Understanding Online Reviews: Funny, Cool Or Useful?

Increasingly online reviews are relied upon to make choices about the purchases and services we use daily. Businesses, on the other hand, depend on online review sites to find new customers and understand people's perception of them. In order for an online review community to be effective to both users and businesses, it is important to understand what constitutes a high quality review as perceived by people, and how to maximize quality of reviews in the community. In this paper, we study Yelp to answer these questions. We analyze about 230,000 reviews and member interaction ("votes") with these reviews. We find that active and regular members are the highest contributors to good quality reviews and longer reviews have higher chances of being popular in the community. We find that reviews voted "useful" tend to be the early ones for a specific business. Our findings have implications on enabling high quality member contributions and community effectiveness. We discuss the implications to design of social systems with diverse feedback signals.