
How to destroy your business with one email - loewenskind
http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-york
======
plusbryan
It it just me, or does the mob mentality of this scare anyone else just a
little? With no real evidence and certainly no trial, a one-sided tale told on
reddit led to the destruction of a small business.

~~~
gabrielroth
I had a similar feeling about the recent Cook's Source episode. It's very
likely that, in both cases, the charges against the business owner are
accurate, and if so I feel fine about them losing their businesses, if that's
the outcome. But how long will it be until some savvy internet user
successfully riles people up against an innocent competitor or a personal
enemy?

~~~
zacharypinter
Further evidence (though the Comcast situation is obviously more complex than
innocent competition):

[http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the_new_york_times_just_reported_that/)

> J-Ro is a professional political activist; he's paid to influence online
> opinion (or has been, on some past issues; no idea whether he's specifically
> paid on this one), and he's primarily concerned with getting people
> outraged, not with accuracy in discussion; hence his entirely false claims
> here.

~~~
gabrielroth
I think there's a slight difference between an intrinsically public matter,
like the Comcast issue, and a relationship between, say, a business owner and
a customer. In political fights, people on all sides make their best case to
the public. Sometimes that best case is deceptive or manipulative and that's a
problem, but the fact of activists trying to shift public opinion just goes
with the territory and long predates the Internet. We're used to it; we have
filters for it.

The other thing is more complicated. If a business owner rips me off, that's
bad. In the past, my only redress was the courts, which is a slow, cumbersome,
expensive process. Now there's this new avenue where I can try to make the
Internet hate the business owner. This can be a useful corrective, but it's
very vulnerable to abuse.

------
bdfh42
But now we know that the more customers who post complaints (with links to
your web site) the better - it boosts your Google ranking and that drags in
new punters.

Bad customer service (in fact preferably rude and near insane) is good for
your business growth - plus you get to keep the excess profits every time you
rip someone off.

Google has inadvertently created a new business model.

~~~
loewenskind
Perhaps, but if this nut job is behaving this way purely to get more hate
reviews he's played it well enough to work in Hollywood.

------
loewenskind
Background story found here:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a_negative_yelpcom_review_and_now_im/)

~~~
maxer
would have been good to post this as well

------
Vivtek
I like the how he's "doing this pro se" and if the customer doesn't knuckle
under he will take this case right to the _Supreme Court_. It's hard to get
spittle flecks on electronic communication, but this guy seems to have managed
it.

He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client - except this time, maybe the
causality runs the other way.

~~~
joshu
As an aside, your second sentence is an excellent one.

~~~
Vivtek
Yeah, and my the first one isn't.

------
eli
Would also be a good way to destroy a competitor's business with one faked
email.

------
samstokes
Interesting, but I think the submission title is misleading (particularly now
the page is so full of bad reviews that it's not obvious which review the
submitter was referring to).

This seems to be more an example of "How to destroy your business by being (at
least perceived as) consistently fraudulent".

~~~
fname
I think this is the email the poster is referring to:
[http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-
york#hri...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-
york#hrid:kDSNyqHT3okOl6_de0hR3A)

If you scroll down further, there's the same email in the comment that was
posted on 12/8/ _2009_

------
swombat
Doesn't look like there was a business to destroy in the first place. Just a
scam that was, apparently, recognised as such by all the reviewers.

~~~
tedunangst
except none of the reviewers even tried to do business with the company.
reddit said give one star reviews, monkeys give one star reviews.

~~~
AndrewS
To be fair, we can't verify that either way. If a company treated me as the
reviewers claim, I wouldn't give them more than one star either. As was
mentioned in other comments, there needs to be some validation of reviewers
built into yelp.

------
mike-cardwell
What proportion of his customers go check Yelp before using him? I'm guessing
it's only a small number... I can't see this killing his business. Seems more
like a minor nuisance to me...

~~~
wladimir
A lot of customers these days will do a Google on a company or product name
before doing any business. They look for reviews as well as other opinions. If
the search turns up a thread like this, I'm sure they'll run away.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I think _some_ customers do this, but they're in a minority. I don't have any
figures to back this up, it's just my general observation of peoples
behaviour...

~~~
ams6110
I typically don't. I have zero reason to believe anything on any "review"
website. I talk to people I know and get recommendations from them.

------
ZachPruckowski
Why are all the reviews posted yesterday?

~~~
duck
The Internet was awaken by evildoers.

~~~
mkramlich
Then the Internet is never going to get back to sleep again.

------
desigooner
Seems like the only "people" posting 5 * reviews are the owner himself via
different IDs .. does Yelp ban accounts for fraudulent reviews? this surely
makes up such a case...

~~~
JshWright
Seems like the vast majority of "people" posting negative reviews are random
redditors who read an e-mail allegedly sent by the owner of this company.
Since they've never used the company's services, are those postings any less
fraudulent?

~~~
desigooner
Yes they are. It's just a form of internet vigilantism. Ideally, all the false
reviews (positive or negative) should be taken down by yelp .. else, there's
not much to trust on yelp if this expands to a bigger scale.

------
vaksel
all he'll do is rename it and nothing will be lost.

------
mambodog
See also: [http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace-
Overachie...](http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace-
Overachiever/dp/1599211793)

To be fair, Cooper Laurence did a little more to enrage the Internet Justice
Machine, but on the other hand she didn't threaten to sue anybody.

------
antidaily
I've seen businesses respond to comments on Yelp reviews - wonder why he
didn't try to do that.

------
zzzeek
maybe its just me but that looks a whole lot like one guy making lots of Yelp
accounts. In particular that two entirely different "accounts" posted the same
letter from the guy word for word. I think the letter itself is likely real
though.

------
thomaz
It's weird that their pictures on Yelp are just HD parts.

------
mkramlich
I can't speak to whether the business in question is real or not, or whether
it's bad or good, etc. What I can speak to is that I think there's a
fundamental flaw with Yelp and similar sites, and indeed even with Amazon
reviews: you don't know who to trust. "On the Internet, nobody knows if you're
a dog!"

Any given post could be made by a shill or astroturfer, it could be made by a
competitor, it could be made by a child or teenager with no perspective, it
could be made by a prankster, an idiot, a mentally disturbed person, by a
spidering script/bot, or could even be fake data planted by the site's owner
in order to make the site look like it has a bigger base of _real_ users. You
just don't know, in most cases, on most sites.

Therefore, it's mostly noise. You can't trust it! Crap. Some of it is not, of
course. There is some signal out there. But this fundamental problem of having
trusted signal buried by untrustable noise is the weakness to all these web-
based systems. Even a stars-based system is useless. It's irrelevant if a
particular app or entity has a lot of five-star reviews or one-star reviews
_if_ it's crowd-sourced, because you can't trust the crowd. ("I gave it five
stars because I'm shagging the creator." "I found a button that had a color
blue that displeased me: ZERO STARS!") At least not when commercial interests
are at stake.

I trust crowd-sourcing a little more when the entities being reviewed are (a)
for hobbyists, and (b) niche, and (c) with a highly filtered review
demographic (not just anybody and their sister can fire off a review -- there
has to be some filtering process or bias that weeds out most folks.) Even
then, it's hit or miss. At the end of the day, reviews have signal only if the
reader already has some explicit trust relationship with the reviewer, based
on past performance. If the reviewer is some faceless random stranger, it's
noise and cannot be trusted in general.

Someone else in this thread made a comment about mob mentality. I agree. I
think that's another flaw to these crowd-sourced systems. Humans are prone to
mob thinking. They take things out of context and blow something all out of
perspective, often in proportion to how ignorant they are.

------
dnsworks
What's really interesting is that most of these reviews happened yesterday,
and it appears mots of the reviewers have never actually engaged in business
with the scammy vendor, or attempted to engage in business, or well ever heard
of the business before this. Being the voice of reason, isn't that a violation
of Yelp's terms of services? Yelp itself is known to be somewhat of a bully.

------
Kurtz79
Epic fail.

~~~
sokoloff
Normally that would get down-voted to oblivion here, but since the name of the
company in question is Epic Data Recovery Labs, I gave you an upvote. (It only
took you back to 0 though...)

~~~
Kurtz79
"The company in question is Epic Data Recovery Lab"

That was sort of the point of the comment. :)

People should be less edgy...

~~~
adaml_623
I think his point was that this isn't reddit and the general consensus is to
avoid creating punful comment threads.

Might be wrong and misinterpreting.

~~~
Silhouette
Ironically, it's also an interesting commentary on how quickly groupthink and
follow-the-leader actions take over on social news sites.

Did everyone who originally downvoted the "epic fail" post realise the context
and just not like jokes on HN, or did a couple of people choose to downvote,
and then more people see what _looked like_ a Reddit-esque joke that was being
downvoted and just join in without understanding the point of the post?

As others pointed out, a similar mentality could explain the results on the
Yelp page we are discussing, even if the entire thing was actually
orchestrated by a competitor and/or triggered by a single unhappy customer
where we don't know the full story.

~~~
Legion
I downvoted. I knew the context. I also know the community here.

On HN, I downvote that comment.

On Reddit, I leave it alone or perhaps upvote it.

On Slashdot, I probably make the joke myself if I'm the first one to get to
it.

I appreciate HN's "no class clowns" tone, as I can (and do) easily get my fill
of that elsewhere.

~~~
kls
Right, it is not the site for it. It is nothing personal but the mantra for HN
is serious discussion, allowing it contributes to the deterioration of the
site away from it's stated goal and makes HN = !HN. That being said, I knocked
it to 0, nothing personal, it just does not belong here.

