Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by daft_pink 12 days ago
I think that generally if you ignore the 5 star review and then look for a staircase pattern of 4, 3, 2 and 1 star reviews on yelp or google then that place is generally awesome. If most reviews are either 5 stars or 1 stars then the place probably sucks. It generally indicates tha legit users are giving a bad review and the company is trying to mask this by recruiting or paying for 5 star reviews. I find the histogram shape to be far more useful than the review average.

Basically businesses only pay for 5 star reviews and 1 star reviews are generally a really bad indicator so the quantity of reviewing in all other categories is the most useful and the size and scope of 1 star review in relation to non fake reviews are really useful indicators