Looks like I managed to put the entire post into the title, so maybe I should have just tweeted it.  But here is a little bit of background.  I was talking to a friend of mine last week who has a newly released app in the app store.  She told me that while a lot of people loved it, some hated it.  She wasn’t so much offended by that but rather annoyed at her inability to respond to the negative reviews “in situ,” especially given that she felt that many of them completely missed the point of the app.

That made me think of the problems Yelp has recently encountered over their handling of negative reviews.  The removal of a review is a nuclear option and should be used only as a last resort.  I am pretty sure far fewer venue owners would be upset if they were able to simply respond to a negative review right there.

With a comment thread, everybody would get so much more value from reviews because there would be so much more signal to go on.  Did someone take the time to respond to a negative review?  Was their explanation logical?  Did anyone else step in to defend the product or service?  Did the person who originally complained go back and respond to the response?  Would be great to see some large sites do this to set the precedent.