Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

Post by pomian » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 12:20 AM UTC

Diederich wrote: post #186

kjs3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you use, if you don't mind sharing? 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.

Post by rconti » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 12:22 AM UTC

ajb wrote: post #33

In 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…

Post by Qwertious » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 12:36 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #164

sxzxs wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Post by m463 » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 12:41 AM UTC

kens wrote: post #222

ajb wrote: post #33

In 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…

> the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on. (The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burr…

Post by Can_Not » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 12:48 AM UTC

cgriswald wrote: post #229

Kalium wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant. What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes i…

> Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map. On desktop, maybe. Here's my experience trying this out on mobile (safari/iOS) just now: I searched for "Pizza" with "San Francisco, CA" pre-filled. I am presented with a screen that ostensibly gives me a choice between "Open in the Yelp App"…