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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think the subtlety that's not evident from these comments is that Maciej didn't solicit IFTTT integration to begin with. In fact, as I recall it, IFTTT did a hacky integration that misused Pinboard's authentication, and Maciej had to help them correct that.

Later, after putting a bizarre legal agreement in front of him to sign, IFTTT announced that Pinboard would stop working on their service in a manner that made it sound an awful lot like Maciej had just decided to stop supporting IFTTT. In reality, all the agency in this relationship belonged to IFTTT.

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I should clarify that the terms of service I quoted are a thing you agree to by using their developer site, and that I was not given a document to sign.

If they actually succeed at that, it's gonna be a laughing season. Every time a company does something and becomes widely successful, their methods are then recommended on business trainings, startup conferences, etc. So if IFTTT actually manages to subdue many services this way, you can expect other startups to think they can build business out of a) hooking up to your service without your knowledge, and b) telling you you're supposed to become their customer now.

Isn't that the Yelp business model? They're notorious for calling up businesses (mainly restaurants) and then offering the business a way to pay to remove negative comments on Yelp (there was a case where some were entered by a Yelp employee!)

It's essentially the "protection/promotion" model.

That's a nice restaurant you have there... it'd be a shame if something happened to it.

No, the Yelp business model is to sell ads.

That didn't happen. Please cite.

Its a fairly well known accusation that has many pieces of circumstantial evidence as well as many lawsuits.

Many business owners have claimed yelp salespeople have called them and tried to sell them the ability to bring down unfavorable reviews or that they would highlight them.

One google search away: yelp wins lawsuit that says they are perfectly within their rights to manipulate their ratings: http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/yelp-extortion-lawsuit/

"Yelp is pay-for-play, and the court says that’s just fine."

> “[T]he business owners did not allege sufficient facts to support their claim that Yelp authored negative user reviews of their businesses.”

The ruling was that if yelp manipulated ratings, that's fine, but there's no evidence they did. I don't know whether to believe they've done it or not. There's a lot of business owners over the years who report having gotten shady calls, but it'd be really hard to prove those calls are from yelp and not from fly-by-night scammers. I get calls from "Cardholder Services" and "Microsoft" pretty regularly, so it shouldn't be surprising if there are extortive yelp scammers.

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