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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.
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've never understood how the business model for 'free' review sites is supposed to work anyway.
You're in the *reviewing* business. If you're legit you can't sell ads - Consumer reports has no ads - They make all their money from subscriptions.
However, it's the internet, so you can't sell subscriptions. People won't pay.
So can't sell ads, can't sell subscriptions... How can you create a legit reviews site?
Search engines are absolutely awful at finding reviews. Try goggling "reviews for X", absolutely zero useful content. Into this void Yelp and other smaller rent-seekers stepped in. With their racketeering they poisoned the system to the point of being useless.
Looks like Yelp learned from the Better Business Bureau.
The BBB is fully funded by dues from member companies. They are even franchaised so each BBB is locally owned and operated.
The incentive to join the local BBB is that unresolved customer complains ("bad reviews") are deleted from the public record of member companies after a certain amount of time, it varies by franchaise but usually 1-2 years. While unresolved complaints against non-member companies are never deleted. So if you file a complaint against a non-member company, that isn't something that will necessarily help you but it is a sales-lead for the local BBB office.
This business model leads to the perverse result that you can't trust the records of BBB members but you can trust the records of non-members.
When you are looking at reviews of hotels or restaurants you have almost nothing to judge the comments against.
I think the idea is to tie their reviews into the larger ecosystem of online comments.
So if they are assholes in the comments section of [online news article] and get downvoted,
then that would be reflected in the data your site gets from the "third party reputation system."
Then it's up to you how you want your site to weight their asshole behavior.
Ideally, this system would support one identification, but multiple user names,
in the sense that I can be Bob on one website and Alice on another,
but the reputation reflects all my online comments.
That said, while I see how it could be useful, I actually hate the idea.
Having ALL my online comments concentrated in 1 easy to hack/subpoena place is discomfiting.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why not have each reviewer's rating for a given item/location be statistically compared/weighted to that reviewer's history of ratings, e.g. a 5-star rating from someone who consistently gives 5-star ratings for everything could be valued less than someone who only does so some of the time, with weighting for older reviewers, anonymous reviewers, etc. Basically the equivalent of a bayesian spam filter, except for reviewers instead of mail. Yes, it won't be perfect, but can it at least be better than what we have now?
The same is true with google. Well, I never use it any more, because if I google something, I either get Alibaba or yelp, and unless I want Alibaba or yelp, it doesn't help me one iota. After all, if I wanted Alibaba, I'd GO to alibaba.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
And Yelp paying someone to remove all these reviews until the keyboard-warrior hipsters move onto some new easy cause is the free market adjustment to ensure the big guy continues winning.
True, but it really lays Yelp's tactics bare for all to see -- the 1-star reviews have to be removed because the system publishes them instantly, while the 5-star reviews are all held pending approval. Time for a lawsuit, methinks.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Anyway, articles like this do make me upset with Yelp. But a lot of places do seem to have yelp sticker on their window, so perhaps it's just part of the cost of doing business these days. I applaud this italian joint for lashing out against it in an entertaining way, and I'll start searching for some of the lowest reviewed places too, since I mostly use Yelp to find the exceptional places anyways.
I suppose it had to be an Italian restaurant that recognised a shake-down when they saw one. A lot of people put their lives on the line to challenge mafia extortion, so a website with no guns is hardly a threat.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'