SF Bar Owner to Yelp: ‘Fuck All of These People Entirely’ | Hacker News Reader

SF Bar Owner to Yelp: ‘Fuck All of These People Entirely’

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54 pointszoolander226 comments

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Related discussion 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706307

>a Yelp spokesperson says “we have paused the automatic rollout of this feature,” as “it has come to our attention that some businesses did not receive a notification with opt-out instructions.”

if you've ever needed proof that this is a mirror dimension and not the prime reality, this is it.

one could imagine such a well intentioned conversation at yelp HQ, trying to connect damaged businesses (yelp clients) and their customers (also yelp clients) to gain easy PR during a disaster. the execution took a wrong turn and ended light years from reasonable. opt-out automatic enrollment of business funding? are you insane? there must be some dimension of go fund mes i do not understand because this seems likely to end in the atomization of one or both of yelp and GFM via lawsuit, not counting summary execution in the court of public opinion.

Is this what it looks like to me?

Businesses don't sign up, GoFundMe gets slapped on their Yelp pages, and they have to "claim" the money (without possibly even knowing it is there?).

Meaning all the "unclaimed" money sits in a nice pool for Yelp to happily earn interest on, invest with, or do other things? Or does this money stay with GoFundMe?

If it goes to Yelp and waits to be "claimed", this is indeed outrageous and is not intended to "help" anyone but themselves.

That can't be how it works, or legal, so I must have missed something. Hopefully.

I was assuming the money would just go back to the donators if it was never claimed, but that is a much more frightening idea. Hopefully Yelp clarifies.

Yes, the dynamics remind me of all the proposals for "orphaned works" where some agency collects royalties on stuff without a contract and creators are then forced to go beg from them and accept their terms without negotiation, or get nothing. In reality most creators never figure out or are aware of the system and the "facilitating agency" aka den of thieves is raking in billions that are never claimed.

What yelp is doing is kind of analogous to what brave browser is doing where people can give donations to any publisher website even if the publisher is not signed up with brave, and then brave will reach out to them to claim their donations.

Have you heard about the small child with cancer? He is dying and wants to see his favorite baseball team before he dies.

We are (I am) collecting funds to help him achieve his dream before his tiny life is extinguished. Won't you give what you can today?* Blessings, dear fellow kind human.

* Please note I have no connection to him or authorization to hold this fundraiser and if he doesn't contact me to claim the money I guess I'll have to keep it for myself but I'm not going to mention that in my appeal.

Jamie Zawinski aka JWZ is a well known for his contributions to Mozilla and XEmacs.[1]

He is also known for Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment :

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

1. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

I see echoes of the RIAA here. Artists told they are entitled to income, but have to sign up, spend money, register, and then get told "oh, the algorithm said you get cents"

I suspect Yelp is going to struggle to show financial transparency on this, and has a future-audit headache if they don't handle this well. The funds are very probably a liability on yelp's books, because the intent is clear: its not for them. If they don't disburse, they have a problem.

Yelp has consistently behaved in an exceptionally sociopathic manner for many many years. I don't see any reason why that should have changed. Does a leopard change its spots?

Yelp's eligibility criteria [1]:

>To be eligible, businesses must: (a) be in the United States, (b) have claimed their business on Yelp by March 22, 2020, and (c) have five or fewer locations. Additionally, businesses must (d) be listed in at least one of the following categories: Restaurants, Food, Nightlife, Beauty/Spas/Salons, or Active, though some exceptions apply; (d) have been negatively impacted by a government mandate due to the COVID-19 pandemic, (e) be independently owned and operated and not nationally dominant in their field, and (f) intend to use funds to either to help care for their employees / workers or pay ongoing business expenses.

The rest of the post sounds as though the process would be on an opt-in basis. I wonder when/why that changed.

[1] https://blog.yelp.com/2020/03/helping-local-businesses-raise...

When people don't trust you even when you try to do something good for them - literally giving them money - that's a clear indicator that your reputation is terrible. And this reasoning assumes an incredibly generous interpretation of Yelp's actions here, a company known for countless predatory business practices over many years.

I don’t understand the level of outrage here, it doesn’t seem to match the reality of what happened which was Yelp trying to help small businesses in a way they can. The opt-out and heads up for sure could’ve been done better though. But I don’t think it deserves this much aggression.

Business owners right now have a bunch of crap they're dealing with. They really don't need extra nonsense to opt-out of, and from the sounds of it the opt-out is more than just a button click.

What I don't understand is why seemingly the majority want to opt-out. Sure, it's a bit weird and presumptuous and they botched the communication, but these businesses really are struggling and they're potentially being handed free money?

Edit: I know Yelp has a track record of being scummy, it's just that in this case the catch isn't clear from my perspective

DNA Lounge already has a Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/dnalounge and a one-time donation page at https://www.dnalounge.com/donate/ .

What happens if an alternative GoFundMe site, auto-generated by Yelp, results in a reduction of the overall donation stream? Then it wouldn't be "free money", would it?

So, who decides if this plan is appropriate for the business?

Hint: not Yelp. Which is why it shouldn't be opt-out.

Plus, Yelp was defaulting to a 15% cut for Yelp. So if people were going to send $1,000 to a restaurant, but did it through Yelp instead of directly, then that would be an overall net loss.

A lot of restaurants are not struggling. Their chefs are still working and their waitstaff have turned into delivery drivers.

This doesn’t work for every fancy restaurant where the markup was for the experience but for food worth it’s price, it’s still worth it at home.

Aside from the already mentioned predatory nature of Yelp (I personally watched a smear campaign happen to a bar I played piano at in another life), IANAL but I think raising money for your business could have all sorts of unintended tax and legal ramifications the business owners did not sign up for.

Also, having one business have one of these campaigns but not, say, a competitor could be seen as a sign of weakness. Conversely, it could be seen as anti-competitive behaviour

The problem appears to be that it's not clear this money is actually "theirs" (the businesses), customers intending to donate via Go Fund Me through Yelp likely think they're actually giving money straight to the business when they're not, and businesses have to "claim" it later on (and yelp seems to have done a not-perfect job of letting them know about the whole thing). I think what's happening here is that Yelp's already toxic relationship with bars/restaurants in general is operating these owners' priors on what the intent of the whole endeavor was. "Fk all these people" might be rude but I'm going to suspend my usual condemnation of otherwise unjustified outrage right now, for obvious reasons.

I listed a couple of reasons in the previous HN story about this [1]. Ultimately I think it comes down to the lack of consent. These guys just unilaterally decided to involve all these companies in a business arrangement without getting any consent from the business owners.

Think of it this way: how would you like it if some prominent web site all of a sudden decided to put up a web page with your name on it and a picture of your face asking people for donations for the destitute and promising to send what they collect to you?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707173

Blackmail, extortion, protection money...

I agree it could have been rolled out better but people generally don't like surprises especially things like the donation page that probably signal that their businesses are on financial life support even if it's not the case.

I'm slightly surprised (this being HN) that no one has noted that the Jamie Zawinski quoted in the article is the Jamie Zawinski (jwz, known for Xemacs and Xscreensaver) . Or is it just too obvious to mention?

Regardless, his comments seem very much in character.

IMO 99% of the time, anything you need to "opt-out" of is bad for you.

Yelp is definitely in the fault here for starting gofundmes for restaurants without consent, but it’s not as if they murdered anyone. I tend to think that yelp genuinely had good intentions, as evidenced by the fact that they don’t profit off this and they would match donations to the gofundmes

> "Fuck All of These People Entirely"

I agree with this guy without even knowing what he's talking about. It's just a general finding.

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