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Company Promises Positive Yelp Reviews For a Price; Yelp Sues
jfruh writes Many restaurants and other small businesses live and die by Yelp reviews. Revleap operates a paid service that it says can "create a large constant flow of positive reviews that stay on top of your [Yelp] profile, and remove fake reviews." But Yelp is suing Revleap for what it says are practices that are fraudulent and in violation of Yelp's terms of service; among other things, Revleap promises users gift cards in exchange for good reviews.
You can make a legitimately negative review of a place and watch your review get buried, because the sort isn't chronological. I really don't care if the restaurant had 5 stars three years ago. I *do* care if they all the sudden have a slew of negative ratings for people getting sick, etc.
The exact same arguments Yelp makes in effectively extorting businesses by deleting positive reviews unless they pay up are the same ones that RevLeap is trying to counterbalance and the same ones that SEO companies use to boost their Google rankings. I see neither a moral nor a legal argument that could favor Yelp in this case given their prior behavior, and I hope they pay RevLeap's costs in the end when they lose.
Since when did EULA's become legally binding? Have they *ever* been tried in court?
The right thing to do is to post intentionally bad reviews and let Yelp shakedown the restaurant to take those reviews off. Yelp got a good set up going, and these selfish users are spoiling the set up and are helping themselves to water from the well dug by someone else, as the old Yiddish saying goes.
(If there is no such Yiddish saying, there is one now. Google will point to this posting to any one trying to search "old yiddish saying" and "help themselves to water from well dug by someone else". Google bombing a language is so easy!)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So they are violating Yelp’s terms of service!? Since when have anybody's terms of service been enforceable in a court of law? It is immoral to lie, but of course it's not illegal, because politicians do it all the time. So why should it be illegal to pay somebody to post fiction on the Internet? Maybe some lying politician will introduce a bill to make it illegal?
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
zing!
Yelp, contributing member of the Legitimate Businessman's Social Club., today initiated a lawsuit against itself announcing, "Our terms of service clearly state that developers may not compete with services already in the Yelp ecosystem."
Yelp later dropped the case, without admission of guilt, when it walked into court only to be confronted by attorneys from Yelp.
Things posted to the internet aren't always true...
Since you posted this on internet, maybe it's not true, which would mean that it's true, which would mean that it's not! *tilt*
lucm, indeed.
I've made a habit of skipping every rating that is the maximum and every rating that is the minimum of the allowed scope. Somewhere in the 2-to-4-star gamut is the truth of the matter.
Potatoes are friggin' magical. Can you power an alarm clock with a carrot? No, sir!
One protection racket is upset that another protection racket is encroaching on their territory. Queue up the violins...
from what Yelp does themselves? They offer to provide paid services to get good reviews, and then amazingly negative reviews start showing up if you decline their offer.
Yes only Yelp is allowed to doctor your reviews by burying your negative reviews for a fee, everyone knows that.
Yelp has a lot of nerve doing this....the pot calling the kettle black
That's where thousands of people pay for fake reviews/comments/etc on ANY site.
Yelp gets money in exchange for good reviews too: The difference being they're a rent-seeking third party, not a customer.
Speaking of customers, isn't this bribery from a third party. It will make a positive result more meaningless than vender reviews on E-bay.
yelp.com sucks goatse anus
It's cool i post my review here right?
Bollocks. They say they offer gift cards to users who create positive reviews.
At no time does that imply Revleap ever agreed to the Terms of Use
As for fraud, they may be encouraging others to commit fraud and rewarding them for it. I don't know if that's a crime or not. I would have thought they should be going after those who create the reviews. If anyone is committing fraud it's them.
I don't think yelp would be so popular if users thought they might risk being sued by yelp if they create a review.
Yelp has for years been making "sales calls" to companies, promising to make those company's Yelp profiles look better by burying or removing negative reviews. I have talked to a few business owners about this; they get very animated when they talk about it. How/why the senior executives of Yelp are not in jail is beyond me.
Yelp claims, "Yelp says it hopes the lawsuit will help businesses distinguish between companies playing by the rules, and those using Yelp’s name to make a dollar by taking advantage of small businesses." Is it because wants to make money off of blackmailing small businesses?
If I was Revleap,I'd argue that any harm to the accuracy to Yelp is their own because they manipulate it based on anyone who pays them enough. Or at least that was its defense to its service by small businesses that it offered to help. http://valleywag.gawker.com/lawsuit-says-yelp-made-millions-forcing-businesses-to-p-1617941464
The bad news is, so does Auschwitz. Really, look it up.
Because like....those calls. Any business owners remember those calls? Holy fscking high pressure "offers I can't refuse".
>Many restaurants and other small businesses live and die by Yelp reviews
Really? I would like to see some actual statistical evidence of this. I somehow doubt it's true in most location. The internet is one possible way to check on what restaurants you might want to go, and Yelp is one single web site/app. I haven't even ever used it myself. (It isn't popular in my country).
I would tend to ask people who live in the area rather than trusting people I don't know reviewing online. (Also, I would tend to trust reviewers more than consumers in most cases).
This is not the first business to do that, there are also businesses that offer facebook followers etc. As for yelp, most of those reviews are either made by the business to portray itself in a positive way or by the competition to bring it down in the eyes of custumers. You cannot trust what you see.