the fact is"
"no other way to survive"
"we are begging you"
Here's the full text of the spammer's email:
> Hello. Unfortunately, negative feedback about your establishment has been left by us. And will appear in the future, one review a day. We sincerely apologize for our actions, and would not want to harm your business, but we have no other choice. The fact is that we live in India and see no other way to survive.
We are begging you to send us google play gift card worth $75
You can buy the card directly from PayPal
paypal.com/us/gifts/brands/google-play
Or in any store selling gift cards
We hope that this amount will not be critical for you.
After selling this gift card we can earn approximately $50, which is three weeks of income for one family
Please send the code to the email address vict2665@proton.me and we will immediately stop leaving negative feedback and remove the existing ones.
“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?
I don't use any Google products on my phone or laptop and very few apps outside of Apple Maps have my location. I could go somewhere and leave a review without them knowing if I've been there. I mean they probably still know but they can't admit to it. :)
If Google were to prioritize authenticity of reviews they could reject reviews from users that cannot be tracked to the reviewed location for whatever reason. It's not that they are afraid of tracking users.
Might be more difficult for other platforms not maintaing full movement profiles of their users.
Locations services on phones use more than just GPS though. It'd be quite easy for Google to add a "Verfied" tag to a review if your GPS history includes the restaurant and a few points around the restaurant, and your WiFi SSID history includes a few of the same SSIDs that other reviewers logged, and there's a photo of the food that includes meta data that matches, etc. It could all be spoofed too but it'd become increasingly difficult.
SSID history and photo metadata are also spoofable.
At some point, only the spoofers will pass all the anti-spam gates, or you'll end up letting many of their reviews past in order to avoid blocking real users. At that point, it's starting to look like the wikipedia "be sure to read the chat page for this article if you actually care about this topic" problem.
They don't seem to. Here in central Texas, a restaurant enforced its trespassing rules and the guy decided to summon his hordes to start logging bad reviews for the restaurant. Yelp locked down the reviews for this place fairly quickly but Google Maps allowed the lies to build up without limit.
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.
I'd be surprised if that's not true of the overwhelming number of people who post reviews on Google.
I've posted several reviews in my home town, Google knows it's my home town from their maps data, that's a strong trust signal that Google could find a way to use to provide improved reviews. Google can probably tell if reviewers logged on to the restaurants wi-fi, that's a strong trust signal too -- Google could expose a trust status and still hide that they're essentially tracking our every move.
Exactly. I could see it as "Verified visitor" for the various things that could indicate a real visit. Or some businesses use Stripe for payments, and they send me emails. Again, google sniffs all emails. This could be used to corroborate usage.
Again, they could be faked, with things like GPS spoofing, and using Wigle to determine local wifi there to fake that. But again, each step there significantly raises the bar of fraudulent activity.
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.
Journalism needs to be paid for. The open information you want is often unreliable, unverified and amateur. Yes, of course you can point to the vlogs of Sabine Hossenfelder, but she won't tell you about the problems with review sites or the tensions in German politics over Ukraine, nor tell you about the James Webb telescope in easy words, nor review the latest Marvel movie. You know who will tell you that for free? Breitbart (). And why? Because someone else pays them to push an agenda. Don't be their enabler.
() Breitbart is just one example. An ugly one, though.
There are thousands of separate paywalls out there, so if the HN front page is full of paywalled links, most of us won’t be able to read any of them. This might make sense if there were a tech wire service we agreed on using.
You have a point. Perhaps there should be a rule that paywalled links can only be submitted with a (user-written) summary? Does take away a bit from the paper's income, though.
Often the papers are doing the same, they're taking the information from a third-party that actually did the journalism.
Yes, there's value in aggregation, which is why tech news sites mostly just use Reddit to harvest stories from a week or so after they appear. IMO that's very low value.
If the "news" sites wanted to encourage reward for sources they could start by attributing every story and indicating who they paid and the originator of the factual data. Truly though most of them would seemingly rather we paid them whilst they just regurgitate a social news site.
The so-called free (as in beer) internet is the root of many problems. One should pay directly for the services/information and not route the money through some surveillance capitalist. Why would the internet be different than any other business? You don't go to the shop and just pick whatever you need because you have paid already elsewhere?
Actually the end stage of communism they were supposed to abandon money. With capitalist greed abandoned, people would just take what they need and nothing more. Looks like lot of the internet works like that now. Except that we are not good socialist factory or farm workers but we have done our share by providing our privacy to the maintainers of "free" internet services.
Edit: Actually I feared the link would not open for me with an EU IP because of GDPR blocker. That's not uncommon for US newspapers. However, it just brought up a huge cookie dialogue and showed the article just fine on agreeing.
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.