Slashdot Mirror
Yelp To "Clarify" How Advertising Affects Listing
WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Yelp is going to change some features in the wake of the class-action suit brought against it. Yelp has been accused of extortion; the Yelp co-founder denies all. The NY Times Bits blog has more details about the changes Yelp intends to make. According to Ars, the business that filed the lawsuit says that the newly announced changes do not address their original complaints at all."
One of the mentioned changes --- giving a link to see the reviews that Yelp's filtered out --- addresses some of the concerns, by at least making it possible to research what Yelp is filtering / not filtering (assuming they really show all reviews in the unfiltered view). The other change the article mentions seems totally besides the point though: the fact that businesses who paid could choose a review to always appear first was never the problem, because that was up-front and part of the advertising package. Removing that feature doesn't even seem necessary.
What the controversy is over is: did or didn't Yelp modify its filtering for particular entries based on whether they were advertisers, and did or didn't they get people (employees or associates) to add positive or negative reviews based on whether they were advertisers? And, separately from that, did their sales staff offer or threaten to do any of those things as part of the attempt to sell ads (and if they did, was that Yelp policy)?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Here's the inherent problem. Even if Yelp's policy specifically denies anybody's targeting non-advertisers for unfairly bad profiles, the sales team is made of individuals upset they're not getting a commission from the guy who decided not to buy ads. So, what's going to stop the sales team from trashing the profile of the non-advertiser? This is impossible to prevent unless the site has a staff-free sales system, like Google does with AdWords.
Yelp (verb) to call or cry out sharply when a class action law suite is filed against you.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
It is a website on the internet, where you can post reviews of things. Mostly restaurants, but apparently also hospitals. It's gotten popular enough that businesses care what their Yelp reviews are like, because it can meaningfully impact business. There are allegations that Yelp takes advantage of this to "suggest" that businesses become paying advertisers, if they'd like their reviews page to look good.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So last year the business I work for started getting AstroTurf by a competing business. I work in an entertainment type venue at night, yadda yadda yadda, whatever...
Our competitor basically said that we were a dull venue, but if folks wanted a non-dull venue to please try theirs. They and their gang would re-write their reviews on a weekly basis just so it would float to the top. To the yelp staff, these fake reviews were deemed credible because one of the ringleaders of this astroturfing had an "Elite" next to his name, I guess that makes him special.
One of my regulars, who is also a yelp "Elite" responded by rewriting his review, but included a ton of links to youtube video of our venue that wasn't staged, showing it was lively. Yelp removed the review saying "It contained to many external links" after the other "Elite" douchebag and his buddies flagged it. (When google was thinking about buying yelp, I sent snail mail letters to the google executive staff with a printout of the review and an explanation. I put in big bold letters googles mission statement of "DO NO EVIL". I hope it changed their minds when it came to buying them out)
Back on subject though. NOTHING got yelp to let up. While all this was happening, we got emails and phone calls from yelp salespeople *CONSTANTLY* promising this would all stop if we joined their ad program. We even tried their "Owner comments" but after a few weeks they banned us because we didn't comment according to *their* guidelines.
One reviewer said, "Your waitress looks like the hooker from hamburger hill, me so horny". I think I said something equally offensive to him. Yelp holds business's at a double standard for how they can comment from the reviewers, it's complete bullshit. We got banned from commenting for responding the way our reviewer did? Why didn't they ban him?
Eventually I got tired of it. I recruited friends to start photoshopping the heads of some of the astroturfers on transvestites, gay porn, whatever. We'd post this weekly on our website. We also started dropping dox on our website on slobbleman and the rest of his crew.
Like magic, our sort order returned to normal. Yelp stopped calling us, the little shittards that astroturfing us stopped as well.
I hate yelp. I hate slobbleham and his whole fucking extortion scheme. I have no doubt there will be some slashdotters that are "ELITES" that will have a problem with what I say, and what I saw but let me ask you this..
Have you ever worked at a business that was being actively astroturfed by a competitor? Did yelp offer to genuinely help you or did they tell you paraphrasically "Pay us or go fuck yourself?"
That's what they told me, paraphrasically. Fuck you slobbleman, I hope you choke on a dick.
The fundamental problem with user review sites is that they don't work unless the number of reviewers is large compared to the number of things reviewed. Yelp needs a statistically significant sample size per thing reviewed to work. Movies, yes. Resorts, probably. Major restaurants, maybe. Local plumbers, no. Joe's Plumbing will be reviewed by Joe, Joe's brother in law, Joe's plumbing supply house rep, and maybe a customer.
That's bad enough, but Yelp sales reps "making you an offer you can't refuse" is worse. There are small businesses that live in terror of Yelp.
Back in the 1990s, the SF Bay Area had a "rating service" which got into trouble for extortion. This was before the Web got big. They used window stickers in participating businesses, and heavily promoted their ratings. Their sales pitch to businesses was "your competitor has one of our stickers, shouldn't you buy one too?". They were shut down.