Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

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.

It was a well-written article. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for clarifying on the "pay-to-play" thing.

I'm with the shopkeepers. Yelp is evil.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

LTH, as in LTHforum.com?

[Edit: this is in fact false, see comment below]

I doubt that is the case, if they respond in a calm, rational manner.

That's a big part of the problem. Owners can't respond publicly to complaints on the site unless they have a paid account.

That's actually not true. All a business has to do is register. They'll get sales calls, but they don't actually have to buy anything.

Thanks for the correction. I picked that up from the other article on Yelp today, but reading it again I think I misinterpreted.

Quote in question:

Business owners contend that they just want the same opportunity to respond to negative, false, or damaging information about their businesses. Instead, the only way for them to salvage their businesses' reputation is by paying Yelp - regardless of whether the reviews are true or false.

> Someone needs to figure out how to scale this model.

It sounds like your standard referrals-only community model (I love the idea of anti-SEO) but how could you keep elements further down the tree ("compromised" referrals, for lack of a better term) from unbalancing the community as it fans out into too many degrees of separation?

Perhaps with a one-level-down moderation model. Each degree of separation from the origin is responsible for moderating posts one level down from them, so in theory there is an unbroken chain of moderation from the earliest users to the newest ones.

This kind of ties into in idea I've playing with, basically a sort of meta-yelp. Since for any given city in the world there probably are at least two or three web sites dedicated to reviewing the bar and or restaurant scene in that city, why not have a site that collects and reviews those sites. So instead of going to Yelp to find the best restaurants in San Diego (or wherever) you'd go to this site find the best sites covering San Diego restaurants and then go to that site find a restaurant. Anybody know if such a thing already exists?

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