You've been Yelped | Hacker News Reader

You've been Yelped

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157 pointsazsromej64 comments

The first page was the worst human interest story I've read. It was structured as though we are to pity the business owner while thumbing our noses at Yelp.

For those who haven't read it, essentially the biz owner trolled yelp and then hunted down a critic, and was arrested for battery. Best line: More than anything, she blamed Yelp.

Edit: If you read the rest of the article, it goes to a salon owner who actually gets it, and her business has benefited from it. Know your customers.

I especially like how she blames the cluttered mess on poor sales. Maybe poor sales are a result of a cluttered store!

I found myself thinking: If you have slow sales, you should have more time to straighten up the place.

My favourite bit was where she claimed she found his address and turned up at his doorstop to 'apologise', but was surprisingly antagonistic and violent when she got there.

Yeah, right, 'apologise', just admit you went crazy and intended to shout/beat him down.

> Accounts differ as to what happened next, but a struggle ensued.

I don't get why Sean C.'s version is more believable than Diane Goodman's, I don't know either of them and nobody else witnessed the event so how can any of us judge?

> I don't get why Sean C.'s version is more believable than Diane Goodman's

FTA: "Over the next few hours, she sent several more angry messages. She warned of a 'world of pain.' 'Goodbye pussy boy I will be contacting your employers,' she said."

Compare this with the story's quote of Sean C. : "TOTAL MESS"

Hers was not a proportional response.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/12772/the-big-lebowski-world-of-pa...

I understand that but why do we believe Sean C's side of the story? He could a bigger loon than she is, it takes two to make a fight.

Well someone thought she should go for a mental health evaluation. Do they do that for everyone who gets into a fight?

> He could a bigger loon than she is, it takes two to make a fight.

He could be, but we have no evidence of that. Furthermore, she admits sending the messages.

It does not "take two" to make an assault.

> It does not "take two" to make an assault.

Actually it does :P

This story showed up on Gawker months ago, so I'm a bit confused why it reemerges now. http://gawker.com/tag/oceanavebooks/

I disagree with the writer's tagline that Yelp is such a new medium it can drive you nuts. The same could happen on other social networking services, discussion fora, AOL, etc. Yelp maybe could have done some diligence to connect dots between the biz owner and the negative review, but that could have been seen as special treatment of one business, out of the 1000's listed on its service.

I believe the biz owner is a bit unstable, and the ongoing media exposure just isn't doing her well.

Yeah, that was really odd. I kept waiting for the part where she was abused by those vicious Yelpers. By the end I just thought she was a nut.

>It was structured as though we are to pity the business owner while thumbing our noses at Yelp.

I'm fairly sure the writer was being ironic. Or at least he's showing us how the (insane) business owner sees things.

Max Chafkin is a little bit late to the party on this one. Here's an LA Times story with most of the same details:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus1...

I read it when JWZ pointed to it from his "I Hate Yelp" post:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html

JWZ runs the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, and is "pretty sure" that he was in fact given a pay-to-play pitch for Yelp placement and review management.

For some very specific kinds of businesses --- the kinds unlikely to attract a constant stream of casual reviews --- Yelp has been useful to me. For restaurants and bars, it's less than worthless; "reviewers" clearly do make up random stories ("Publican serves O-Reida fries! Violet Hour serves well-liquor!").

In Chicago, we have LTH Forum. It is the polar opposite of Yelp. It is a PHPBB named after a specific Chicago Chinese restaurant that has completely owned up all the reputable food reviews in Chicago. It has no salespeople, makes no profit, is aggressively NOT SEO'd (LTH is never going to be the first hit for anything), appears to be layed out in PHPBB's default template, and is better than any other source of reviews in any city in the US. Every year it gives out awards (the LTH "Great Neighborhood Restaurants"), which --- again, this is a PHPBB site --- are hung in the windows of every restaurant that has received them.

You could never post a half-assed troll review on LTH and get anywhere with it. 15 people who'd been there and talked with the chef would write counter-reviews, and the moderator would probably strike your post. Someone needs to figure out how to scale this model.

Thanks for the comment. And sorry if it seemed late--that's one of the drawbacks of a monthly mag.

But it's also advantage since we have time to sift through these claims. I talked to a lot of business owners for this story and I was unable to find a single verifable instance of pay to play. All of these stories end up being hearsay. As I tried to convey in the story, the problems that Yelp creates for business owners are more complicated and more subtle. Like Google, Yelp is based on an algorithm that can make or break businesses and that is ever-changing and hard to understand. That's what is at the heart of most business owners' complaints.

It was a well-written article. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for clarifying on the "pay-to-play" thing.

I'm with the shopkeepers. Yelp is evil.

Thanks for an interesting article.

I think some of the problem is just adjustment into a new medium. Those of us who have been net-savvy for a while know how to read reviews - I am pretty confident we can all tell an irrational impossible-to-please customer from their bad review, as opposed to a rational customer who genuinely had a poor experience. The problem is that some of these business owners are worried that a poor review from a crazy person will sink them - but I doubt that is the case, if they respond in a calm, rational manner.

I encourage people to read through to the later example of the salon owner. Even if the owner had not caused the unhappy customer to up their review rating, I think I, as a potential customer, would have been capable of not placing much weight on 1 bad review out of 30 good ones.

Take a restaurant where, upon walking in, you can see the chef --- a bona fide celebrity, for what it's worth --- individually peeling potatoes over a bucket for the fries, which are to be fried in pure duck fat.

Now tag that restaurant with a review saying "I went to this place with my husband last week and it was VERY disappointing. The prices were very high, they were all out of the dish I wanted to order, the service was bad, and they served me O'Reida food service fries".

This isn't just an adjustment. On LTH, your comment would be buried under those of reputable people setting you straight. On Yelp, I found a substantially similar review on the first page of results.

Right, but presumably the owner can reply with "For the record we only use hand-cut fried cooked in duck fat" to that review?

I am not insensitive to the point, that an individual customer may be poorly placed to be a reliable critic, but I am not sure what the solution is besides somebody with a yelp-type service providing an infrastructure that lets everybody have their say. Not every sector in every town will have an editorially controlled forum for high-quality recommendations.

As a point of interest, do you for example object, say, to tripadvisor as well, or is it something that yelp does in particular?

Yelp is a user-generated content company (meaning: unpaid contributors are doing the lion's share of the value creation) with heavy SEO optimization and little quality control, and a business model that extracts money from business owners.

Their incentives are all out of whack. They profit by dragging eyeballs to non-authoritative content they didn't write, and then scaring businesses with it.

Hear hear.

I'm not a yelp user, but the other problem that occurs to me is the anonymity.

Of course you have user profiles, but you can't (easily) track a review back to a human being, which is why this was such a shock to the reviewer in the magazine article when it actually happened.

The businesses stand there naked and the reviewers can take little potshots at them behind the screen of anonymity. No wonder some people go a little crazy.

If yelp made reviewers less anonymous, such as stating where you work, maybe this would be less of a problem.

At least bad reviews would probably be polite and dignified rather than outright nasty.

LTH, as in LTHforum.com?

[Edit: this is in fact false, see comment below]

I doubt that is the case, if they respond in a calm, rational manner.

That's a big part of the problem. Owners can't respond publicly to complaints on the site unless they have a paid account.

That's actually not true. All a business has to do is register. They'll get sales calls, but they don't actually have to buy anything.

Thanks for the correction. I picked that up from the other article on Yelp today, but reading it again I think I misinterpreted.

Quote in question:

Business owners contend that they just want the same opportunity to respond to negative, false, or damaging information about their businesses. Instead, the only way for them to salvage their businesses' reputation is by paying Yelp - regardless of whether the reviews are true or false.

> Someone needs to figure out how to scale this model.

It sounds like your standard referrals-only community model (I love the idea of anti-SEO) but how could you keep elements further down the tree ("compromised" referrals, for lack of a better term) from unbalancing the community as it fans out into too many degrees of separation?

Perhaps with a one-level-down moderation model. Each degree of separation from the origin is responsible for moderating posts one level down from them, so in theory there is an unbroken chain of moderation from the earliest users to the newest ones.

This kind of ties into in idea I've playing with, basically a sort of meta-yelp. Since for any given city in the world there probably are at least two or three web sites dedicated to reviewing the bar and or restaurant scene in that city, why not have a site that collects and reviews those sites. So instead of going to Yelp to find the best restaurants in San Diego (or wherever) you'd go to this site find the best sites covering San Diego restaurants and then go to that site find a restaurant. Anybody know if such a thing already exists?

Max (the article's author), I saw that you're posting in the thread. Reading the account on the first page, the bookstore owner sounds troubled. She won't clean her store, and when someone leaves (what I think is) a review with valid criticism, she responds with vitriol. Considering her prior behavior and the fact that the authorities sided with him, I'm inclined to believe Clare's account of the altercation. I don't always cede to the authorities. But considering that the stereotypes were stacked against Clare - male, younger - I bet the cops who interviewed the two decided that Goodman was unhinged.

Others here have the same impression. So, two questions. Why did you decide to lead the story with her? And are your conclusions regarding her behavior similar to ours?

Thanks Scott. I led with her because I think the incident, while extreme, is a vivid illustration of the way that Yelp (and not just Yelp, but all online review sites) is making business owners feel. This owner is not the first or the last to take criticism personally and respond without thinking.

As to your second question, I don't think anyone thinks that the the owner's actions were reasonable. (As I say later I the story, she feels terrible about what happened.) Sean C.'s review was negative, but not overwhelmingly so. And whatever someone says on a review site, I think that everyone has a right to privacy.

I don't see the anecdote as an example of how Yelp is making business owners feel. I see it as an example of how one sadly troubled woman got into trouble - the mechanism through which that happened seems incidental to me.

By the end of the first page, I'm thinking "This woman sounds crazy," not "Yelp can cause trouble." I don't think she's a good example for the problems Yelp can cause.

I'll read the rest of the article later. But the problem with leading with such an anecdote is that after thinking "This woman sounds crazy," my next thought was "Does this reporter not see that? If not not, is it worth reading the rest?"

Doesn't she know she can just become a "Yelp! Sponsor" and have the offending reviews removed?

My whole Yelp account was banned for calling out a local restaurant owner for being so psycho that he made my date cry. It was a mighty coincidence that my account ban and deleted reviews coincided with his shit-hole restaurant deciding to sponsor Yelp.

But I'm sure Yelp has excuses. Maybe I didn't log in frequently enough, or they thought because my experience was so out-there that it must be fake. Either way, I'll never trust or use Yelp again. It's pay for play all the way.

That sponsorship costs $300/month. That's a lot of money for many small businesses and can easily push a business that's barely scraping by in this economy into the red.

And I don't know about you, but I get angry when I think of people trying to extort $3600/year from me. It is my business - not theirs. Yet somehow I'm the one getting my wallet picked.

My bad, cynicism is not easy to convey via text.

To be clear, businesses are not supposed to be able to remove any review from the site. Yelp makes a big deal about claiming that they don't let businesses, even Yelp Sponsors, remove negative reviews. That being said, I know first-hand that they do remove negative reviews, so... fuck Yelp, I guess.

I'm angry too that Yelp pits businesses against customers for profit while claiming to be an unbiased source. Just the fact that it's even possible for a business to "sponsor" an "unbiased" review site should set off a lot of red flags.

Just ran a search on "yelp unbiased" and this popped up: http://ask.metafilter.com/142694/Yelp-sucks-I-need-unbiased-...

Overall, I thought it was an excellent article. It had a good "hook" up front with the slightly crazed store owner, and then led into a pretty good description of Yelp's impact on businesses. As a frequent Yelp contributor, and reader, I'd say that 95-99% of reviews are honest, forthright, and make an attempt at some kind of balance. I'm actually quite impressed at how effective Yelp is at keeping both the trolls and shill reviews off their site.

The downside of the Yelp "Anti-Shill" algorithm is that it does to tend to have a lot more false positives than false negatives. As a result, infrequent, or new Yelp reviewers will typically have their reviews dropped off the site, or not appear to accounts other than theirs - New Yelp reviewers may not be aware that their Yelp reviews may appear to their logins, but not to others.

The foundation of Yelp, of course, are the "Elite" reviewers - They are the equivalent of the "Wikipedia Admins" - by themselves, they are obviously fallable. As a group, you can trust them - particularly the best of the best - someone like http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=P5bUL3Engv-2z6kKohB6... is more trustworthy than any restaurant critic you've ever read in the NYT. I can attest his credibility is untouchable, and, with Yelp, you can get a _dozen_ reviews by people like him of high-profile places.

Is Yelp Perfect - No. Have they had salespeople (typically teenagers or people in their early twenties) say things on the phone during cold calling that they shouldn't have? Absolutely. Do they maintain a pretty damn good wall between Sales and Advertising/Services - Nowadays, yes. I don't know if that was _always_ the case, but I don't have any strong evidence to the contrary. Just rumor and innuendo. Regardless, they are a pretty upstanding act these days.

I'd be interested if anyone has any real evidence of poor behavior lately? I think this is more like Mark Pincus's speech that "when you are small, and struggling, you do all sorts of things that you'd rather not do - Just so you can get to a stage _where you don't have to do those things_ anymore."

I think Yelp is now at that stage.

This reminds me of the AppStore. You write an App. You publish it. A few weeks later somebody make the first "review": 1/5 stars + a comment "Total crap" without any explanations...

You have no possibility to contact this person, no way to delete the review. Sales are down. You can forget the app.

Ce la vie.

Now imagine that Apple threw regular parties for the people who wrote those troll reviews, and you have Yelp.

The best part is that you're always asked to review an app when you're deleting it. Clearly you don't like it enough to keep it, how well do you think you're going to rate it?!

Yeah this feature pisses me off. I hope that they only use those ratings internally and don't factor them in to the reviews on the App Store.

It's just insane to only actively solicit the opinion of people who think "I'd rather have this 60x60px area of screen real estate and a few megs of space than ever use this app again."

It's "C'est la vie."

Summary of first page:

* Woman encounters a problem.

* She reacts angrily instead of intelligently.

* She is surprised when the problem gets worse instead of better.

* Yelp is bad.

To be fair, there are then four more pages to this article which focus on Yelp and it's growth and impact and have nothing to do with this woman's story.

She was an extreme case of a real problem.

Yelp may not be bad all the time, but it certainly hurts people in some cases, and appears to have extortionate sales practices.

The company was, literally, conceived over lunch and funded -- to the tune of $1 million -- by dinnertime.

Interesting. There's more on page 3 in case you didn't read that far.

I really couldn't read it past the first for the same reason as everyone else, the account was just annoying to read. Not sure if it was intended but it seemed to sympathize with a crazy person.

Business owners need to keep this in perspective. Most people have never heard of Yelp. I had not before I read this. The more you react to what somebody posts in an anonymous forum, the more you call attention to it.

As a small business owner who could find himself on Yelp, I can somewhat sympathize with some of the owners (although not the woman in the article, she just seemed nuts. A much more appropriate thing would be to contact the negative reviewers and try to learn how to make her store better).

The problem with Yelp is probably the search rankings. Chances are, Yelp has higher PageRank than some local company, and when someone search for "company name" on Google and Yelp reviews come up, it could harm their reputation.

While most people haven't heard of Yelp, they could easily find unfair negative reviews of your company easily.

By Max Chafkin | Feb 1, 2010

Wow, news really travels fast on this site! Can anyone find the Apple Tablet announcement somewhere on the future-web? I'd love to know what it looks like.

Random association, but my first experience of this was comic books. When I was younger, I remember that the date on the book was always way ahead of when I bought it.

I bet this goes back to some weird print/magazine marketing thing: more current = more better.

It probably just means that the article will be in the Feb 1 issue.

Skewed dates might be more accurate, but they'd also be more confusing in a lot of use cases than simply using the print date everywhere.

If I remember my 2000AD days right, I think the date was when the newsagent should remove the comic from the shelves, more like a sell-by date than a published-on time.

Correct. I raise my LRD to you, Sir.

Yeah, print magazines have a kind of chronological arms race. No one wants to have a date that's earlier than the adjacent magazines on the stand.

Well, along with cars, and sports video games, and basically anything else with some chronologically oriented release cycle. Really the only things to buck this trend were Microsoft operating systems in the 90s.

does anyone have a business that is featured on Yelp? If so, do they offer any buisness centric tools. Like get satisfaction, where they encourage a dialogue between owner and client rather than one sided posts? If not, maybe some companies would be willing to pay for that kind of ability...

They offer a bunch of tools. and they've gotten a lot better at being sensitive to business onwers. Owners can respond to negative reviews, either publiclly or privately. (Later in the story, I talk about a hair salon that has done a really awesome job managing its Yelp reviews by being fanatical about responding.) The difficult issue is that the interests of business owners and those of Yelp will never align perfectly. If they did then Yelp would essentially be useless to its readers. (The tension is similar to how some companies feel about GetSatisfaction.)

Good info, thanks!

I think it's interesting how /personally/ business owners take feedback. Especially at first, I know my stomach churned rather unpleasantly when I got even a mildly negative review. It's hard not to take it personally.

But how you end up handling that, I think, is super important. In my space, it's pretty easy to say "Oh, I'm sorry, would you like a refund?" First, taking responsibility for the problem, and then offering to refund what the customer paid seems to disarm even the most vocal critics. I mean, you don't usually get to keep the customer, but they usually stop saying bad things about you.

But really, being 'just a guy' is a little bit of a double-edged sword. you want to be 'human' enough that you seem like a person and not some faceless corporation, but you also need to maintain enough emotional distance that you respond in a polite manner (or don't respond at all) when someone insults the 'baby' you have spent the last 5 years of your life working on.

I actually went to the email thread from the store owner - (http://www.flickr.com/photos/44269394@N06/sets/7215762259508...) - I can see why the police tended to believe the customer, and not the store owner. While I recognized that "tone" doesn't carry well in email, I'd be seriously concerned for my welfare if the person who had written those missives showed up at my door one day...

"Do you not have a girlfriend? Are you divorced? I can see why...." , "world of pain", "Goodbye pussy boy and I will be contacting your employers", and on, and on...

Yowsa!

Sure, the bookstore owner was a psycho, but there are huge problems with Yelp--namely, that if a store/restaurant isn't the kind of thing somebody likes, he posts a 1-star review.

"This used book store isn't Barnes and Noble! DO NOT GO HERE IT IS SMALL AND HAS OLD BOOKS"

"This corner bar is not a dance club, I could actually hear my friend talking to me. Plus the bartender didn't give me and my friends free drinks for acting like sluts, BARTENDER IS GAY AND THE BAR IS BORING"

"This restaurant serves Korean food! I like Chinese food! One star!"

I would instantly disqualify all of those reviews while reading them, even subconsciously. So either 1) I am smarter than Yelp users, or 2) the lame reviews are actually more subtle and believable, or 3) this just isn't a big issue.

I wish that there was a reviews co-operative that didn't have draconian terms-of-use.

Maybe you even get a share of the advertising profit based on the helpfulness of the reviews you write?

My first thought was that the company might be mismanaged. It may be just going through growth pains. The concept seems innocent enough. It sounds like what is needed is is a filter that keeps both sides of the discussion civil and warnings that "this post may be archived" with the appropriate reason so that no one is left guessing.

I think there must be already a service offering everyday good reviews on any selected website like Yelp. For business owners it would be a better brand management tool and probably the least expensive.

Sounds like that business owner Yelped herself!

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