
Yelp.com Stands Accused of Acting Like a "Modern-Day Mafia" - vaksel
http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2010-04-22/news/yelp-com-stands-accused-of-acting-like-a-modern-day-mafia
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nfnaaron
_Every_ business has good and bad interactions with customers. For most
businesses the bad ones are unfortunate but isolated cases. For those where
it's a pattern, they'll eventually lose enough business that they'll change or
die.

What yelp has done is to artificially magnify the effect of an individual
complaint. Most people don't bother to write publicly one way or the other,
and (I think) people with a negative experience are more likely to complain
publicly.

The effect of yelp is "world changing" in some sense; they make it easier for
perfectly good businesses to go out of business. Not really what I'd want my
life's work to be, but to each his own, I guess.

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bkbleikamp
Yelp's data would seem to indicate that users with a positive experience are
more likely to write a review: <http://www.yelp.com/press>

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AlexBlom
I wonder if those figures are massaged, considering everything else going on!

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moultano
Amazon has observed exactly the same behavior. The average review for
something on the internet is 4.5 stars.

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mahmud
What about astroturfing by product vendors?

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iamdave
And I'm supposed to let Facebook connect my profile to this site with it's
OpenGraph?

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rhettinger
Unlike many lawsuits, this one is a testable hypothesis. It is knowable
whether favorable reviews disappeared, whether an algorithm or person
triggered the disappearance, and whether this occurred after a sales-rep made
contact. The phone logs, syslogs, and code repositories should reveal the
truth in this case.

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derwiki
I see more "People Love us on Yelp" stickers in a 10 minute walk around SoMa
than the 10 people who have joined this lawsuit. What's browardpalmbeach.com
anyway? This article is just an echo of the hundreds of other articles from
more reputable sources about this topic.

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hugh3
This one has allegations I haven't seen before. I've heard that yelp offers to
rearrange reviews or remove one or two bad ones if you buy advertising, which
sounds a little dodgy. I've never heard of it threatening to remove _good_
reviews if you _don't_ buy advertising. I'm more skeptical of that one.

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rmorrison
_The company, which has yet to turn a profit despite astounding popularity_

Really? How is this possible?

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AlexBlom
It's a tech startup silly. Are you suggesting these companies focus on making
money??????

What the hell are you smoking!!!

*sarcasm

