Social Media, Yelp, and User Generated Content

One of the students this week brought up Yelp as an example of social media, and it's a good one. Yelp is a review site where the users contribute reviews of businesses. It is especially used for restaurant reviews, but also other retail stores and entertainment venues.

One downside of user-generated content, however, is that there is no telling what will actually be said. Comments sections in newspaper's online versions, for example, are notorious for having off topic and often controversial comments. Yelp, concerned that reviews might be compromised by a rabid reviewer with a grudge or an establishment owner reviewing themselves under a false name, developed a mechanism to give greater weight to some reviews. By "featuring" a review, some user generated content rose to the top. The reverse also became true, for as good reviews rose to the top, negative ones sunk towards the bottom, sometimes being a number of clicks deep, making them less likely to be read. Sometimes, these reviews would just disappear completely.

This resulted in a lawsuit from companies reviewed on Yelp, claiming that Yelp was engaging in extortion. The allegation was that Yelp advertising representatives offered to feature good reviews (and bury bad ones) in exchange for advertisement.

This week Yelp announced that it will scrap its "featured review" mechanism entirely.

While this means that allegations of extortion will no longer be able to be made, at the same time it also means that reviews that may be in some way bogus will see the light of day. As with all things in social media, there's been a trade off.