Lone Yelp review dogs business owner • Hacker News Board

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#151

Post by ebrenes » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 8:14 PM UTC

VladRussian wrote: post #110

jxcole wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong, but with the right attitude. A while ago, SEOMoz reported a similar problem with ripoff report: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-ripoff-report-la... Apparently, suing them for libel laws is impossible because of CDA, but suing them under RICO might work. CDA says that you can't sue someone for content posted by their users. RICO is an anti-mafia law that says if you are part of an organization that…

>CDA says that you can't sue someone for content posted by their users. how about manipulating the content posted by their users - hiding some parts of it and prominently show other?

I think if one were to try to sue them, one would have to mount an attack along this vector. The editorial nature of their review system could be seen as a generator of new content (even if it is based on used-submitted content); the end result (in terms of message and tone) is considerably different to the initial material.

I wonder though if such an approach has any legal merits. I've heard of something similar with copyright, where aggregating data for example and presenting it in new ways is copyrightable. I think one could expand upon that approach and use it as a basis for the complaint.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#152

Post by pconf » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 9:57 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #80

pbz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Yelp does is a racket, similar to what BBB does. In Yelp's case they are being helped by Google and other search engines. The problem is that when people link to them that's an upvote in Google's eyes. After enough upvotes are gained, provided they don't spam, there's little anybody can do to downvote them. It's not like you can negatively link to them. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the like and…

I suspect Yelp is extremely venerable and could be successfully sued from several angles. However, the court system tends to protect such companies on free speech grounds etc. So, their downfall will probably come from leaked internal operations rather than any external source.

This isn't the first extortion attempt we've read about over the past few years, and Yelp's excuse is always their so called impartial "algorithm". Google, for their part, extorts Yelp in much the same way, as they used to do with Experts-exchange, until that racket became too obvious. If Yelp reviews were not so useless they'd probably have been sued for racketeering by now. That said I bet the first Federal RICO case they go up against will put them out of business.

Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

#153

Post by AppSec » Fri, Sep 09, 2011, 7:24 PM UTC

jeremymims wrote: post #84

It's easy to come down against Yelp, but small businesses have been trying to "game" Yelp in unsophisticated ways for some time. We work with a lot of small businesses and I've had conversations with a statistically significant number of them who have admitted trying to flood Yelp with reviews they've written themselves, writing reviews under fake named accounts, and providing over-glowing text for reviews to be subm…

The question is: Why doesn't Yelp have a flag for someone whom is posting a significant number of negative replies and one positive reply for the same business category?

Would make me question whether or not the owner of the business receiving a positive reply is trying to game Yelp's system.