

You've been Yelped - azsromej
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/youve-been-yelped.html

======
steveplace
The first page was the worst human interest story I've read. It was structured
as though we are to pity the business owner while thumbing our noses at Yelp.

For those who haven't read it, essentially the biz owner trolled yelp and then
hunted down a critic, and was arrested for battery. Best line: _More than
anything, she blamed Yelp._

Edit: If you read the rest of the article, it goes to a salon owner who
actually gets it, and her business has benefited from it. Know your customers.

~~~
tjsnyder
I especially like how she blames the cluttered mess on poor sales. Maybe poor
sales are a result of a cluttered store!

~~~
NikkiA
My favourite bit was where she claimed she found his address and turned up at
his doorstop to 'apologise', but was surprisingly antagonistic and violent
when she got there.

Yeah, right, 'apologise', just admit you went crazy and intended to shout/beat
him down.

~~~
dghughes
> Accounts differ as to what happened next, but a struggle ensued.

I don't get why Sean C.'s version is more believable than Diane Goodman's, I
don't know either of them and nobody else witnessed the event so how can any
of us judge?

~~~
jbapple
> I don't get why Sean C.'s version is more believable than Diane Goodman's

FTA: "Over the next few hours, she sent several more angry messages. She
warned of a 'world of pain.' 'Goodbye pussy boy I will be contacting your
employers,' she said."

Compare this with the story's quote of Sean C. : "TOTAL MESS"

Hers was not a proportional response.

[http://www.hulu.com/watch/12772/the-big-lebowski-world-of-
pa...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/12772/the-big-lebowski-world-of-pain)

~~~
dghughes
I understand that but why do we believe Sean C's side of the story? He could a
bigger loon than she is, it takes two to make a fight.

~~~
jbapple
> He could a bigger loon than she is, it takes two to make a fight.

He could be, but we have no evidence of that. Furthermore, she admits sending
the messages.

It does not "take two" to make an assault.

~~~
dghughes
> It does not "take two" to make an assault.

Actually it does :P

------
tptacek
Max Chafkin is a little bit late to the party on this one. Here's an LA Times
story with most of the same details:

[http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-
lazarus1...](http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus11)

I read it when JWZ pointed to it from his "I Hate Yelp" post:

<http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html>

JWZ runs the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, and is "pretty sure" that he was in
fact given a pay-to-play pitch for Yelp placement and review management.

For some very specific kinds of businesses --- the kinds unlikely to attract a
constant stream of casual reviews --- Yelp has been useful to me. For
restaurants and bars, it's less than worthless; "reviewers" clearly do make up
random stories ("Publican serves O-Reida fries! Violet Hour serves well-
liquor!").

In Chicago, we have LTH Forum. It is the polar opposite of Yelp. It is a PHPBB
named after a specific Chicago Chinese restaurant that has completely owned up
all the reputable food reviews in Chicago. It has no salespeople, makes no
profit, is aggressively NOT SEO'd (LTH is never going to be the first hit for
anything), appears to be layed out in PHPBB's default template, and is better
than any other source of reviews in any city in the US. Every year it gives
out awards (the LTH "Great Neighborhood Restaurants"), which --- again, this
is a PHPBB site --- are hung in the windows of every restaurant that has
received them.

You could never post a half-assed troll review on LTH and get anywhere with
it. 15 people who'd been there and talked with the chef would write counter-
reviews, and the moderator would probably strike your post. Someone needs to
figure out how to scale _this_ model.

~~~
mchafkin
Thanks for the comment. And sorry if it seemed late--that's one of the
drawbacks of a monthly mag.

But it's also advantage since we have time to sift through these claims. I
talked to a lot of business owners for this story and I was unable to find a
single verifable instance of pay to play. All of these stories end up being
hearsay. As I tried to convey in the story, the problems that Yelp creates for
business owners are more complicated and more subtle. Like Google, Yelp is
based on an algorithm that can make or break businesses and that is ever-
changing and hard to understand. That's what is at the heart of most business
owners' complaints.

~~~
frossie
Thanks for an interesting article.

I think some of the problem is just adjustment into a new medium. Those of us
who have been net-savvy for a while know how to read reviews - I am pretty
confident we can all tell an irrational impossible-to-please customer from
their bad review, as opposed to a rational customer who genuinely had a poor
experience. The problem is that some of these business owners are worried that
a poor review from a crazy person will sink them - but I doubt that is the
case, if they respond in a calm, rational manner.

I encourage people to read through to the later example of the salon owner.
Even if the owner had not caused the unhappy customer to up their review
rating, I think I, as a potential customer, would have been capable of not
placing much weight on 1 bad review out of 30 good ones.

~~~
tptacek
Take a restaurant where, upon walking in, you can see the chef --- a bona fide
celebrity, for what it's worth --- individually peeling potatoes over a bucket
for the fries, which are to be fried in pure duck fat.

Now tag that restaurant with a review saying "I went to this place with my
husband last week and it was VERY disappointing. The prices were very high,
they were all out of the dish I wanted to order, the service was bad, and they
served me O'Reida food service fries".

This isn't just an adjustment. On LTH, your comment would be buried under
those of reputable people setting you straight. On Yelp, I found a
substantially similar review on the first page of results.

~~~
frossie
Right, but presumably the owner can reply with "For the record we only use
hand-cut fried cooked in duck fat" to that review?

I am not insensitive to the point, that an individual customer may be poorly
placed to be a reliable critic, but I am not sure what the solution is besides
somebody with a yelp-type service providing an infrastructure that lets
everybody have their say. Not every sector in every town will have an
editorially controlled forum for high-quality recommendations.

As a point of interest, do you for example object, say, to tripadvisor as
well, or is it something that yelp does in particular?

~~~
tptacek
Yelp is a user-generated content company (meaning: unpaid contributors are
doing the lion's share of the value creation) with heavy SEO optimization and
little quality control, _and_ a business model that extracts money from
business owners.

Their incentives are all out of whack. They profit by dragging eyeballs to
non-authoritative content they didn't write, and then scaring businesses with
it.

~~~
tphyahoo
Hear hear.

I'm not a yelp user, but the other problem that occurs to me is the anonymity.

Of course you have user profiles, but you can't (easily) track a review back
to a human being, which is why this was such a shock to the reviewer in the
magazine article when it actually happened.

The businesses stand there naked and the reviewers can take little potshots at
them behind the screen of anonymity. No wonder some people go a little crazy.

If yelp made reviewers less anonymous, such as stating where you work, maybe
this would be less of a problem.

At least bad reviews would probably be polite and dignified rather than
outright nasty.

------
ghshephard
Overall, I thought it was an excellent article. It had a good "hook" up front
with the slightly crazed store owner, and then led into a pretty good
description of Yelp's impact on businesses. As a frequent Yelp contributor,
and reader, I'd say that 95-99% of reviews are honest, forthright, and make an
attempt at some kind of balance. I'm actually quite impressed at how effective
Yelp is at keeping both the trolls and shill reviews off their site.

The downside of the Yelp "Anti-Shill" algorithm is that it does to tend to
have a lot more false positives than false negatives. As a result, infrequent,
or new Yelp reviewers will typically have their reviews dropped off the site,
or not appear to accounts other than theirs - New Yelp reviewers may not be
aware that their Yelp reviews may appear to their logins, but not to others.

The foundation of Yelp, of course, are the "Elite" reviewers - They are the
equivalent of the "Wikipedia Admins" - by themselves, they are obviously
fallable. As a group, you can trust them - particularly the best of the best -
someone like
[http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=P5bUL3Engv-2z6kKohB6...](http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=P5bUL3Engv-2z6kKohB6qQ)
is more trustworthy than any restaurant critic you've ever read in the NYT. I
can attest his credibility is untouchable, and, with Yelp, you can get a
_dozen_ reviews by people like him of high-profile places.

Is Yelp Perfect - No. Have they had salespeople (typically teenagers or people
in their early twenties) say things on the phone during cold calling that they
shouldn't have? Absolutely. Do they maintain a pretty damn good wall between
Sales and Advertising/Services - Nowadays, yes. I don't know if that was
_always_ the case, but I don't have any strong evidence to the contrary. Just
rumor and innuendo. Regardless, they are a pretty upstanding act these days.

I'd be interested if anyone has any real evidence of poor behavior lately? I
think this is more like Mark Pincus's speech that "when you are small, and
struggling, you do all sorts of things that you'd rather not do - Just so you
can get to a stage _where you don't have to do those things_ anymore."

I think Yelp is now at that stage.

------
scott_s
Max (the article's author), I saw that you're posting in the thread. Reading
the account on the first page, the bookstore owner sounds troubled. She won't
clean her store, and when someone leaves (what I think is) a review with valid
criticism, she responds with vitriol. Considering her prior behavior and the
fact that the authorities sided with him, I'm inclined to believe Clare's
account of the altercation. I don't always cede to the authorities. But
considering that the stereotypes were stacked _against_ Clare - male, younger
- I bet the cops who interviewed the two decided that Goodman was unhinged.

Others here have the same impression. So, two questions. Why did you decide to
lead the story with her? And are your conclusions regarding her behavior
similar to ours?

~~~
mchafkin
Thanks Scott. I led with her because I think the incident, while extreme, is a
vivid illustration of the way that Yelp (and not just Yelp, but all online
review sites) is making business owners feel. This owner is not the first or
the last to take criticism personally and respond without thinking.

As to your second question, I don't think anyone thinks that the the owner's
actions were reasonable. (As I say later I the story, she feels terrible about
what happened.) Sean C.'s review was negative, but not overwhelmingly so. And
whatever someone says on a review site, I think that everyone has a right to
privacy.

~~~
rubberbunny
Doesn't she know she can just become a "Yelp! Sponsor" and have the offending
reviews removed?

My whole Yelp account was banned for calling out a local restaurant owner for
being so psycho that he made my date cry. It was a mighty coincidence that my
account ban and deleted reviews coincided with his shit-hole restaurant
deciding to sponsor Yelp.

But I'm sure Yelp has excuses. Maybe I didn't log in frequently enough, or
they thought because my experience was so out-there that it must be fake.
Either way, I'll never trust or use Yelp again. It's pay for play all the way.

~~~
Tangurena
That sponsorship costs $300/month. That's a lot of money for many small
businesses and can easily push a business that's barely scraping by in this
economy into the red.

And I don't know about you, but I get angry when I think of people trying to
extort $3600/year from me. It is my business - not theirs. Yet somehow I'm the
one getting my wallet picked.

~~~
rubberbunny
My bad, cynicism is not easy to convey via text.

To be clear, businesses are not supposed to be able to remove _any_ review
from the site. Yelp makes a big deal about claiming that they don't let
businesses, even Yelp Sponsors, remove negative reviews. That being said, I
know first-hand that they do remove negative reviews, so... fuck Yelp, I
guess.

I'm angry too that Yelp pits businesses against customers for profit while
claiming to be an unbiased source. Just the fact that it's even possible for a
business to "sponsor" an "unbiased" review site should set off a lot of red
flags.

Just ran a search on "yelp unbiased" and this popped up:
[http://ask.metafilter.com/142694/Yelp-sucks-I-need-
unbiased-...](http://ask.metafilter.com/142694/Yelp-sucks-I-need-unbiased-
reviews-Help)

------
elrodeo
This reminds me of the AppStore. You write an App. You publish it. A few weeks
later somebody make the first "review": 1/5 stars + a comment "Total crap"
without any explanations...

You have no possibility to contact this person, no way to delete the review.
Sales are down. You can forget the app.

Ce la vie.

~~~
tptacek
Now imagine that Apple threw regular parties for the people who wrote those
troll reviews, and you have Yelp.

------
techiferous
Summary of first page:

* Woman encounters a problem.

* She reacts angrily instead of intelligently.

* She is surprised when the problem gets worse instead of better.

* Yelp is bad.

~~~
brown9-2
To be fair, there are then four more pages to this article which focus on Yelp
and it's growth and impact and have nothing to do with this woman's story.

------
mattlanger
_The company was, literally, conceived over lunch and funded -- to the tune of
$1 million -- by dinnertime._

Interesting. There's more on page 3 in case you didn't read that far.

~~~
chaostheory
I really couldn't read it past the first for the same reason as everyone else,
the account was just annoying to read. Not sure if it was intended but it
seemed to sympathize with a crazy person.

------
ams6110
Business owners need to keep this in perspective. Most people have never heard
of Yelp. I had not before I read this. The more you react to what somebody
posts in an anonymous forum, the more you call attention to it.

~~~
leftnode
As a small business owner who could find himself on Yelp, I can somewhat
sympathize with some of the owners (although not the woman in the article, she
just seemed nuts. A much more appropriate thing would be to contact the
negative reviewers and try to learn how to make her store better).

The problem with Yelp is probably the search rankings. Chances are, Yelp has
higher PageRank than some local company, and when someone search for "company
name" on Google and Yelp reviews come up, it could harm their reputation.

While most people haven't heard of Yelp, they could easily find unfair
negative reviews of your company easily.

------
swombat
_By Max Chafkin | Feb 1, 2010_

Wow, news really travels fast on this site! Can anyone find the Apple Tablet
announcement somewhere on the future-web? I'd love to know what it looks like.

~~~
telemachos
Random association, but my first experience of this was comic books. When I
was younger, I remember that the date on the book was always way ahead of when
I bought it.

I bet this goes back to some weird print/magazine marketing thing: more
current = more better.

~~~
petewarden
If I remember my 2000AD days right, I think the date was when the newsagent
should remove the comic from the shelves, more like a sell-by date than a
published-on time.

~~~
anigbrowl
Correct. I raise my LRD to you, Sir.

------
thinkbohemian
does anyone have a business that is featured on Yelp? If so, do they offer any
buisness centric tools. Like get satisfaction, where they encourage a dialogue
between owner and client rather than one sided posts? If not, maybe some
companies would be willing to pay for that kind of ability...

~~~
mchafkin
They offer a bunch of tools. and they've gotten a lot better at being
sensitive to business onwers. Owners can respond to negative reviews, either
publiclly or privately. (Later in the story, I talk about a hair salon that
has done a really awesome job managing its Yelp reviews by being fanatical
about responding.) The difficult issue is that the interests of business
owners and those of Yelp will never align perfectly. If they did then Yelp
would essentially be useless to its readers. (The tension is similar to how
some companies feel about GetSatisfaction.)

~~~
thinkbohemian
Good info, thanks!

------
lsc
I think it's interesting how /personally/ business owners take feedback.
Especially at first, I know my stomach churned rather unpleasantly when I got
even a mildly negative review. It's hard not to take it personally.

But how you end up handling that, I think, is super important. In my space,
it's pretty easy to say "Oh, I'm sorry, would you like a refund?" First,
taking responsibility for the problem, and then offering to refund what the
customer paid seems to disarm even the most vocal critics. I mean, you don't
usually get to keep the customer, but they usually stop saying bad things
about you.

But really, being 'just a guy' is a little bit of a double-edged sword. you
want to be 'human' enough that you seem like a person and not some faceless
corporation, but you also need to maintain enough emotional distance that you
respond in a polite manner (or don't respond at all) when someone insults the
'baby' you have spent the last 5 years of your life working on.

------
ghshephard
I actually went to the email thread from the store owner -
([http://www.flickr.com/photos/44269394@N06/sets/7215762259508...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/44269394@N06/sets/72157622595083993/))
- I can see why the police tended to believe the customer, and not the store
owner. While I recognized that "tone" doesn't carry well in email, I'd be
seriously concerned for my welfare if the person who had written those
missives showed up at my door one day...

"Do you not have a girlfriend? Are you divorced? I can see why...." , "world
of pain", "Goodbye pussy boy and I will be contacting your employers", and on,
and on...

Yowsa!

------
jff
Sure, the bookstore owner was a psycho, but there are huge problems with Yelp
--namely, that if a store/restaurant isn't the kind of thing somebody likes,
he posts a 1-star review.

"This used book store isn't Barnes and Noble! DO NOT GO HERE IT IS SMALL AND
HAS OLD BOOKS"

"This corner bar is not a dance club, I could actually hear my friend talking
to me. Plus the bartender didn't give me and my friends free drinks for acting
like sluts, BARTENDER IS GAY AND THE BAR IS BORING"

"This restaurant serves Korean food! I like Chinese food! One star!"

~~~
sofal
I would instantly disqualify all of those reviews while reading them, even
subconsciously. So either 1) I am smarter than Yelp users, or 2) the lame
reviews are actually more subtle and believable, or 3) this just isn't a big
issue.

------
ecyrb
I wish that there was a reviews co-operative that didn't have draconian terms-
of-use.

Maybe you even get a share of the advertising profit based on the helpfulness
of the reviews you write?

------
johnl
My first thought was that the company might be mismanaged. It may be just
going through growth pains. The concept seems innocent enough. It sounds like
what is needed is is a filter that keeps both sides of the discussion civil
and warnings that "this post may be archived" with the appropriate reason so
that no one is left guessing.

------
alexro
I think there must be already a service offering everyday good reviews on any
selected website like Yelp. For business owners it would be a better brand
management tool and probably the least expensive.

------
RyanMcGreal
Sounds like that business owner Yelped herself!

