Yelp To "Clarify" How Advertising Affects Listing 53
WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Yelp is going to change some features in the wake of the class-action suit brought against it. Yelp has been accused of extortion; the Yelp co-founder denies all. The NY Times Bits blog has more details about the changes Yelp intends to make. According to Ars, the business that filed the lawsuit says that the newly announced changes do not address their original complaints at all."
Fire the sales staff. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the inherent problem. Even if Yelp's policy specifically denies anybody's targeting non-advertisers for unfairly bad profiles, the sales team is made of individuals upset they're not getting a commission from the guy who decided not to buy ads. So, what's going to stop the sales team from trashing the profile of the non-advertiser? This is impossible to prevent unless the site has a staff-free sales system, like Google does with AdWords.
Irresponsible "Article" (Score:3, Interesting)
I searched the linked articles, and several articles linked from those, but couldn't find the word "clarify" in any of Yelp's statements. In fact, the only use I found was also in quotes, in the Ars article.
It appears Ars has decided to substitute scare quotes for "commentary." Readers ought to be informed that the "journalist" may be misleading them, because in fact, Yelp's changes (as "reported" by Ars) do not aim to "clarify how advertising affects listing."
(Please note that my last use of quotes was not intended to scare, but to set off language that came from another source. Sorry if I frightened anyone.)
Re:FIRST POST (Score:4, Interesting)
It is funny to me that this story comes up on slashdot now. Just two days ago, I went to pick up my dog from the day care place, and the owner asked me if I use Yelp. I told her it was crap and that you can never believe anything you see there, but she (rightfully) said that other people don't see it that way. It seems Yelp had deleted all their positive reviews, and only kept the one bad one. This is a business started by a couple young people who have obviously put all of their eggs into this particular basket. It makes me really angry, but I don't know what I can do to Yelp to get them to stop. Ignoring them would do no good, because that's what I was doing before and that obviously wasn't working.
The world needs a way to hold companies like Yelp accountable. My experience with the dog place made me wonder if maybe there was some legal structure a company could use. For example, NotYelp.com does what Yelp does, but sells $1 contracts with anybody who will buy them that the reviewing system meets certain requirements, like not purging positive reviews from businesses that don't advertise with you. This would create an assurance for other people that NotYelp.com would have to be crazy to do untrustworthy things, which should make NotYelp.com reliable and worthy of your trust.
Dear slobbleman, fuck you (Score:5, Interesting)
So last year the business I work for started getting AstroTurf by a competing business. I work in an entertainment type venue at night, yadda yadda yadda, whatever...
Our competitor basically said that we were a dull venue, but if folks wanted a non-dull venue to please try theirs. They and their gang would re-write their reviews on a weekly basis just so it would float to the top. To the yelp staff, these fake reviews were deemed credible because one of the ringleaders of this astroturfing had an "Elite" next to his name, I guess that makes him special.
One of my regulars, who is also a yelp "Elite" responded by rewriting his review, but included a ton of links to youtube video of our venue that wasn't staged, showing it was lively. Yelp removed the review saying "It contained to many external links" after the other "Elite" douchebag and his buddies flagged it. (When google was thinking about buying yelp, I sent snail mail letters to the google executive staff with a printout of the review and an explanation. I put in big bold letters googles mission statement of "DO NO EVIL". I hope it changed their minds when it came to buying them out)
Back on subject though. NOTHING got yelp to let up. While all this was happening, we got emails and phone calls from yelp salespeople *CONSTANTLY* promising this would all stop if we joined their ad program. We even tried their "Owner comments" but after a few weeks they banned us because we didn't comment according to *their* guidelines.
One reviewer said, "Your waitress looks like the hooker from hamburger hill, me so horny". I think I said something equally offensive to him. Yelp holds business's at a double standard for how they can comment from the reviewers, it's complete bullshit. We got banned from commenting for responding the way our reviewer did? Why didn't they ban him?
Eventually I got tired of it. I recruited friends to start photoshopping the heads of some of the astroturfers on transvestites, gay porn, whatever. We'd post this weekly on our website. We also started dropping dox on our website on slobbleman and the rest of his crew.
Like magic, our sort order returned to normal. Yelp stopped calling us, the little shittards that astroturfing us stopped as well.
I hate yelp. I hate slobbleham and his whole fucking extortion scheme. I have no doubt there will be some slashdotters that are "ELITES" that will have a problem with what I say, and what I saw but let me ask you this..
Have you ever worked at a business that was being actively astroturfed by a competitor? Did yelp offer to genuinely help you or did they tell you paraphrasically "Pay us or go fuck yourself?"
That's what they told me, paraphrasically. Fuck you slobbleman, I hope you choke on a dick.
Re:FIRST POST (Score:3, Interesting)
You're also going to get the fans/haters phenomena. That is, the majority of the people doing reviews are either going to give very positive or very negative reviews. People who don't have strong opinions either way won't bother wasting their time giving a review. Similar to reviews at gaming sites.