
Yelp's Legal Troubles Mount - newsit
http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2010/03/third-lawsuit-filed-against-yelp.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+inc%2Fheadlines+%28Inc.com+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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mdasen
It's just a murky place. To be honest, I think I believe Yelp. SPAM is hard to
figure out - especially when it's shill reviews - and it's easy to imagine an
outsourced sales staff (working on commission) making all sorts of
demands/promises to boost their next paycheck.

The issue is that Yelp has the incentive to be evil here. That doesn't mean
they are being evil, but incentive + coincidence == evidence? It does to many
people.

From what we've seen: Yelp is important to business since it's a site that
creates a reputation for you. Good reviews help you, bad ones hurt. Yelp does
some sort of SPAM protection to remove vindictive/shill reviews. Yelp has the
ability to manipulate all their data. Yelp has the ability to ruin your
reputation or create a good reputation for you through that manipulation. Some
businesses are complaining that Yelp _is_ using that power and asking for
money to keep a good reputation.

But there's hardly evidence. There are no emails being posted showing someone
asking for money and no recorded phone calls. Reviews are disappearing and
appearing, but we always change around data and sometimes algorithms are
complex enough that you can immediately see why when you don't know the
intent. I mean, a week or so ago I saw an article posted 4 hours ago with 30
votes showing up lower than an article posted 6 hours ago with 24 votes. OMG!
PG is manipulating HN for articles he likes!

Maybe. But maybe it's more complicated than votes and time. Maybe the age of
each vote is used rather than the age of the article. Maybe some of the votes
were from SPAM accounts. Maybe it uses karma to determine vote weight. I could
look up most of that in the source (SPAM stuff being absent there), but I just
wanted to bring a relatable scenario into the mix.

If Yelp is manipulating reputation for profit, it borders on blackmail and
they should be sued out of existence. But I have yet to see anything
conclusive that would indicate that. To me, it looks like blundering mistakes
- hiring a bad sales staff that lies; not making SPAM prevention and
algorithmic changes transparent and understandable; etc. Those are problems.
Being blundering and causing problems is something that one needs to address
and it might be that Yelp is derelict in their duty (morally, legally,
otherwise - I'll leave those bikeshed arguments for others). And maybe part of
it is hiring humans to read reviews and make determinations about shill level
- we can all imagine sending out an email blast to 100 people asking them to
rate us as 5-star on Yelp and then a deluge of reviews that were very short
over a small period of time all being 5-star (and how that would look
suspicious).

I think transparency is the key here. Yelp needs to open the conversation up a
bit and explain a bit better than "algorithms do it". I know, once you tell
people how SPAM prevention works, it ceases to be prevention. Still, it's the
reputation of businesses.

As for now, I'm willing to give Yelp the benefit of the doubt, but I hope the
whole truth will come out in the future.

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ghshephard
I'll pay attention to this story when someone provides either:

    
    
       A) An email 
       B) A recorded phone call
    

that suggests there is inappropriate behavior taking place on behalf of Yelp.
Ever since that East Oakland story, where they became not only high profile,
but transitioned into being a hundred million dollar plus company that has a
chance to _own their market_, I have a very hard time believing they would
screw it up by making these types of mistakes.

This isn't a case of classmates.com which demonstrated almost complete
incompetence, and never left the bottom-feeding stage. Yelp really gets it,
and their "Elite" reviewers make the site a phenomenal resource when trying to
get a sense of how good something like a restaurant is.

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hkuo
So does this make it 3 companies so far filing suit? If I do the math (well,
do I really need to?), if this were a regular business practice Yelp was
involved in, wouldn't you think that there would be wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more
businesses chiming in? I actually can't fathom the number of businesses there
are in their database. Couldn't even venture a guess.

Even if what these businesses are saying is true, I would regard them as
extremely isolated incidents that could have been done by individuals within
the company with a vendetta. But again, I would more likely consider the chain
of events coincedences.

I'll need to see way more companies accusing Yelp of this before I would even
consider Yelp at any fault.

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roboneal
261 Yelp page views to 158...

The article infers these are monthly page views (July to August)?

The furniture store claims a drop of 25% of revenue - that's a lot of revenue
for 103 pageviews. He must "convert" very well.

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hkuo
I would actually say that yes, Yelp converts very well for small businesses.

Recently, when I was looking for a printing shop to print my wedding
invitations, I was very highly intent on giving someone my business. Out of
the 4 printers I researched on Yelp, I picked one and paid for that company's
services.

Generally, people browsing Yelp have a very specific goal. They're searching
for a business to use and ready to choose and pay.

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nycticorax
After reading this article, and the Yelp blog posts about the issue, it sounds
to me like Yelp is doing exactly what they claim to be doing, and what they
should be doing. Yelp says that there's a "Chinese wall" between the people
selling ads on Yelp and the people managing reviews. Former Yelp employees
seem to vouch for this. The people suing them don't seem to have any evidence
that the ad-sellers are manipulating the reviews. Furthermore, some of the
people suing Yelp admit that they solicited reviews from happy customers,
which Yelp considers a no-no (and they've made this clear in public).

The only thing the people suing Yelp seem to have going for them is that some
of the positive reviews for their businesses (some of which were admittedly
solicited) got removed not long after they declined to buy advertising on
Yelp. Yelp essentially says that this was a coincidence: Their automatic
filters try to eliminate solicited (and vindictive) reviews, and the filters
happened to do their thing shortly after these businesses were approached by
Yelp's ad-sellers. But there's really no solid evidence of causality. Given
the number of businesses covered by Yelp, you'd expect this sort of thing to
happen occasionally. Furthermore, there are a lot of businesses that _do_ buy
ads that still have negative reviews on Yelp. So.

Also, did anyone else think of PG's essay "The Submarine" when reading that
Inc. article? To me, it really seemed like the article was biased against
Yelp, to the extent that I wondered whether some of the lawyers suing Yelp
have hired a PR firm...

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jrockway
The problem is that the businesses are trying to hold Yelp responsible for its
user's behaviors. The fact that nobody clicks through when the business has a
3-star rating is not Yelp's fault, it's the collective-userbase's fault.

Yelp is being sued because it's an easy target for angry business owners, not
because they did anything wrong. (If they didn't exist, they wouldn't push
_any_ traffic to the restaurant. The problem is that they do exist and that
users trust them.)

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sjsivak
That is not it at all. The lawsuit claims (from what I read in the article)
that the issue is before turning down an offer to advertise on the site for
$300 a month, the company had a 4.5 star rating. Two days after the refusal,
the company claims that six out of seven 5 star reviews were removed (by
Yelp).

This is about being forced to pay to keep your good reviews, not about page
views. The company is just saying that with a reduced rating they saw less
traffic, which is to be expected.

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jrockway
Why is Yelp obliged to publish favorable reviews? If a newspaper critic said
"I hate this place", that would be fine. But if Yelp does it, it's not fine?
Why is that?

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sjsivak
1\. I have no idea what obligations Yelp has, legally or otherwise.

2\. Legal definition of extortion (IANAL): The use, or the express or implicit
threat of the use, of violence or other criminal means to cause harm to
person, reputation, or property as a means to obtain property from someone
else with his consent.

Seems like (to my untrained and uneducated self) that this would be Yelp
damaging the Company's reputation because the Company refused to pay Yelp.

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jrockway
"criminal means" is the key word. Removing comments from a website that you
operate is not criminal. I hope.

