I fail to understand how exactly yelp/grubhub would bill the 10-20% of the order amount of the phone call. The call is recorded, yes (a reason why they can forget about that in the EU, in the EU you would need to implement a system for the caller to deny consent of the recording while on the line other than "if you don't like being recorded hang up now"). But do they manually listen to every phone call, make sure the restaurant place tells the correct amount, calculate their fee and put this on a bill to the restaurant?
Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
161–170 of 300 posts
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that don't end in a sale. i would bet 99%+ of all calls to restaurants from grubhub end in a sale, thus making this law meaningless. edit: why did i get downvoted for this? it adds to the discussion and it doesn't break any of HN's rule. are people just not happy about it or something? wtf.
Have any data to back up that claim?
What data would be required? A betting slip? (-:
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#163In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator). If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to…
A few people seemed to have missed an important step in the argument:
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#164In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator). If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to…
Can you elaborate more on (or give an example of) "mechanical honesty"? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem unfeasible to implement biases in mechanical systems (especially government departments!), but I haven't given it a lot of thought.
The phone book.
It's a public mapping of people and businesses with how to contact them. Any dishonesty would be noticed, because everyone has the same phone book.
Contrast with getting a phone number from $large-company, be it Yelp, Google or otherwise. The only thing stopping them from selling this privilege to an intermediary is their reputation, and clearly where Yelp is concerned, this isn't enough.
One could argue that Google has been exploiting this since the creation of AdWords: they will happily sell the right to advertise on a search for your exact company name to a competitor, a nice income stream which verges on extortion.
It's even possible to deliver personalized dishonest results; applications including search engines know who you are, and can lie to you and only you.
It's certainly possible to be 'mechanically dishonest', but no question that contemporary technology makes it easier and more lucrative.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#165I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system. In order for that site to show up first i…
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
Yes, I've been saying for years that there's a fundamental contradiction in the paid search model. If the best content moves to the top organically, it doesn't need to pay, so only the not-best content will pay, which degrades search results. So, Google has perverse incentive to put the best content not at the top so it can force them to pay go get to the top. (The same dynamic applies on FB feeds, although the definition of "best" there is fuzzier.)
The solution is that advertising against algorithmically moderated content should be illegal. It breaks the contradiction because now users will have to pay to get the top content, instead of content providers paying for visibility.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#166I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system. In order for that site to show up first i…
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web.
Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created.
> In the old days we had paid search engines
I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#167Very cool update at the top of the article "NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here." Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
How would Yelp know whether or not my call to a local restaurant ended in a sale without listening in on the phone call?
They are listening in on the phone call.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there are definitely anecdotes about this kind of behavior, I have yet to see evidence of systemic or corporate-sponsored effort to do this. I believe this is more a question of possibly poorly-incentivized sales people rather than an intentional strategy on behalf of Yelp. I think this is backed up by a number of lawsuits that haven't gone anywhere. I might be mistaken; if there is a source showing this is rea…
I'm in no way defending anything google here, I was just stating that Yelp if as bad is not worse than google (as they are more desperate for revenue). And I have no incentive to lie, the anecdote was something that happened to a close friend of mine and know what kind of distress it caused. I have no idea if their corporate strategy is to " extort ", but from noticing other incidents they're not too far off. Their a…
Out of principle I trust Google more than Yelp as they're less incentivized to extort small businesses. Also companies that cripple their mobile site (while having a functional desktop site) to force an app download deserve everything bad that happens to them
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#169In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator). If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to…
"Mechanical honesty" worked because it was much harder to have automated "if statement" mechanisms with non-electronic machinery. And then electronic computers made it much, much easier.
Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)
#170I don't get it. It's well known yelp is awful. Why hasn't a competitor emerged to take them on?