This actually doesn't seem to address the rumors floating around about Yelp, which were that they would use (misleading) negative reviews as part of high-pressure sales tactics for small businesses. The "favorite review" feature is what Yelp themselves said they were selling. It wasn't the nexus of the accusations against them.
I would love to know how they intend on filtering reviews successfully while exposing the process behind the filter. It would seem any transparent filter system would invite people to find reliable ways of bypassing and subverting the things that get you flagged.<p>There's a reason Google won't give you a full look at a page's spamminess rating, and a reason reddit is open source <i>except</i> for the spam filtering bits. With any blacklist filtering routine, transparency puts you at an inherent disadvantage. Instead of a million trials to see what passes and what doesn't, the answers are already there.<p>...or they aren't really, and this is just a PR scheme by Yelp to claim more transparency with the illusion of fairness for review visibility. To me this is the only real possibility here.
Still no way to request a manual review though. I already see several good detailed reviews by people that I know personally that have been flagged. As well as reviews filtered for businesses that I know personally and know for a fact that they don't pay anyone for reviews. From initial appearance, looks like a lot of innocent reviews get caught in the filter.
This might be a pretty good PR move..<p>Most of the filtered reviews I have seen so far are, in fact, pretty spammy or blatant advertising..<p>This will definitely make people appreciate the filter more<p>OTOH people, not machines (thanks to the captcha), could read tons of filtered reviews and come up with cleverer ways to beat it
I hate to be cynical right out of the gate, but we'll see how it goes down. Admittedly, its a better move than doing nothing.<p>Could be interesting to see what kind of reviews are being flagged anyways. I've always thought that review stuffing is way more common than people would think...