One day after receiving some really horrible service from my local Burger King I decided to try Yelp. To be honest it felt very therapeutic to relay to everyone on Yelp exactly what had happened at the Burger King to make me so despondent*. So after that I was hooked. Yelp allows us lowly consumers a place to vent and praise our consumer experiences so the whole world can see and feel what it is we see and feel firsthand. Sure, there are always going to be trolls and fake handles but that is the nature of the online beast nowadays. You have to take some of the bad in order to experience the majority of the good. So after a few more reviews; some good, some not so good, I logged on one day to discover that many of my reviews were filtered out by Yelp. Mainly it was my bad reviews that were the subject of the filtering process. I was being censored.
I immediately set out to find out exactly why only certain reviews(negative) were being filtered and certain others(positive) were not. The site policy stated that Yelp runs a complex algorithm that takes many variables into account when it censors a review. The policy also states that mistakes are expected but you know what, it is too bad because once you have been scheduled to be filtered there isn’t anyone at Yelp who can change it. Apparently they forgot to pay the programmer to allow Yelp manual control of their own review system. I emailed one of the support personnel and she replied back that yes, it is true they cannot reinstate a filtered review. Once you are in limbo you stay in limbo. She did say she was really, really, really sorry for the inconvenience but she hoped that I would still use Yelp even though I had a 50/50 shot of being filtered.
*The details of the review are irrelevant but it seems I was not the only one with service problems from that Burger King. A month afterwards I went back and a whole new crew was being trained by a lady doing her best Sgt. Hartman routine. Since then the service has had a drastic improvement.
No comments:
Post a Comment