
Yelp: Slow Growth Lessons - aj_icracked
https://medium.com/startup-study-group/slow-growth-lessons-in-a-hack-assed-world-28d9c557969b
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vessenes
For years, I've done the following on every yelp search: filter -> sort by ->
rating.

I would probably jailbreak my phone just to be able to lock that preference
in. Of course, there's a lot of money in that search option being default set
to 'best' or 'recommended' or whatever it is they call it.

And, it's of course awesomely useful, and I use it constantly. But I never
don't sort, that's a testament to how useful the database they've built is.
It's worth like triple the effort of another search method to get the data.

~~~
rowborg
i think you meant

    
    
      filter -> open now -> sort by -> rating
    

;)

~~~
vessenes
I like to imagine I'm out at odd hours and really need to know who's open for
my post-pub-crawl food. I'm going to click that as well from now on.

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joesmo
Sounds like a lot of marketing speak from a site that rewards a lot of review
writers like myself with censorship. Once they started censoring my honest
reviews, I realized the site's information was no longer useful and generally,
this is proven by their rather inaccurate reviews.

~~~
AustinG08
I have a friend who is a restaurant owner. From what i've heard, their
business model is to display the worst reviews and then try to extort the
business owner in order to display better ones. They wanted something to the
tune of several thousand dollars. He called them 'The Yelp Mafia.'

~~~
jdross
Debunked many many times. Michael Luca at HBS is one such study. Sales at Yelp
has no ability to influence reviews, and Yelp employees are not allowed to
even write reviews anymore.

[http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-
debunks-y...](http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-yelp-
extortion-conspiracy-theory-yelp-doesnt-extort.html)

~~~
joesmo
The most plausible explanation is that their content filtering system is just
badly written and obviously can't discern between spam and real-life input,
despite all usage patterns, history, and content pointing to a human. Whatever
the reason, who wants to create content for a site that will then just censor
it?

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mhartl
Slightly off-topic, but a couple of years ago I had an epiphany regarding
Yelp's name. My conversation with a tech-savvy friend went something like
this:

me: I realized that "Yelp" is like the "Yellow Pages".

friend: No duh.

me: No, the _name_ "Yelp" is like " _YEL_ lo _P_ ages". It's basically a
portmanteau. [1]

friend: mind = blown

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau)

