Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut • Hacker News Board

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#71

Post by Kique » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

ilikehurdles wrote: post #24

kadabra9 wrote: post #12

Yelp is such a slimy company. 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 t…

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... 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…

The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system.

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.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#72

Post by slenk » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

tjr225 wrote: post #2

I had to install their app to get in line at a local restaurant. Immediately uninstalled. I don't see why people use Yelp other than the fact that they have a mindshare dominance on ratings. User generated/internet 2.0 style food ratings are basically useless anyway, add in all of the other shady stuff Yelp does and you have a hard pass from me.

That would make me immediately leave the restaurant for good.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#73

Post by ilikehurdles » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #66

ilikehurdles wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read? 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 f…

> In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read? 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…

>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?

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.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#74

Post by fancyfish » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

icanhasfay wrote: post #44

(Serious Q) What other good alternatives are out there for Yelp?

For food, I've enjoyed Foursquare for a better signal:noise ratio in reviews. I am generally quite satisfied eating at its top-reviewed places for any given search term. Coverage of locations is almost as good as Yelp although you'll miss a few restaurants here and there (I'm in NYC).

Just be sure to turn off the always-on location tracking and go through the other privacy settings.

I typically cross-reference Foursquare with Google Maps reviews to make sure the overall rating is similar, since I'm a stickler like that.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#75

Post by oliveshell » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #28

kadabra9 wrote: post #12

Yelp is such a slimy company. 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 t…

Are other companies that have apps but not sites (or their site is just a download button) slimy? Should yelp not be allowed to pivot from website to app? 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.

No one is arguing that Yelp shouldn’t be allowed to funnel customers to their app. We’re just condemning the choice as shitty and user-hostile.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#76

Post by noncoml » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #29

kadabra9 wrote: post #12

Yelp is such a slimy company. 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 t…

I just turn around and go to Google’s reviews.

From Scylla to Charybdis

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#77

Post by largbae » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

ilikehurdles wrote: post #24

kadabra9 wrote: post #12

Yelp is such a slimy company. 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 t…

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... 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 think the challenge with finding firsthand reports on HN is that the owners of small brick-and-mortar businesses that Yelp is alleged to exploit are not well represented in this community.

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.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#78

Post by wtvanhest » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #46

scarface74 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote Jobs about Dropbox - Yelp is a feature not a product.

Steve Jobs FTW yet again. I thought he was wrong about Dropbox for the longest time. But their latest attempts at "productizing" their service (Adobe / Zoom / Slack / Atlassian / Google Docs / Office integrations, "social" features, etc. etc.) have convinced me that simple file sync, which is all I ever wanted from them, is not enough to sustain a company. Meanwhile the shareholder-induced march downwards continues.

Everything is just a product over a long enough time scale

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#79

Post by SkyPuncher » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

leroy_masochist wrote: post #6

I'm no lawyer, but to my layman's eyes this has class action lawsuit written all over it. Would love to hear an actual tort attorney's perspective on this.

I don't agree with it, but I don't really see the legal argument.

They're a private business routing calls through a private service. Tons of companies do that.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#80

Post by stri8ed » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

Fjolsvith wrote: post #10

stri8ed wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Yelp since its significantly harder to fake reviews on it than it is on Google. That, and the community culture is centered on high-quality reviews.

As a Google guide, I can flag irrelevant content in Google reviews.

The volume of fake reviews is simply too much, and its much cheaper to create them, than it is to combat them. A good measure of this is, compare the prices for fake reviews on both platforms, I suspect Google will be significantly cheaper.

Its a tough problem to solve, no doubt, but Yelp chooses to error on the side of caution, and will sometimes flag legitimate reviews as "not recommended reviews" as a result.