Fun with review sites!

Poor dude - Source

This post is very much inspired by my continual troubles with Latoken (Latoken is the worst). There's absolutely no change in status there, it's clear they want to keep my money and are just waiting for me to forget.

Never use LaToken.

Anyway... after a couple of months I turned to social media and review sites to try and get something working for me... and this has opened my eyes to the dodginess of online review sites. I'm sure there are no huge surprises there, but I didn't realise how dodgy until now.

A couple of years ago, I had set up a small company to help do cyber security reviews for small businesses. Unfortunately, shortly after I started, I got involved in an all-consuming project and couldn't give it the time it deserved. I had done the usual things to advertise it, and even though I wound it up shortly afterwards, I've been plagued by phonecalls from Google wanting money for good reviews and 'improving my search ranking'. Every time I decline their offer, explain the business is no longer, and ask to be taken off their call list... and every few months I reappear on their list. It's frustrating, but also not cool... how can we trust Google reviews is they're hassling businesses to pay for positive ones.

My friends run a gym, they've been around for 2 years now, and they mention that they constantly get hassled by Yelp to pay for positive reviews. Again, the entire business model is flawed and I'm not sure people who use those sites are aware of the money changing hands.

Sponsored results hey? - Source

The one I'm most annoyed with is Trustpilot.

Clearly I'm not the only person annoyed with Trustpilot - Source

Trustpilot is a smaller site, and LaToken has been absolutely savaged on this site by disgruntled customers who have lost thousands of dollars worth of crypto due to their non-existent customer service. Latoken have a business account with Trustpilot, an account they pay for, which gives them the ability to reply to reviews. This functionality is wasted on LaToken, they provide a token response asking for the ticket number and then do nothing.

I had put up a review in the 3rd week (Feb 17th 2019) and then put up another review months later (May 28th). Within minutes, my review on May 28th was removed by Trustpilot, and upon investigation, a huge number of negative reviews were also removed.

All the super scammy 5 star mega vague 'only ever posted 1 review' all remained, all from Russia (the home of Latoken, even though it started in France) but so many of the detailed angry reviews disappeared, pushing Latoken up from 2 stars to 3 stars.

So... angry reviews gone, fake reviews remain.

So much more authentic than the negative reviews - Source

After my review had been deleted, I had received an e-mail from Trustpilot telling me that my review had been removed because they doubted the authenticity of my review. I replied instantly; proving I am who I say I am and requesting they reinstate my review.

Nothing.

Silence. For weeks.

They removed my review in minutes, but took weeks to even recognise my instant verification.

After forever, I start hassling them on Twitter. Their twitter person was super responsive, but she had no power.
Eventually she told me that the Trustpilot Compliance team had responded to me, but they hadn't.

I asked a number of times if they could resend their response, and after another couple of weeks they did.

Their response asked for further proof that I was having issues with Latoken, again I responded instantly, and again I heard nothing back.

After some more twitter hassling I was finally told that they had reinstated my review a few days earlier, which I hadn't realised because I never received notification of that action... but I was happy Latoken was back to it's 2 star rating.

Months earlier I had flagged all those vague clearly fake 5 star reviews... and those flags had all been ignored, so I'm starting a new campaign to have them removed.

The problem is though, that Trustpilot makes it's money from the very businesses being reviewed.

Businesses obviously don't want bad reviews, so it's in the best interests of Trustpilot to create hurdles and headaches to prevent or slow down negative reviews.

I mean, for $550 a month I'd want good reviews too - Source

It's no secret that angry people are far more motivated than content people, so maybe reviews in general don't work. Yelp is a scam, Google reviews are a scam and sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Steam will often cop revenge-reviews by people who have never consumed the product but who are protesting or trying to lift a competitor.

I've wondered if a blockchain solution would be better... where people are paid for their effort, regardless of the positivity of the review to make an actual fair review site... but then we'd find people reviewing things they've never used or consumed, just to get paid.

We used to only have family and friends to rely on when we wanted to be sure we were spending money on quality... and then we had the whole internet at our disposal, but this has mostly been corrupted... between review sites being owned my manufacturers (sleepopolis.com), review sites discouraging negative reviews to help businesses (Trustpilot) and review sites harassing businesses for fake positive reviews (Yelp and Google) and companies offering incentives for reviews (the entire internet), I think we've come full circle and can only literally rely on word of mouth again.

Source

What do you think? Have you had any good or terrible experiences with review sites and/or businesses that were wildly different from reviews?