First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket going trying to strongarm restaurants into paying for advertising, and now this.
Friendly reminder - if you are on mobile and trying to read a Yelp review and don't want to download their app, simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" and it will load the full review without forcing you to get the app.
> simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site"
Apple are changing that feature in iOS13 to be a lot more obvious (menu where reader button is). And iPadOS13 (beta 4) defaults to Desktop Mode (might break lots of websites) although there is a setting to change it to default to Mobile Mode.
Android Chrome users have Desktop Mode checkbox under the hamburger menu.
I'm running the iPad OS beta and have yet to run into a site that it breaks. Mostly it's a huge upgrade, you can use sites like YouTube that have been serving the gimped phone version to iPad users for years. Set the video resolution? Don't mind if I do!
It sounds simple, but I've read that at lot of work went into the desktop class browsing experience so that it can handle websites that are designed for cursors. There's more to the change than just sending a desktop useragent.
From the other side of the fence, it has been a lot more efficient to use a responsive design on all clients, so that small screens automatically get what used to be the mobile site. The benefit for us was we don't need to maintain separate code paths which turned out to be quite a bit of code/markup and caused a lot of problems over time.
Agreed, but unfortunately not how a lot of sites work (especially Google's properties) - they'll sniff a Mobile Safari user agent and say "Here's the gimpy phone edition with half the options missing!"
13" iPad Pro? Gimped version. 12" MacBook with a smaller screen and worse CPU/GPU performance? Full version!
I would've thought that it'd be simpler to have one codebase and make some UI modifications so that it works on touch devices. But it's been years and they didn't. Maybe cost savings by giving phone users low resolution streams and no way to change it?
I don't use Google Docs, but I gather being able to use the real web version on an iPad now beats out their official iOS apps.
Unfortunately if your site is interactive, you still need to know if dealing with touch versus keyboard.
For touch, extra spacing is needed around click targets (allow for fat fingers).
For some touch data entry, you need to allow for different input methods, because accessing symbols and numbers is different from a real keyboard versus a virtual keyboard. Also a virtual keyboard: covers some of the page, causes scroll, causes resize, can cause zoom, loses fixed headers. Avoiding the effects of those issues often requires some compromises.
For touch, you must register onclick events on a div near to an input that can be tapped. Otherwise the browser resizes the touch zone to be bigger than the actual input, and you can't tap the div.
There are many many subtleties to how browsers treat touch events and virtual keyboards
> Unfortunately if your site is interactive, you still need to know if dealing with touch versus keyboard.
Detecting a mobile browser vs regular won't handle this well for laptop touchscreen users... especially for anyone using a laptop in a tablet mode. I suspect the larger targets would also help some regular keyboard + mouse users with poor fine motor control.
Similarly, we try to support tablet users (iOS/Android) with external keyboards or mice. I totally agree with your point (I purchased a laptop with a touchscreen for testing).
For tablets we optimise for touch, but I also make sure keyboard and mouse work (e.g. I am extremely careful to support click events, not just touch events). I can do this because we have our own framework (when I developed our product, other frameworks simply did not work well with corner cases). Writing our own framework means I am very familiar with the various quirks and workarounds.
However, browsers force us to make compromises, because we simply can't detect or fix certain problems that affect the UI.
Come on, we both know the answer... They’re serving shitty versions for iPad users to force them to download their app which has much more invasive tracking abilities.
Apple Maps are frustratingly locked to the Yelp app. If it’s not installed, you simply can’t see more than the 3 excerpted reviews in maps app. To see the full Yelp listing (or full text of one of teased reviews) you have to go to yelp.com and search again for the establishment.
Probably a very dumb question. Why do sites like Yelp/Quora try very hard to force you to use the app instead of the web site? Isn't it easier to make money on ads on the web? In the Yelp app I don't get any ads. I may be more likely to browse longer in the app I guess.
well yeah, but a local app can get a more detailed fingerprint off the user, which includes location visited, app installed, habits etc. an app can do a lot more things when installed and closed compared to a closed browser tab.
> the Yelp app I don't get any ads
the profile is sent upstream and aggregated. ads served from other apps and on web pages you visit have a chance of using information collected by yelp even if yelp itself is not showing the ads, that's the point of it, a seemingly innocuous "ads free" app collects telemetry and third parties use that info to build a profile and serve personalized ads on other apps and web pages, correlating sidechannel info (last seen position, ip and other) to unmask your browser/app session and pin it to your "shadow identity" in the advertisers' system.
There's been a lot of press here and otherwise lately about how lucrative mobile data is and how lax the permissions can be, particularly compared to "just" a website.
Ignoring advertising for a moment, mobile apps are first-class clients, whereas mobile websites frequently aren't. Mobile websites are usually stripped-down experiences, and the company doesn't want to invest the effort in turning the mobile website into a first-class client because most of the users are on the mobile app. It's easier to just funnel people into the app, which is also much more likely to get the user to come back (now they have the app on their home screen, the site can send notifications, etc)
That seems entirely circular. The mobile website is poorly made, so people use the mobile app, so the mobile website is neglected. I can understand why the mobile app gains dominance after the cycle starts. The question is more why this cycle starts.
People are going to use the mobile app regardless. It's the first-class experience for mobile. People don't use the app because the website is poor; people simply use the app.
Or to put it another way, Yelp would be rightfully lambasted for not having a mobile app. Having a mobile app is table stakes for a site like Yelp. And if you've got all this engineering effort going towards a mobile app, why double your workload by also building a first-class mobile site? The mobile site just needs to be functional enough to satisfy the basic needs of casual users.
I think that was my main annoyance when Google removed the "merge tabs and apps" feature in 2016. With that feature, a shortcut to a webpage was a first-class experience that worked nicely with the app switcher.
I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as I have yet to see anything but anecdotal stories about some folks getting a phone call from someone allegedly from yelp allegedly having the power to do this. I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company.
On the mobile experience, what are you referring to? The mobile site is fully functional with reviews, search, ratings, etc. I can't say the same of Twitter, Tumblr, and most major other sites. I despise mobile apps as much as the next person but I hardly see how Yelp is unique or even worse than others here. Please clarify.
You literally do not need the mobile app or even render the desktop site to read full reviews. I'm looking at a fully expanded review in mobile safari right now.
I think the challenge with finding firsthand reports on HN is that the owners of small brick-and-mortar businesses that Yelp is alleged to exploit are not well represented in this community.
Having said that, I have firsthand experience in having my own review of such a business censored:
6 months ago I wrote a review for the RazzleDazzle Barber Shop in Riverview, FL. Great little shop, I was surprised that it had zero reviews and was gray in Yelp. A month later, I returned for my second haircut and asked about business. I heard the same story about Yelp pressuring for sales, and mentioned that I had already written a 5-star review.
Upon checking Yelp, I noticed that the shop was still gray with 0 reviews, despite having left one a month ago myself. After carefully reading the site, I found that the keyword is "0 Recommended Reviews." At the bottom is a gray link that leads to more than a dozen reviews that are "Not Recommended", all 5-star, including my own. I wasn't the first to review the shop, the other reviews were hidden.
I wrote Yelp support to ask why this review was censored, despite my other reviews for other businesses being accepted. They assured me that an algorithm decides what reviews are recommended for protection of customers and that's all that's happening.
However, within a day my review was the only recommended review, and the barber shop was live on the site instead of gray. A few other reviews have been accepted since.
Go have a look for yourself, scroll to the bottom of that shop and click the "x Reviews that are currently not recommended" link in gray at the bottom. You will even find my original 5 star review, so perhaps they made a copy of it to get it to show.
It's their anti-fraud system. Reviews get moved to Recommend after the user passes some minimum anti-fraud Activity threshold.
If that was your first review, it's almost always unrecommended at first. This stops a lot of the "ask your friends and families" for 5 stars sorts of reviews.
Curious! I'm looking at it and don't see a duplicate review in the "not recommended" section. I do see one trend which matches my experience with "not recommended" that I mentioned in another comment: 10 out of 13 reviewers have no connections on yelp. It seems like the account's social network is one heavy factor in deciding whether to recommend a review or not.
There is one curious review that shows up in the normal sort that looks like a "follow up" review despite both version of it being identical.
The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system.
If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking. Once I starting paying they're typically hidden. Now if you manually go and and sort by Date they will still be there, they're not deleted and my star rating doesn't change - so I guess you're technically right that I don't get better ratings. I do think that most people don't realize that the most recent bad reviews aren't necessarily as visible though if you advertise with Yelp.
That's not far off of how (Yelp's partner) Grubhub operates, where the default sort for restaurants is in descending order of the cut they give Grubhub.
From my experience, the reviews filtered out are often reviews by folks with small or no networks. I saw my wife's reviews filtered out when she first had an account, before she added friends or connected the account to facebook (not sure which one did it, this was years and years ago). I'm not saying this is a good system, just my observation of one factor.
Yea I'm sure brand new users have lesser ranking on Yelp Sort. My experience is just from talking to the Yelp Account Managers and seeing our bad reviews be Page 1 one month, and pushed to a further page the next month.
Except in this case there's a million anecdotal stories about Yelp doing this. I've been in the restaurant industry a long time, I've taken calls from Yelp sales agents, they're shit. And their sales pitch basically is extortion (pay us to hide your bad reviews, or else). I've seen owners straight up tell them to fuck off.
Thankfully they have zero traction here; my last place had a 4.5 rating on Google with 250+ reviews, and a 3.3 rating on Yelp with about 10 reviews.
This is where the nuance of their scumminess comes in and where you're either ignoring or are ignorant of it. Yes, they can say that they're not "deleting" or "altering" reviews because that's not what they're doing. What they're doing is sorting by "Yelp Sort" and listing "Recommended" reviews. If you look at any Yelp business page, you'll see a tiny little link at the bottom that says "See reviews that aren't Recommended". They claim that these reviews are hidden behind this wall because they're from users whose reviews are biased or who don't have enough patterns to be "trusted" but this is literally just their way of hiding the reviews that people don't pay for. Since every single one of those terms is subjective, they can change what constitutes a "recommended" review and be completely subjective about why one review is "trusted" and another isn't. It's completely up to them and they totally line up with whether or not a company pays for Yelp's "services".
It's a lot like the BBB. No one has to pay to be listed by the BBB but you can pay for the BBB to "arbitrate" disputes between consumers and your business when someone posts a strike against you on their site. You're just paying for them to contact the customer and hide their bad review.
> or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication?
They've probably carefully avoided lying while still being as misleading as possible.
> If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence
yelp may not alter the reviews themselves, but it does change the sorting of reviews and images for paying customers.
Also the willingness/capability to carry through on the threat used in extortion isn't directly required, just the threat itself. The execution of the threat is only important when you want the consequences of non-compliance broadly known.
> I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company.
Really? Yelp is a business which provides little to no customer support bandwidth. Sales is easiest point of contact for Businesses with questions about reviews. Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened.
For specific a specific claim that seems to provide evidence that something weird is going on:
> And what is indisputably clear is that Yelp’s claim that 75 percent of the reviews that get posted by Yelp users become recommended reviews is wildly inaccurate in the case of Baraka Café. When Yelp was only displaying 16 reviews and filtering out 30, it was displaying roughly 35% of all the reviews of Baraka Café, and suppressing 65% of them. It recommended less than half the claimed figure of 75%. Most importantly, none of the suppressed views were negative, only positive reviews were suppressed.[1]
> Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened.
I really don't disagree with this having happened or it being possible that the culture/leadership turns a blind eye to it. My issue is that there is this oft-repeated claim that paying clients' selection, ranking, or content of reviews is somehow different from non-paying ones. It shouldn't be hard to study this claim and yet there is no evidence of it being true.
I've been to Baraka Cafe. It's great. Take a look at their "not currently recommended" reviews. As has been mentioned elsewhere, almost all (8 out of every 10) reviewers have 0 friends on yelp. Active accounts' reviews get preferential visibility.
Perhaps if I start a business and tell all my friends and family to create accounts and review it with 5 stars, I too will have evidence of yelp "altering" reviews when theirs are inevitably hidden for looking suspicious.
Don't want to edit my previous comment, but I just realized that you're listing one particular scam that you allege they're not running, while they're running another totally different shitty scam.
This is the equivalent of "why are you mad, I didn't take your wallet" as you're riding off on my bicycle.
It's not Yelp directly, it's their outside sales contractors. Anyone who manages the online presence of a small business can contribute corroboratory anecdotes, including me. Yelp encourages this behavior from their contractors.
I'm sorry that no one has formally studied Yelp's shady business practices, because that leaves us without data you find worthy of consumption. Maybe an enterprising law firm will change that once they smell enough blood in the water.
Until then, consider that swaying someone's opinion on Yelp using their own PR resources is a complete waste of everyone's time.
In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read?
> In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read?
I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? If this were the case, we'd reach one of those dumb school-book economic equilibriums where no class-action lawsuits would take place. Businesses evaluate the risk of doing things, balancing profit against loss. Exposure to a lawsuit is just another number in that calculation.
> independent scientific study
That study is looking at whether fraudulent reviews are being added to the platform, not whether Yelp is calling up businesses and offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for money, which was my understanding of the original complaints against Yelp.
>I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things?
Businesses doing shady things will dance around the allegation of shadiness with clever language, legalese, and PR-talk to avoid saying the truth. They will rarely intentionally give an unequivocally simple and straightforward answer when there is some truth the allegation.
Or... just informally incentivize employees to do the wrong thing and make sure they have (or refuse to remove availability of) the tools they use to do so.
If yelp has salespeople that can alter reviews or how they show in any way, and those salespeople are incentivized to hit sales numbers, some subset of them will use the tools at their disposal to facilitate their sales.
In this theoretical scenario, is Yelp extorting businesses? No, it's just a few bad employees with an outside influence (and outsize sales numbers likely, too). But if Yelp knows about this and does nothing about it? It's gets more complicated then, and almost impossible to prove.
That's just one possible scenario where Yelp's statement is true, and the people reporting extortion are also being truthful, and depending on the details, Yelp is or isn't complicit in some way. A simple statement from either side doesn't really eliminate myriad possible situations like this, but given the number of reported instances of businesses having problems, I'm not so willing to discount that something is going on.
>If yelp has salespeople that can alter reviews or how they show in any way, and those salespeople are incentivized to hit sales numbers, some subset of them will use the tools at their disposal to facilitate their sales.
I've been threatened by SEO sales people that they can hurt my site's search rankings if I don't sign up for their service. There are robocallers[1] that pretend to be Google employees making these threats. Does that mean they have direct access into Google's database, or even the power to fulfill their threats? Do you think that local businesses, often run by much less technically-literate people, aren't hit by the same kind of scam for their online reviews?
I'm sure they probably are at some times. My only point was to say that there are situations where a statement from Yelp to the contrary doesn't really mean something isn't happening, with or without Yelp's informal approval, so it doesn't necessarily put the discussion to bed. It's just one more point of reference, and should be seen as such when people are making their own assessment of the situation.
Someone hearing complaints of Yelp coercing people shouldn't immediately believe it or believe it explains the whole situation, and neither should someone hearing Yelp's response. They are both possible insights into the actual reality of the situation, which may accurately describe part or al of that reality to varying degrees, and should be seen as exactly that.
I don't use Yelp so my opinions are both irrelevant and formed entirely by what I've heard from others. I'm not sure I believe Yelp hides/shows reviews based on whether businesses are willing to pay but I'm not sure I put too much weight in the above posted link either.
If Yelp's review algorithm has nothing to do with advertising spend then it should be fairly easy to have someone from PwC/Deloitte/E&Y look at the algorithm and issue a letter saying advertising spend isn't a factor. I'd give a lot more weight to a third-party review than I do the Buzzfeed article (not Buzzfeed News) and academic study on the ethics and incentives behind review fraud that Yelp has cited.
In my experience audits done by big 4 are worth nothing. Irregularities are raised, and handled, unofficially, so when the report comes, everything is fine, everything’s legit.
That’s what you get when auditing companies also do consulting.
Thanks for sharing this. I use Yelp for client lunches because I rarely know the area well, and it easily identifies restaurants that deliver. I always felt kind of slimy because of anecdotal rumors. I may have even perpetuated those rumors in passing. Now I feel a bit better, and I have some resources to back it up.
Yelp always says that they don't delete bad reviews for companies that pay them, which I think is true - they just hide the bad reviews behind all sorts of harder to find links so most people won't see them and take them out of the aggregate.
I wouldn't mind the constant redirects to the app IF the app was actually at least as functional as the website. The problem is that the app is less functional, which is infuriating.
1. image quality on the app is substantially worse than on desktop; a problem when you're trying to zoom into a large menu with small text
2. you can't search through image captions (i.e. to see only pictures of a particular menu item); possible on desktop but not on mobile
I would add to this that all services that handle directory and review services are pretty slimy. Google frequently asks me about my IHOP visit much more often that I ever punch IHOP into Google Maps. While I don't mind writing reviews, stuff like this really scares me.
Back in the dot com days, I worked for one of those online phone directory start ups, and those fared better only in the naivete in capturing and manipulating data.
Are other companies that have apps but not sites (or their site is just a download button) slimy? Should yelp not be allowed to pivot from website to app?
I might not agree with that strategic direction as a customer, but its well within their right as a company to choose what they want to be.
Depending how you set your Criteria, certainly Facebook for example will try its darnest not to let you read your messages on mobile browser, but rather force you to download the messenger ️.
I would personally characterize that as slimy and annoying; others may well disagree.
Internets are also full of condemnation for Reddit's app vs website, and their attempt to force the app upon user.
If you're on Android, try Opera - don't know why but it works (Either Opera did some custom script to hide the 'install messenger' banner, or FB code is broken. But shhh don't tell anyone.)
Right away, the fact that it requires downloading and installing an app (which you then have to log in to) leaves it pretty far behind in the "better user experience" race vs a mobile website that just works. It's hard to catch up from that deficit.
I don't bother with the Yelp app anymore because I'm sick and tired of having to re-download and re-log in to every app (which can be painful since I don't reuse passwords) every time I wipe the OS or get a new phone. Unless it's an app that doesn't need login, or that I use very frequently, it's just not worth it. I don't use Yelp often enough to justify it.
And the Google Maps app has fine reviews with less taint of corporate meddling anyway.
I guess it depends on your POV. I haven't found a mobile website that I liked using. The touch/swipe/double-tap experience is always janky, sometimes you want to zoom in on a map, but it zooms the entire page, etc, etc. Maybe if it was just text with no interactivity, then being a mobile website wouldn't matter. Personally I don't mind spending a couple of minutes installing an app if its useful.
Just because you happen to always download mobile apps doesn't negate the fact that many people don't, and deliberately crippling a mobile site to coerce people to download an app they otherwise wouldn't is an extremely clear case of being user hostile.
Are they obligated to maintain feature parity across apps and websites? Is focusing on one or the other acceptable to you? If I prefer an app, and a website doesn’t have a high quality app or the app constantly pushes me to the website, is that also user hostile? It sounds like your definition of user-hostile is “things you don’t like”.
Criticizing a company for purposefully crippling an existing site for certain users is not at all the same as saying all companies must support all platforms equally. I'm having trouble seeing how you could even make such a mistake arguing in good faith, so I'll just leave things here.
You haven't responded to the points your parent comments are making. The argument is that making it difficult for users not to use your mobile app is hostile. You have been responding by saying that you prefer to use mobile apps (for reasons many people, myself included, disagree with). That's simply not relevant to the fact that it's hostile to force users into an experience they don't want.
> The argument is that making it difficult for users not to use your mobile app is hostile.
It isn't hostile - because as I stated, websites are often janky when used in a mobile browser, especially interactive websites, in which case the app is a net positive. This is my experience and opinion, and I don't hide behind "many people think __".
Everyone is free to have their opinion, but I hope you realize that passing it off as fact, and then forcing someone to agree with it is silly.
Again, the hostility is that users are forced to use the mobile app. Forcing someone to do something that is (granted for the sake of argument) a net positive that they do not believe is a net positive is user hostile.
The question is not whether mobile apps are good things. (Everyone is free to have their own opinion about that.) The question is whether or not it's a good thing to force someone who does not want to use your mobile app to use it for your own reasons / or for your own benefit.
No one is forced to do anything, its not a public utility. The company is free to implement their service in whatever way they want, and you as the consumer or user can ignore it and move on to something else. If you feel strongly about it, write them a letter. Sorry, what you're saying is not resonating at all, and frankly sounds a bit entitled to me. I don't think this conversation is productive for either of us. Bye!
"The company is free to implement their service in whatever way they want ..."
Yeah, and we're free to complain about it when they do so in a manner that's hostile to users.
Why are you so intent on defending this company against reasonable complaints about its product decisions?? If you don't agree with a particular complaint, just ignore it and move on. It's really strange how much you're inserting yourself into the conversation here though and shouting down and insulting everyone who says anything negative about the product.
It needs to not just be better. It would need to be better in ways that aren't achievable with the alternative, and sufficiently better that it justifies the cost in terms of space and management requirements imposed.
Sure, and different people make different trade-offs. I don't like using mobile websites, because to me, the interactivity when it comes to touch/swipe/zoom interactions, or edge-swipes etc is always a little janky compared to a proper app. If its a website that I use a lot, I'd rather just have the app than deal with the mobile website.
I don't see anyone who said Yelp isn't allowed to use ethically questionable business tactics and user-hostile delivery mechanisms. We just don't have to like it, and we don't have to keep quiet about it while they do it.
Google also sells your direct links to "Buy Tickets" and your phone number to 3rd party affiliates that will take a cut without your permission.
I've been fighting for almost a year to get links in our profile pointed back to our website for a website with more than 1 Million hits a year and a 30k Google Ad spend.
What do you mean by "profile"? I think you just need to "take ownership" of the maps place, and then presumably you can control the links and phone number and such. Hopefully there is some verification involved...
I have no idea how to actually do this, I just remember seeing a link asking if I own this or that business on maps, I guess when it is unclaimed?
We have ownership of our profile and filled out the links with what we wanted initially.
In fact when we log in to manage our profile it still shows the correct link, but the link replacement is happening on a layer in between the profile management and what displays to users.
After several years Google just swapped the link to a 3rd party that claims to have an agreement with us. Which there is no documentation of, and the dispute process is not handled by Google but the 3rd party directly. Which is why fixing it has taken over a year.
And to correct my earlier comment our Google Ad budgets is now 120k+ per year. But even this doesn't give us the ability to appeal to a higher authority and swap the link.
First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket going trying to strongarm restaurants into paying for advertising, and now this.
Friendly reminder - if you are on mobile and trying to read a Yelp review and don't want to download their app, simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" and it will load the full review without forcing you to get the app.