Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeff18 | Hacker News Reader

Yelp does not need to extort people to be insanely successful. It would be a pretty bad move, given that if they did actually do this, someone could:

a) Simply print out the email where Yelp explicitly extorted them.

b) Record the phone call using Google Voice or whatever, where Yelp explicitly extorted them via the phone.

c) Save the hardcopy of the letter or fax where Yelp mailed them the extortion offer.

Those are the only ways Yelp communicates. It would be trivial for one of the millions of companies in Yelp's directory to blow the whistle with concrete evidence. Yelp, an extraordinarily valuable company, would be pretty much ruined overnight. Why would they run this risk to squeeze out a few extra bucks?

View on HN

> Why would they run this risk to squeeze out a few extra bucks?

You must not hang out with enough sales people. Companies do irrational things for short term gains all the time. See Wall Street for a recent example.

That's not exactly my point.

Yelp has many easy opportunities to be a shady company and raise its profit margins in ways that are 100% invisible. For example, they could claim that an ad impression got twice as many views as it actually did and there would be no way to call them on it other than a few internal potential whistleblowers.

However, running a blatant extortion scheme where there is inherently a huge paper trail is not one of those things. Any one of the millions of businesses could become a whistleblower simply by posting an email to Hacker News, and Yelp would go from a near billion dollar company to a fraction of that.

It saddens me that if someone accused my startup of doing something absolutely atrocious, illegal, and irrational, instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt, it looks like Hacker News would actually say "where there's smoke there's fire" and start to rationalize how I am likely guilty given zero evidence.

> It saddens me that if someone accused my startup of doing something absolutely atrocious, illegal, and irrational, instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt, it looks like Hacker News would actually say "where there's smoke there's fire" and start to rationalize how I am likely guilty given zero evidence.

It's not someone, it's hundreds of companies over a long period of time. Now a class action lawsuit. There are over 4 million hits for Yelp and scam on Google--this isn't a one-off accusation.

And there are almost 4 million hits for moon landing conspiracy, just because people believe there's faults doesn't mean there is.

The business owners I've heard complaining don't usually allege that it was explicit extortion (or they would, as you point out, just record it and stick it online), but many feel like the unsolicited communications from Yelp asking if they'd like to pay have an extortiony feeling, sort of: nice Yelp ratings you've got there, I bet you'd love to keep them, eh?

The step that's of course hard to prove is whether it makes any difference if the owners pay or not. Many feel that it does--- that things like results ordering, review ordering, which reviews are highlighted, etc., depend in subtle ways on who's paying vs. not. Even if that isn't true, the fact that it's kind of hard to tell why Yelp is displaying things the way it does feeds that sort of perception.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com