Yelp Extortion Allegations Stack Up (March 2009) | Hacker News Reader

Yelp Extortion Allegations Stack Up (March 2009)

eastbayexpress.com

147 pointsTrevorBramble78 comments

I stopped using Yelp and uninstalled it from my iPhone when I read the article last year.

Yelp's business model doesn't sit well with me. Even if the allegations of good reviews disappearing for businesses who don't pay up aren't true, the idea that there is a service out there that you don't want but you're almost forced into paying for since it's affecting your business directly feels to me like paying the mafia to 'protect' your business.

If Yelp really does want to help both businesses and consumers, give businesses the ability to respond to reviews for free and don't artificially alter results, be like Google and let your algorithm work. Make money selling ads.

It reminds me of the whole GetSatisfaction drama with 37 Signals from a few months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540540). This type of business model where you provide a business a "service" they didn't ask for then try to charge them for it will never go over well.

[Edit] FWIW this page, found below in relme's comment (http://www.yelp.com/myths) directly answers every one of my concerns with Yelp. If it's true then great, sounds like they're doing things well. I find it hard to write off all the complaints as fictional though.

So are there any similar services which do offer business owners a chance to respond for free? If not, wouldn't this be a good opportunity for a startup? You could probably advertise yourself as the 'dont-be-evil' version of yelp.

This is basically the project I started working on a few weeks ago. If anyone is interested in getting together on this, feel free to get in touch (my email address is in my profile). I'm a programmer located in the Mission district of San Francisco.

It would be a nice to have a Craigslist or Wikipedia-style Yelp (fast, lightweight, and non-evil).

Yelp doesn't charge biz owners to respond to reviews, in public or in private. I'm pretty sure about this because I built the feature.

The source of the negative sentiment may boil down to the cold calling. It seems to be one of those things that just hits a nerve, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could trace the anti-Yelp movement to this business practice. The other thing people complain about a lot is that their reviews aren't counted (presumably because of the anti-spam filter). If Yelp fixes those two major problems, it will be in much better shape.

My bad, my bad, what I should have said was something that allows businesses to opt-out of the service.

you want a business with poor consumer reviews to be able to delist itself? Isn't that like being able to delete your case record with the Better Business Bureau?

I seriously doubt good reviews would just disappear. The reviewer would complain. I'm a Yelp Elite in my city and I'd scream murder if any of my reviews disappeared.

They may show your review to you but not others.

Bingo. Ever try logging out, clearing cookies and then looking at a view again?

To be safe, you really need to view it from a machine/IP you've never logged in from before...

I keep a proxy script on my webserver which comes in handy from time to time for that sort of thing - proxy.nfriedly.com

Yes, I use many computers. I also share reviews often with friends who have no problem seeing them in context. This sounds like paranoia to me.

See timcederman's post below. Reviews can, and do disappear apparently. Yelp admits the "spam algorithm" can be aggressive on new reviewers.

>>"[The] spam algorithm can filter based on how established user is. [Your post was] not deleted & can re-appear on biz page. Still live on your profile."

It sounds fishy to me. Who cares if the review is "still live on your profile" if it's not live on the business page. It doesn't sound like a spam filter to me, it sounds like selective removal of reviews.

There's a lot of spammers on Yelp. I have no problem with this on new users as businesses will often post reviews of themselves to drive up traffic.

But why not tell the user that it was flagged as spam and/or delete it from their profile page? Why let the user believe that their review is still there when it isn't? Maybe this is a way to fool the spammers into believing that their spamming is working, but it really is a poor experience for legitimate users, no?

It just happened to my wife this weekend: she'd written a review of her trainer that showed up at the time, but at some point in the last few months it disappeared from the trainer's page, even though it still appears within her profile. She updated the review and it then appeared to her when viewing her trainer's profile, but it didn't show up if she logged out or when logged in from my account.

Simply deciding not to show reviews you've written and/or randomly taking them down after they've been up? Sketchy. Showing those reviews to you so you think they're there even though no one else can see them? Ultra-sketchy.

The same thing happened to me. I created a yelp account for the express purpose of reviewing a local business that has food that's beyond shitty. I wrote a scathing one star review, and it was put in purgatory. Only when I logged into yelp was it visible.

Now, I can understand why they'd be wary of an account that only posted a single negative review, but if you ban someone, you should let them know.

> "give businesses the ability to respond to reviews for free and "

Yelp has had the ability for businesses to respond publicly or privately to a review for almost a year now I believe.

> "don't artificially alter results, be like Google and let your algorithm work."

The same game happens in the web search world - it's called SEO. Yelp's spam algorithm is decoupled from any advertising, yet since business owners don't write their own reviews, they have less control over their reputation (as opposed to webmasters who change their page content), and are much more likely to come up with conspiracy theories as to why things happen the way they do and consequently often get very frustrated.

The fact that myths page even exists at all, with 9 rather damning myths, is enough of a red flag.

My wife and I both recently posted negative reviews at businesses that were advertising with Yelp. Neither review (which were both fair and truthful) ever showed up on site.

edit: Just to clarify, I spoke to Yelp about it. The reply I got was "[The] spam algorithm can filter based on how established user is. [Your post was] not deleted & can re-appear on biz page. Still live on your profile."

The small business owners I know in Chicago say Yelp calls them incessantly, offering to let them take over their profile pages for $500/month (don't quote me on that price).

Their biggest issue with Yelp is that they tell their customers to go review them on Yelp. The customers do. Then Yelp deletes the reviews because the people who posted them weren't "true Yelpers." So only reviews from people who post lots of reviews are valid? WTF.

That's basically what happened to us. We had all our customers Yelp about us, many who haven't even heard of Yelp. Then they took them all down because those people only wrote one review, basically for us.

No offense, but that does tread into dicey territory. It comes rather close to businesses offering customers discounts for positive Yelp reviews. How do you draw the distinction? If there is no distinction how can you be sure that Yelp reviews are true?

But, is it any more dicey that only accepting reviews from a small population of yelpers that are more loyal to yelp than to the business they review? Think of it this way a yelper whose never heard of your business vs. many loyal customers who've never heard of yelp. To some degree it turns into a yelps loyal customers vs. a business' loyal customers and yelp with always side with their loyal customers on it. Advantage yelp. If they don't let everyone participate in the conversation equally then a business can't put their best foot forward.

I did find it that the salon owner was much wiser about how she approached yelp than the bookstore owner. The bookstore person wasn't listening to her customers, and blaming the wrong person.

I'm not saying that the alternative of only accepting reviews from a small population of regular/power users is necessarily a good thing either. I'm just stating that it's not a black-and-white issue with an easy answer.

We weren't offering any discounts. We just said please write reviews and give your honest feedback since you are our customers. Seriously they took most of them down.

Sounds like Wikipedia edits.

Sales operations where you need many customers, each consisting of low price point "buys" typically require a large salesforce of relatively low-paid junior people who make most of their money on commission (similar to classified sales at newspapers). Basically a boiler room style operation where people "dial for dollars" all day. It's not a surprise that some sales people may have attempted these tactics without management's knowledge or approval.

Absolutely correct.

It may valid, but it doesn't exonerate the business (yelp, in this case) from responsability.

I think the real troubling issue is that they demand openess from other businesses but don't show their algorithms or give open access on their pages for response.

I wonder how long it will take for businesses to start using Mechanical Turk against this Yelp.

It is actually fairly plausible that Stoppelmann has no idea at all that his sales representatives are using such shady tactics.

That is not, however, good news for Stoppelmann. Not in any sense. It would indicate that, at the client-business level of interaction, there is no functional oversight at all. That Yelp's management's either willing to turn a blind eye, or are so negligent as to allow this to occur even in the face of growing criticisms.

Incompetence or malevolence; either way, they're in trouble.

or it could just not be true

You do have to view the claims with some skepticism considering those making the claims stand to benefit substantially from people believing them, true or not.

> It is actually fairly plausible that Stoppelmann has no idea at all that his sales representatives are using such shady tactics.

I kind of buy this--I've been told that the sales reps at Yelp are paid by commission, which can lead to this sort of thing.

Since Yelp depends on sponsorships to turn a profit (trick question: have they turned a profit yet?), they depend on the sleazy tactics of their sales reps. I'm reminded of a line from the opening of Mission Impossible: As usual, should you or any member of your I.M. Force be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence.

Any advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malevolence.

This is actually racketeering and not extortion.

Actually, I think it qualifies as both.

Can you explain why this doesn't quality as extortion?

To some people, racketeering is a subset of extortion. To me, extortion is the simple extraction of money by coercion. Racketeering involves the protection from both the racketeer but also from other aggressors. The Yelp model fits this nearly exactly, whereas extortion is a much broader term.

From the wikipedia article on protection racket:

>In some cases, the "protection" is little more than extortion, with no real service rendered unto the victim. Otherwise, the racketeers will warn other criminals that the client is under their protection and that they will punish anyone who harms the client. Services that the racketeers may offer may include the recovery of stolen property or punishing vandals. The racketeers may even advance the interests of the client, such as muscling out unprotected competitors.

A racket is an illegal business operation. Extortion is coercing money out of a party under threat of blackmail (which yelp is doing), violence or some other negative action done on the extorted.

We had a similar issue over at Extreme Kung Fu where I teach out of. A Yelp rep called (this was maybe a year or year and a half ago) and same thing: We notice you have a lot of positive reviews and we drive a lot of traffic to your site. The implication of the conversation was that if we wanted to stay that way, we better sign up as a sponsor.

I even wrote a blog post about it, and that got picked up when the whole Yelp thing blew up last year. I used to recommend Yelp to everyone, now I feel dirty even talking about it.

http://www.yelp.com/myths

"I am not a crook." -- Richard M. Nixon

JWZ has gotten the shakedown too: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html

This is why I want Foursquare to start handling reviews. (Foursquare lets people "check in" at a bar, restaurant, or other venue and notify friends.)

Foursquare's developers say they're working on winnowing out false checkins with GPS, which should give them a good idea of where their users are actually going, and when. I'd trust reviews written on the spot more already.

I'd also trust reviews from my friends. And since Foursquare is a social network first, I've built an actual collection of real-world friends, not a network of people I only know through a web site. These are people who largely share my taste in venues.

It's obvious that a lot of people want an alternative to Yelp. I'd try out others, but I particularly want one that verifies reviewers were actually there, and one that pays attention to what I already like and my friends like.

I want a Pandora for places.

Bad reviews -> self/friend posted shill review -> shill reviews removed -> "Yelp removes my 5-star reviews!"

I'd expect a little exaggeration from the frustrated party, and these conversations sound like they're just barely more than benign. I'll have to ask my friend in Yelp ad sales how pushy they get.

Because someone in ad sales would tell you the truth about business practices from which he derives a living.

She has no reason to do otherwise with me. Our definitions of "friend" may differ.

Well, she may feel dirty about what she does and be concealing it from everyone. It's not like people have never lied about things to family before, let alone friends.

Other than possibly being fired if found out. Perhaps our definitions of "no reason" also differ.

By the same token: note enough ad revenue -> promise removing bad reviews in exchange for buying ads.

So why did you chose one narrative instead of the other?

I've only been on one side of the equation. :)

There probably isn't a single business owner out there that feels comfortable with the existence of an online directory where disgruntled customers can collate and publish their opinions. I'm sure a good deal of them are willing to lie to rid themselves of the nuisance. Just because Yelp is creates a large headache for lazy business owners doesn't mean it's evil. It's creating an environment where business strive to provide quality service. It does so by creating incentives for doing so (good reviews) and disincentives for failing to do so (bad reviews).

There are no facts in this article. Just allegations.

There are also incentives to disgruntled employees (for example) to publish bad reviews to 'get back' at the business. In general, services like this are only useful once they reach a critical mass so that the signal drowns the noise. But as you grow you also become the target of spammers (i.e. Google's problems with SEO, real estate scammers, link farms, etc).

> As you have undoubtedly noticed, we've been doing some shuffling around here, and the page you're looking for seems to have gone missing.

Bad web designers, bad! There's no excuse not to ensure that old URLs return HTTP 301 redirects to the new URLs.

I don't remember who it was or what their business was called , but someone else got called out for something similar. It was under the guise of brand management as the site aggregated social media, blogs, etc about what people were saying about a company on the Internet then charging business owners to make replies.

It came down to brands being held hostage and the story that broke was very similar. I wish I could remember the guy. I remember his blog posts sounding very proud though.

As far as yelp goes, Its probably only the sales or a small portion of the operation (maybe). I have a friend that works at yelp and I'd be dissapointed if he stayed there knowing this was going on.

It was Seth Godin and "Brands in Public":

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/launching-br...

(I had the same memory this morning and tried searching for it and couldn't find anything, but thanks to your post I thought to include "brand management" in the search)

Good look. Thanks!

The source is 404 Page Not Found http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/yelp-extortion-allega...

Google Cache Link: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:DdZjkw-XSRgJ:www.eastba...

Before reading this I'd never heard of Yelp. It sounds like a good example of antisocial networking, of which we might see more examples in future.

You've probably seen Yelp stickers in business windows before but overlooked them. I've seen them around, but I can only recall instances of businesses in Portland or Toronto. I can remember specifically if I've seen them in other places, but probably so.

I was expecting to see something damning but this looks like what yelp has been admitting to do for a while now.

They admit to letting you sort your negative reviews to the bottom if you advertise? Or to restore five-star reviews which were "flagged as spam" if you advertise?

Do you have a citation for this? I don't mean to call you out but I have no idea what yelp has admitted to.

And even if they did admit to it, that seems about as "damning" as it gets for a site whose value proposition is based almost entirely on its credibility.

I don't think that's even Yelps primary value proposition. They're much more of a social network than anything else. Their proposition seems to be more around providing a place for people to gain recognition for their taste. This is why they have the elite yelper program and what-not.

The result of that play is a huge site with a TON of reviews that create a lot of organic SEO traffic. The credibility of those reviews, while important, isn't really their upmost concern.

That's why withholding positive reviews (under the guise of spam control) is effective. They're effectively extorting you to create more content for them.

Is it intentionally designed that way? I have no idea, but I bet it's extremely effective.

Now..two things. 1. Can anyone comment on the legality of this internet based extortion as opposed to "regular" extortion?

2. Is this by any chance the reason why the Google deal fell through? I know we heard otherwise but it makes me wonder.

I would think with that many reviews the potential for libel is a concern.

What happened to the article? I am getting 404 errors? Is this some sort of Yelp conspiracy? Maybe East Bay Express didn't pay up!

old news ... march '09

Hi, Joel. I updated the title.

Maybe because I only recently moved to an area where Yelp has a presence, but I hadn't noticed this article until today.

I hadn't heard of this before, so thanks for posting.

Do you have any sources for updated info on this situation? I'm curious to see how it has played out.

I just posted Inc's article on how Yelp can make or break local businesses (this month's article). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062641

Yes, I'm unclear as to why this story is considered "relevant". There are many startups that have skeletons in the cupboard like Yelp allegedly does

Reply on news.ycombinator.com