First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket going trying to strongarm restaurants into paying for advertising, and now this.
Friendly reminder - if you are on mobile and trying to read a Yelp review and don't want to download their app, simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" and it will load the full review without forcing you to get the app.
Apple are changing that feature in iOS13 to be a lot more obvious (menu where reader button is). And iPadOS13 (beta 4) defaults to Desktop Mode (might break lots of websites) although there is a setting to change it to default to Mobile Mode.
Android Chrome users have Desktop Mode checkbox under the hamburger menu.
It sounds simple, but I've read that at lot of work went into the desktop class browsing experience so that it can handle websites that are designed for cursors. There's more to the change than just sending a desktop useragent.
13" iPad Pro? Gimped version. 12" MacBook with a smaller screen and worse CPU/GPU performance? Full version!
I would've thought that it'd be simpler to have one codebase and make some UI modifications so that it works on touch devices. But it's been years and they didn't. Maybe cost savings by giving phone users low resolution streams and no way to change it?
I don't use Google Docs, but I gather being able to use the real web version on an iPad now beats out their official iOS apps.
For touch, extra spacing is needed around click targets (allow for fat fingers).
For some touch data entry, you need to allow for different input methods, because accessing symbols and numbers is different from a real keyboard versus a virtual keyboard. Also a virtual keyboard: covers some of the page, causes scroll, causes resize, can cause zoom, loses fixed headers. Avoiding the effects of those issues often requires some compromises.
For touch, you must register onclick events on a div near to an input that can be tapped. Otherwise the browser resizes the touch zone to be bigger than the actual input, and you can't tap the div.
There are many many subtleties to how browsers treat touch events and virtual keyboards
Detecting a mobile browser vs regular won't handle this well for laptop touchscreen users... especially for anyone using a laptop in a tablet mode. I suspect the larger targets would also help some regular keyboard + mouse users with poor fine motor control.
For tablets we optimise for touch, but I also make sure keyboard and mouse work (e.g. I am extremely careful to support click events, not just touch events). I can do this because we have our own framework (when I developed our product, other frameworks simply did not work well with corner cases). Writing our own framework means I am very familiar with the various quirks and workarounds.
However, browsers force us to make compromises, because we simply can't detect or fix certain problems that affect the UI.
need a "demand desktop version" option
well yeah, but a local app can get a more detailed fingerprint off the user, which includes location visited, app installed, habits etc. an app can do a lot more things when installed and closed compared to a closed browser tab.
> the Yelp app I don't get any ads
the profile is sent upstream and aggregated. ads served from other apps and on web pages you visit have a chance of using information collected by yelp even if yelp itself is not showing the ads, that's the point of it, a seemingly innocuous "ads free" app collects telemetry and third parties use that info to build a profile and serve personalized ads on other apps and web pages, correlating sidechannel info (last seen position, ip and other) to unmask your browser/app session and pin it to your "shadow identity" in the advertisers' system.
Or to put it another way, Yelp would be rightfully lambasted for not having a mobile app. Having a mobile app is table stakes for a site like Yelp. And if you've got all this engineering effort going towards a mobile app, why double your workload by also building a first-class mobile site? The mobile site just needs to be functional enough to satisfy the basic needs of casual users.
I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as I have yet to see anything but anecdotal stories about some folks getting a phone call from someone allegedly from yelp allegedly having the power to do this. I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company.
On the mobile experience, what are you referring to? The mobile site is fully functional with reviews, search, ratings, etc. I can't say the same of Twitter, Tumblr, and most major other sites. I despise mobile apps as much as the next person but I hardly see how Yelp is unique or even worse than others here. Please clarify.
You literally do not need the mobile app or even render the desktop site to read full reviews. I'm looking at a fully expanded review in mobile safari right now.
Having said that, I have firsthand experience in having my own review of such a business censored:
6 months ago I wrote a review for the RazzleDazzle Barber Shop in Riverview, FL. Great little shop, I was surprised that it had zero reviews and was gray in Yelp. A month later, I returned for my second haircut and asked about business. I heard the same story about Yelp pressuring for sales, and mentioned that I had already written a 5-star review.
Upon checking Yelp, I noticed that the shop was still gray with 0 reviews, despite having left one a month ago myself. After carefully reading the site, I found that the keyword is "0 Recommended Reviews." At the bottom is a gray link that leads to more than a dozen reviews that are "Not Recommended", all 5-star, including my own. I wasn't the first to review the shop, the other reviews were hidden.
I wrote Yelp support to ask why this review was censored, despite my other reviews for other businesses being accepted. They assured me that an algorithm decides what reviews are recommended for protection of customers and that's all that's happening.
However, within a day my review was the only recommended review, and the barber shop was live on the site instead of gray. A few other reviews have been accepted since.
Go have a look for yourself, scroll to the bottom of that shop and click the "x Reviews that are currently not recommended" link in gray at the bottom. You will even find my original 5 star review, so perhaps they made a copy of it to get it to show.
If that was your first review, it's almost always unrecommended at first. This stops a lot of the "ask your friends and families" for 5 stars sorts of reviews.
There is one curious review that shows up in the normal sort that looks like a "follow up" review despite both version of it being identical.
If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking. Once I starting paying they're typically hidden. Now if you manually go and and sort by Date they will still be there, they're not deleted and my star rating doesn't change - so I guess you're technically right that I don't get better ratings. I do think that most people don't realize that the most recent bad reviews aren't necessarily as visible though if you advertise with Yelp.
If so, that answers a lot of questions.
Thankfully they have zero traction here; my last place had a 4.5 rating on Google with 250+ reviews, and a 3.3 rating on Yelp with about 10 reviews.
It's a lot like the BBB. No one has to pay to be listed by the BBB but you can pay for the BBB to "arbitrate" disputes between consumers and your business when someone posts a strike against you on their site. You're just paying for them to contact the customer and hide their bad review.
They've probably carefully avoided lying while still being as misleading as possible.
> If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence
yelp may not alter the reviews themselves, but it does change the sorting of reviews and images for paying customers.
Also the willingness/capability to carry through on the threat used in extortion isn't directly required, just the threat itself. The execution of the threat is only important when you want the consequences of non-compliance broadly known.
> I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company.
Really? Yelp is a business which provides little to no customer support bandwidth. Sales is easiest point of contact for Businesses with questions about reviews. Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened.
For specific a specific claim that seems to provide evidence that something weird is going on:
> And what is indisputably clear is that Yelp’s claim that 75 percent of the reviews that get posted by Yelp users become recommended reviews is wildly inaccurate in the case of Baraka Café. When Yelp was only displaying 16 reviews and filtering out 30, it was displaying roughly 35% of all the reviews of Baraka Café, and suppressing 65% of them. It recommended less than half the claimed figure of 75%. Most importantly, none of the suppressed views were negative, only positive reviews were suppressed.[1]
[1] https://thetechnoskeptic.com/yelp-extortion-starring-role/
I really don't disagree with this having happened or it being possible that the culture/leadership turns a blind eye to it. My issue is that there is this oft-repeated claim that paying clients' selection, ranking, or content of reviews is somehow different from non-paying ones. It shouldn't be hard to study this claim and yet there is no evidence of it being true.
I've been to Baraka Cafe. It's great. Take a look at their "not currently recommended" reviews. As has been mentioned elsewhere, almost all (8 out of every 10) reviewers have 0 friends on yelp. Active accounts' reviews get preferential visibility.
Perhaps if I start a business and tell all my friends and family to create accounts and review it with 5 stars, I too will have evidence of yelp "altering" reviews when theirs are inevitably hidden for looking suspicious.
This is the equivalent of "why are you mad, I didn't take your wallet" as you're riding off on my bicycle.
I'm sorry that no one has formally studied Yelp's shady business practices, because that leaves us without data you find worthy of consumption. Maybe an enterprising law firm will change that once they smell enough blood in the water.
Until then, consider that swaying someone's opinion on Yelp using their own PR resources is a complete waste of everyone's time.
> Does the Big Bad Wolf blow down houses?
> "Of course I don't!"
If you opened the link, you'd also see a link to an independent scientific study on the subject: http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/papers%20on%20ris/fakeittillyoum...
Perhaps the issue is more with folks falling for conspiracy theories and urban myths without investigating the claims in an unbiased manner.
I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? If this were the case, we'd reach one of those dumb school-book economic equilibriums where no class-action lawsuits would take place. Businesses evaluate the risk of doing things, balancing profit against loss. Exposure to a lawsuit is just another number in that calculation.
> independent scientific study
That study is looking at whether fraudulent reviews are being added to the platform, not whether Yelp is calling up businesses and offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for money, which was my understanding of the original complaints against Yelp.
Businesses doing shady things will dance around the allegation of shadiness with clever language, legalese, and PR-talk to avoid saying the truth. They will rarely intentionally give an unequivocally simple and straightforward answer when there is some truth the allegation.
If yelp has salespeople that can alter reviews or how they show in any way, and those salespeople are incentivized to hit sales numbers, some subset of them will use the tools at their disposal to facilitate their sales.
In this theoretical scenario, is Yelp extorting businesses? No, it's just a few bad employees with an outside influence (and outsize sales numbers likely, too). But if Yelp knows about this and does nothing about it? It's gets more complicated then, and almost impossible to prove.
That's just one possible scenario where Yelp's statement is true, and the people reporting extortion are also being truthful, and depending on the details, Yelp is or isn't complicit in some way. A simple statement from either side doesn't really eliminate myriad possible situations like this, but given the number of reported instances of businesses having problems, I'm not so willing to discount that something is going on.
I've been threatened by SEO sales people that they can hurt my site's search rankings if I don't sign up for their service. There are robocallers[1] that pretend to be Google employees making these threats. Does that mean they have direct access into Google's database, or even the power to fulfill their threats? Do you think that local businesses, often run by much less technically-literate people, aren't hit by the same kind of scam for their online reviews?
[1]:https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-robocall-scam-were-suin...
Someone hearing complaints of Yelp coercing people shouldn't immediately believe it or believe it explains the whole situation, and neither should someone hearing Yelp's response. They are both possible insights into the actual reality of the situation, which may accurately describe part or al of that reality to varying degrees, and should be seen as exactly that.
Hmm, I wonder why Yelp would keep mentioning him.
https://blog.yelp.com/2016/10/academic-study-shows-yelp-ads-...
A good reminder to be critical about what you hear.
If Yelp's review algorithm has nothing to do with advertising spend then it should be fairly easy to have someone from PwC/Deloitte/E&Y look at the algorithm and issue a letter saying advertising spend isn't a factor. I'd give a lot more weight to a third-party review than I do the Buzzfeed article (not Buzzfeed News) and academic study on the ethics and incentives behind review fraud that Yelp has cited.
That’s what you get when auditing companies also do consulting.
1. image quality on the app is substantially worse than on desktop; a problem when you're trying to zoom into a large menu with small text
2. you can't search through image captions (i.e. to see only pictures of a particular menu item); possible on desktop but not on mobile
Back in the dot com days, I worked for one of those online phone directory start ups, and those fared better only in the naivete in capturing and manipulating data.
https://www.howtogeek.com/407789/how-to-stop-google-maps-rev...
I might not agree with that strategic direction as a customer, but its well within their right as a company to choose what they want to be.
They're will within their rights to do so, but it's also mega dumb and as such I have the right to not give them anymore of my business.
I don't bother with the Yelp app anymore because I'm sick and tired of having to re-download and re-log in to every app (which can be painful since I don't reuse passwords) every time I wipe the OS or get a new phone. Unless it's an app that doesn't need login, or that I use very frequently, it's just not worth it. I don't use Yelp often enough to justify it.
And the Google Maps app has fine reviews with less taint of corporate meddling anyway.
It isn't hostile - because as I stated, websites are often janky when used in a mobile browser, especially interactive websites, in which case the app is a net positive. This is my experience and opinion, and I don't hide behind "many people think __".
Everyone is free to have their opinion, but I hope you realize that passing it off as fact, and then forcing someone to agree with it is silly.
The question is not whether mobile apps are good things. (Everyone is free to have their own opinion about that.) The question is whether or not it's a good thing to force someone who does not want to use your mobile app to use it for your own reasons / or for your own benefit.
Yeah, and we're free to complain about it when they do so in a manner that's hostile to users.
Why are you so intent on defending this company against reasonable complaints about its product decisions?? If you don't agree with a particular complaint, just ignore it and move on. It's really strange how much you're inserting yourself into the conversation here though and shouting down and insulting everyone who says anything negative about the product.
I've been fighting for almost a year to get links in our profile pointed back to our website for a website with more than 1 Million hits a year and a 30k Google Ad spend.
I have no idea how to actually do this, I just remember seeing a link asking if I own this or that business on maps, I guess when it is unclaimed?
In fact when we log in to manage our profile it still shows the correct link, but the link replacement is happening on a layer in between the profile management and what displays to users.
After several years Google just swapped the link to a 3rd party that claims to have an agreement with us. Which there is no documentation of, and the dispute process is not handled by Google but the 3rd party directly. Which is why fixing it has taken over a year.
And to correct my earlier comment our Google Ad budgets is now 120k+ per year. But even this doesn't give us the ability to appeal to a higher authority and swap the link.
Looks ugly, but does the trick.