Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 126 posts

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#111

Post by DamnInteresting »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #107
DamnInteresting wrote: post #64

Via a bit of sleuthing, I managed to figure out what business this person is writing about. I could post a link to the Yelp page, but that feels a bit doxxy, so I don't know if it's appropriate. The business does have more one-star reviews than one might normally expect, but the texts of the accompanying reviews contain specific details of complaints, and the complaints are appropriate for the ISP/TV category. For ex…

Isn't it also possible that when you buy that plan from Yelp, they push your company more and that leads to more negative reviews along with positive ones? But as part of that agreement (they might not tell you they do it), they hide the negative ones (all or some, or maybe even only temporarily) so that your company thrives. If you thrive, Yelp thrives because they want your business to keep paying for Yelp and you…

> Isn't it also possible that when you buy that plan from Yelp, they push your company more and that leads to more negative reviews along with positive ones? But as part of that agreement (they might not tell you they do it), they hide the negative ones (all or some, or maybe even only temporarily) so that your company thrives.

Sure, it's possible that perverse incentives would drive Yelp to such rationalized missteps, my argument is that it would be easy to prove if it's true. But none of the complaining businesses have offered proof, only conjecture.

I'm not "calling bullshit" here, I'm just asking for evidence in a scenario where evidence should be easily accessible if it exists. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#112

Post by cxseven »

dsp1234 wrote: post #82
cerved wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your standard of proof is very high. Who records all of their phone calls (presumably without consent which is illegal in my jurisdiction) and makes an archive of their yelp page periodically? This is not the only company to face such allegations and afaik it's not the first time yelp has been accused either. I think you'll have to base this one on anecdotal stories.

their phone calls (presumably without consent which is illegal in my jurisdiction) IANAL, but if the call starts out with the standard, "Please note that this call is being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes", or similar, then you are free to record that conversation and it would not be illegal. All parties to the call have been informed that the call is being recorded, and thus no wire tapping laws…

Yes, I believe the "consent" is judged to have been given if a party continues the call after being informed that it is not a private, unrecorded call. So if one party announces that it's recording the call, all parties who continue the call (including the recording party) have supposedly consented to that breach of privacy.

It's probably also not that unusual for Yelp to call a business that plays this announcements to its incoming callers, and actually records them. I can only guess that we haven't seen this evidence because the offended business might have preferred to settle things in private.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#113

Post by valuearb »

Analemma_ wrote: post #74
metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

Here's what I said ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849689#12850055 ) the last time this was brought up: > That said, it would be nice if someone presented some evidence to back up claims that yelp is doing something "corrupt". This is an extremely difficult standard to meet. A lot of the accusations against Yelp involve phone calls with their sales reps, which is not public data that can be aggregated and pa…

A common internet poker conspiracy story goes like this, Player becomes very unlucky after withdrawing money from site, so obviously site is punishing them for withdrawing. But there is a huge amount of variance in poker, so you can be lucky or unlucky for extended periods without being targeted by the site. And, no one ever rushes to the internet to complain about getting extra lucky after they withdraw.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#114

Post by brilliantcode »

brilliantcode wrote: post #92
jps359 wrote: post #45

Louis Rossman (the guy who makes mac repair videos) had this happen to him too, and did some investigating of his own/connected the dots between the Yelp salesperson and the person leaving 1 star reviews on his business page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY

Unfuckingbelievable. If you google Eric Sperber, you can see that youtube show up in first page results. I wonder how in hell is Yelp not giving a fuck? They even tried to take down the video but that guy was smart enough to upload a backup on S3 and many ppl have copies ready to be distributed. At least Yelp knows about streisand law....

who would actually support yelp sales extorting small buinesses? wtf HN?

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#115

Post by nvr219 »

metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

I have a yelp page for my small business. I got a call from their sales team, listened to the spiel, thought about it for a few days and decided it wouldn't be worth the investment. I told the salesperson so, and that was it. No harassment, no noticeable impact on my page. Just an anecdote... Maybe I'm too small a fish to be worth their trouble :)

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#116

Post by angry-hacker »

Diederich wrote: post #98
openmosix wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were just discussing this with my wife yesterday. The very same story happened to our doula, who's very non-technical and she asked us what to do (we are both engineers). Short story: she had a profile on Yelp, almost 20 5-star reviews from former customers (who spend, on average, 2/3 months with her - so each star is a big deal). One day Yelp! connects with her proposing her to become a paid customer, how could t…

Yup, sounds about right. In my wife's correspondences with Yelp (via voice and e-mail) on behalf of her clients, they kept focusing on that word 'algorithm'....like it's some magical, mystical thing that nobody really understands or controls. That was the key word that was used in all of the bullshit deflections. Thing is, Yelp is absolutely dominant in this space, so we're all kind of stuck with it.

Why are they so dominant? Do they rank so well on a Google in the U.S?

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#117

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

jly wrote: post #52
metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

A business I used recently for some tree maintenance in my town had a 1-star Yelp review which was perplexing. In this case, the business and owner are well-known in the area as one of the best at what they do and top subject matter experts. While digging a little, I found that Yelp was highlighting only the four 1-star reviews and factoring only those into the score. Each of these reviews is responded to by the owne…

If this is true, wouldn't it be pretty easy to write some sort of scraper that pulls all of this information from both yelp and google and reveals such discrepancies?

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#118

Post by Diederich »

angry-hacker wrote: post #116
Diederich wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, sounds about right. In my wife's correspondences with Yelp (via voice and e-mail) on behalf of her clients, they kept focusing on that word 'algorithm'....like it's some magical, mystical thing that nobody really understands or controls. That was the key word that was used in all of the bullshit deflections. Thing is, Yelp is absolutely dominant in this space, so we're all kind of stuck with it.

Why are they so dominant? Do they rank so well on a Google in the U.S?

I really don't know how they became so dominant, but Yelp is basically The Way my family and tons of people we know find services, restaurants, and the like. We live in the SF Bay Area; I don't know how widely applicable it is, but based on the work my wife has done with her customers (all over the US), Yelp is generally pretty important everywhere in a lot of sectors.

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#119

Post by yuhong »

Diederich wrote: post #73
metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

One thing that Yelp absolutely does do, I've seen it with my own eyes, is play with 'recommended' reviews based on whether the business in question is paying them. I can't provide hard links because it's a client of my wife's business. Specifically, a business had about 20 very positive reviews in total, all of them 'recommended'. A review that isn't 'recommended' basically doesn't exist; it doesn't count toward the…

I have been thinking about it. Are most of these "clients" owned by people who don't know much about Yelp?

Re: Business cancels Yelp advertising contract, negative reviews start pouring in

#120

Post by yuhong »

Diederich wrote: post #73
metalliqaz wrote: post #13

I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence. There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Inte…

One thing that Yelp absolutely does do, I've seen it with my own eyes, is play with 'recommended' reviews based on whether the business in question is paying them. I can't provide hard links because it's a client of my wife's business. Specifically, a business had about 20 very positive reviews in total, all of them 'recommended'. A review that isn't 'recommended' basically doesn't exist; it doesn't count toward the…

I wonder if it would be worth modifying state extortion laws to cover this.
Post reply on HN