Slashdot Mirror
Small Restaurant Out-Maneuvers Yelp In Reviews War
An anonymous reader writes Yelp has, for the past year or so, garnered a reputation for extorting businesses into paying for advertising on their site. Allegations include incessant calls for advertising contracts, automatic listing of a business, and suppressing good reviews should a business decide to opt out of paying Yelp for listing them. One small Italian trattoria, however, may have succeeded in flipping Yelp's legally sanctioned business practices in its favor. The owners of Botto Bistro in Redmond, CA, initially agreed to pay for advertising on Yelp one year ago apparently because they were tired of getting calls from Yelp's sales team. But even after buying advertising, the owners claim that they kept receiving calls. So they started a campaign to get as many one-star reviews as they could, even offering 25% discounts to customers. As of this writing they have 866, and a casual perusal of them reveals enthusiastic tongue-in-cheek support for the restaurant. One-star reviews, once Yelp's best scare tactic, is now this particular business's badge of quality. And they didn't even have to pay Yelp for it.
...and no one knows what to do to fix it.
In 2010 the new Web was all about "user generated content". Today, the modern mantra is: "Don't read the comments"
Reviews and review sites have almost exactly the same problems as comment sections: there is no way to filter the ignorant and/or malicious from the informed and sincere. Case in point: there are currently exactly two reviews of my book on Amazon. One from a reasonably thoughtful reader (3 stars) and one from a troll who apparently has given Charles Dickens the same rating as me (2 stars).
There was a five-star review which was from someone who had read the book and genuinely liked it, but Amazon determined it was from someone I knew (likely because I bought her a book on the site a few years ago) and removed the review. This is a ridiculous practice--it would invalidate a huge number of reviews in traditional publications--but is made necessary by authors who try to game the review system in the stupidest possible way.
If there is a solution to these problems it's likely some kind of reputation system, but as near as I can tell no one--not Amazon, not GoodReads, not TripAdvisor, not Yelp, not anyone--is even thinking along those lines, which suggests there is no money in building a site that provides honest peer-to-peer feedback. This is a shame, because the Web should be enabling us to help each other, not increasing our distrust of each other (we're plenty good enough at that already).
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Sure, but yelp shilling doesn't also provide a good laugh or two.
That's not fair to the restaurant, considering their other options were to pay Yelp off repeatedly (and in increasing amounts) or to have an undeservedly negative mark on their public image. The restaurant gave discounts to customers to take the power away from their blackmailers.
The restaurant's response of incentivizing 1 star reviews on Yelp IS the free market solution to the Yelp problem.
I believe their plan is to deliberately violate Yelp's terms of service - by paying for reviews - to force Yelp to enforce said terms by removing the listing entirely. Which is what the restaurant wants - to not be listed at all.
It's a very clever plan. At best, they get everything they want, and at worst, "real" bad reviews get buried in amongst the snarky ones.
The key to successful anarchy is ethical behavior.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
No, they are posioning the well to give Yelp a deserved middle finger.
The business merely turned Yelp's tactics against them. Yelp strong arms businesses into buying advertising to bury negative reviews and push positive reviews up. They simply told Yelp to fuck off and had people give them a bunch of negative reviews. What the business did is pure genius.
But they paid for reviews. So after paying Yelp! to shill for them unsuccessfully, they paid customers to shill for them.
I fail to see how anyone in this story acted non-shittily.
I fail to see this as a problem. They beat yelp at its own game. Good for them.
Giving discounts to people who are going to prevent someone from extorting money from them isn't shitty behaviour.
As well as getting lots of free publicity from this stunt. And also being known as a rebel, which makes it a "cool" place to go in some people's eyes. This is a genius business move, if nothing else.
Slashdot's system works because there is not much at stake here apart from people's egos or opinions. If businesses depended on comments on slashdot, I think we'd find way more trolls and mod points for sale. The problem would be in a different league altogether.
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
It would need to be a full on classification system, similar to how Netflix does ratings. That is, it would have to put both the reviewer and the review reader into groups, and weigh the rating based on the reviewer's similarity to the reader.
"People with similar ratings to yours gave this restaurant 2 stars, while the general public gave it 4 stars."
The problem with this is that you would need a whole lot more ratings in order to get any kind of reliability.
That's why there's no successful anarchy.
The best anti-yelp sites are sites like this and others that help spread the word about yelp's unworthiness of trust.
Give it a few more years and yelp simple won't matter any more; they'll have scammed themselves out of relevance.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm hoping we don't get to a point where a corporation has such a right. It's bad enough that they get to choose a religion.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think that it is hilarious they are going against their own terms in order to defend against removing them entirely.
That is priceless and more or less just confirms Yelp are a bunch of bullies.