181–190 of 300 posts
I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Very 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?
So chances are if you ever called via Yelp into one of such Grubhub numbers, they got at least your voice and your food preferences (which might include medical/dietary needs) on record, maybe even your full details and CC number etc (depending on the quality of their automated censoring algorithms and on whether or not they store the original unredacted calls as well).
“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”, as their phone robot tells you :P
You have no right to free speech with a private company. Stop talking about it.
They don't want you publish your phone numbers, they don't have to.
Relevant XKCD -
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 engin…
It doesn't matter that Google created the monster that is SEO, thr fact is that it exists and it's how most people navigate the web. Google creating AMP further breaks it and gives Google even more control. Google is very much the yelp of the Internet. I understand where you are coming from being an 80s baby myself, however more and more young adults see google as the homepage of the internet, much as many now see Fa…
But "fundamentally broken" is hyperbole.
I think that "Deities" is also hyperbole. The people under 40 that I know regard Google as a corporation that does useful stuff, sometimes almost as if by magic, but not godlike.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's obvious to you that corporations don't break laws because doing so is illegal? That's very naive.
> It's obvious to you that corporations don't break laws because doing so is illegal? No, you're over-generalizing my claim. My claim is that it's rare for large companies (with established legal counsel) to approve of illegal policy changes when those changes are very public and likely to be noticed.
Something like this though was almost certainly not one of those gambles.
I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
My wife does various kinds of consulting for local small businesses and we have many stories (that I've put in other Yelp WTF replies here on HN previously) about how horrible Yelp is.
While we know that Google is by far from perfect, that's what we use almost exclusively in this space, though very open to alternatives.
I 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…
If someone says the internet is broken they always mean "It doesn't work how I want it to!" Can we bury that stupid meme already?
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>These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away. And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles. This is clearly an issue that needs to be dealth with but the problem is that it's not a problem we can engineer our way of, we need to confr…
> And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles. It's even worse than that, because it's so hard to tell if this is even happening. Suppose guidance counselors in predominantly black schools are telling kids to focus on athletics and the ones in predominantly white schools tell them to focus on intellectual extracurriculars. Then…
I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.