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…
That is simply so terrible, a lot of apps on the market are jockeying for the "download numbers" instead of the customer experience.
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.
I like and have used Google reviews for a while after having had enough of Yelp's issues, to the point where I removed my many reviews from Yelp. However, I think Google has a ways to go to remove junk reviews. For example, 'Baguette et Chocolat' near Austin pissed off some open-carry person, who I think also runs a gun blog, last year by asking him to leave when he ignored their state-law-compliant signs prohibiting the same. He then proceeded to command his fans to leave bad reviews for this restaurant, and they complied in droves leaving useful gems such as 'Found out the owners are hoplophobes. Never giving them my business again.' . I spent quite a bit of time reporting these and I think many others did as well. Yelp shut down review logging for this restaurant fairly quickly at the time but I am not sure Google did anything - the above "review" is still present as of today. I am disappointed with Google but have come to realize that they embody the opposite of the motto: "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well." Edit: Google still allows logging reviews without comments, which further worsens the problem.
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'm no lawyer, but I'll bet on mandatory binding arbitration and no class action stuck into the agreement.
Isn't agreement to no class action an ipso facto law violation and unenforceable in most states -- e.g., the way noncompete provisions are in California?
In my area, Slice bought domains containing local pizzerias' names. Slice then set up the domains with sites branded with the local businesses' branding and replaced the phone numbers and online ordering with Slice's. Turns out Slice was able to beat those businesses at the SEO game and now those fake sites are the first results when looking for local pizzerias' contact info.
This is the exact game that OrderAhead played a few years ago:
Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each? I’ve never tried it, but unlike Dropbox, with OneDrive you can share folders without the shared folders taking away from your storage. With Dropbox for instance with the free account, if you have 2GB of storage and use a shared folder with 2GB of storage you still hav…
> Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each? Well, what is Dropbox doing wrong that they have to charge so much more? (Given that offering more products for the same price basically equivalent to charging less per product)
Who's to say they're doing anything wrong? Microsoft is a huge company that can subsidize products using their profits from other products. They book Office 365 revenue as cloud revenue, and they're eager to grow that portion of their business to make Azure look good. So they're basically giving away services and throwing money at it to pad growth for Azure.
If anything, it's likely Dropbox's prices are closer to the true cost of providing the service.
I'm curious whether Yelp is only doing this in states without two-party consent to record. In the article the author (Yelp user/restaurant customer) is told the line is recorded before being connected through but the restaurant employee on the other end appears completely unaware. I would guess there are at least a few Attorneys General who would take issue with this approach. It's not even close to the shadiest part…
The article states that Grubhub is recording the calls.
... yes. In states that require two-party consent to record a conversation (CA & MA, for example) Grubhub can't record a call without telling _everyone_ on the call it's being recorded. The article opens with a story of the author having a conversation with a restaurant employee who's clearly unaware of the recording.
I've found Google Maps review quality and quantity improved over the last few years so it's rare that I'd even open Yelp in recent months. With this, I'm deleting my Yelp app.
Lately I’ve noticed Google Maps had better images. Not sure if they scrape some of them but they didn’t overlap with Yelp. Google Maps reviews also tend to be more positive. The two bad things I noticed were fake guides and a few bogus sounding comments.
Really wish they'd make it easy to show images of menus in restaurants. I usually use Yelp for easily viewing photos of different aspects from interior/exterior to menu, etc.
I'm no lawyer, but I'll bet on mandatory binding arbitration and no class action stuck into the agreement.
Isn't agreement to no class action an ipso facto law violation and unenforceable in most states -- e.g., the way noncompete provisions are in California?
The other way around. The supreme court continually permits no class action in agreements split right down political lines.
Did you work on it as NoWait or at Yelp (formerly NoWait). If you worked on it as the original NoWait, have you seen any changes, positive or negative, now that the feature is under Yelp's umbrella?
I worked on it from the Yelp side during the intitial partnership/integration. So, I can't comment on the NoWait perspective, but I will say that almost all of the NoWait software team is still working at Yelp 2+ years post-aquisition.
What's the general Yelp employee vibe like when news like this comes out about features they've worked on?
Is it a feeling of "meh, we're growing revenue" or more of a "they completely misunderstood the value we're delivering based on what our users asked for" scenario?
Makes me think really hard about tech’s blind adoration for the “PayPal mafia.” I find myself seeing more instances of soul crushing amoral behavior from this group of entrepreneurs than just about any other group.
It's worth pointing out that Google shamelessly cloned Yelp and funnels everyone into using their clone when they search for restaurants. If Yelp is in desperate spot its because Google put them there.
Google also did it better, but that's just my opinion.