61–70 of 95 posts
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Soliciting someone to pay for an account to remove negative public reviews comes close to blackmail, correct?
Close, but not quite. Blackmail would be if they held the negative reviews and then released them if they refused to pay. This is more like a sleezy PR person that offers to help bury a story that they themselves are promoting.
The Internet reminds of me of driving. Most people will scream at another driver for cutting them off on a merge -- assuming the driver was being aggressive and entitled (he thinks is time is so much more important than mine!). That same driver will find himself on a road, not paying enough attention, only to discover his lane is ending at the last second and expects another driver to let them in and understand it was just a mistake.
We scream because we don't see the other driver as a human being, just an angry caricature of a bad driver (and we're not actually confronting that driver directly). On the Internet, we'll rip a mom and pop or small restaurant business apart because of a server who had too many tables and one bad dining experience. That same person likely didn't talk to the manager or give them an opportunity to make the situation better because it's a lot less socially intimidating to hit Yelp and tear into them via a bad review.
[0] My favorite is "bed bug" reports at hotels. Practically every single hotel I've stayed at in the last few years has had at least one review claiming bed bugs (some with pictures for evidence). It's a problem pretty much everywhere and in those reviews I look for a hint about how the hotel handled the situation. If it was taken care of in a reasonable manner (regardless of what the reviewer feels was reasonable), I won't hold it against the hotel.
How adorable. Yelp taking the moral high ground. Once I wrote a negative review for a business describing my personal experience with them. The company first wrote me an email and asked me to remove it, I obviously didn't because everything I wrote was true. Then Yelp removed my review, because it was "irrelevant"! :-) Strangely enough, that business had all positive reviews on Yelp with near 5/5 score, while on Goog…
> Does anyone even care about Yelp scores at this point? Hundreds of millions of users?
Protecting free speech is about a framework of process, transparency, inclusion, and democracy.
Yelp is not a transparent, inclusive democracy with processes in place to ensure we can each express ourselves freely. It is a business, driven by business decisions, run by business people, for its customer, in the interest of it owners.
Period.
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Companies are gaming verified purchases now. There are several sites that provide a service of connecting reviewers with companies who provide their products for a hefty discount with the expectation of getting a perfect review. Companies are allowed to vet your previous reviews to determine how likely you are to give a good review before giving you a discount code. If reviewers don't deliver, they stop getting disco…
Seems like an obvious thing for Amazon to check out then ban all reviews and or products on these services.
Banning products: Companies could knock out competing products by starting a "false flag" review campaign that Amazon eventually discovers.
Banning reviews: It can be legitimate to provide samples of products for people to review and helps encourage competition, it's more about the method of the approach.
The best approach is if Amazon just facilitated the whole approach to ensure integrity. I think they attempted this with their Vine program, but that might be too one-size-fits-all for some companies.
I think one of the things Yelp has caused (or, perhaps, needs to cause) is a change in consumer behavior related to bad reviews. I've learned, over the years, to disregard certain kinds of bad reviews[0] or not choose to avoid a company because it has a small number of poor reviews. The Internet reminds of me of driving. Most people will scream at another driver for cutting them off on a merge -- assuming the driver…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
It's definitely helpful to keep in mind.
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> There are far too many businesses who've been open 10+ years with thousands of customers that have never felt the necessity to leave a review. I wonder what could be a good way to incentivise this. If I like a restaurant, I'll go back multiple times. At most, I may leave a good review once. If I go to a bad place, I'm more likely to leave a bad review. Maybe businesses could integrate a "did business here $x amount…
We were thinking about giving cards with the Tripadvisor name/link to restaurants to give then only to those customers that seems specially happy; however the local restaurants where I live are really technophobic so they just saw it as overhead with no benefit.
No way.
Nothing to do with the post, but I wonder why they've chosen to host the blog on a separate domain instead of a subdomain on the official site. I did confirm blog.yelp.com redirects to it, but still it's easy to be suspicious of a separate domain not having the same owners.
Doing the right thing in one instance of one aspect of "free speech" is not "protecting free speech". Protecting free speech is about a framework of process, transparency, inclusion, and democracy. Yelp is not a transparent, inclusive democracy with processes in place to ensure we can each express ourselves freely. It is a business, driven by business decisions, run by business people, for its customer, in the intere…
I wish as a society we can make up our minds on this.
Nothing to do with the post, but I wonder why they've chosen to host the blog on a separate domain instead of a subdomain on the official site. I did confirm blog.yelp.com redirects to it, but still it's easy to be suspicious of a separate domain not having the same owners.
I gather that this sort of thing happens a lot because the bureaucracy around getting IT to set up a subdomain is so onerous that it becomes easier to just buy a new domain and set it up independently.