Yelp Posts Q4 Loss, CFO Resigns | Hacker News Reader

Yelp Posts Q4 Loss, CFO Resigns

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438 pointspraneshp145 comments

Yelp in 2014 Q4 had revenue $110M and a profit of $32.7M [1].

Its revenue for Q4 2015 is $154M and a loss of $22.2M [2].

I see that there is an income tax expense of $20.3M in 2015 and other depreciation costs...but is this change in profit with growth in revenue typical?

[1] http://www.yelp-ir.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=250809&p=irol-newsArt...

[2] http://www.yelp-ir.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=250809&p=irol-newsArt...

This is really the only interesting question regarding the CFO's resignation. The CFO isn't responsible for revenue growth, but would be on the hook for something like a bunch of previous quarters' botched taxes.

That said, it could just be that Krolik resigned to do something else. It's not like he was fired and kicked out of the office -- he's given notice, and they're looking for a replacement.

No profit = no bonuses likely, leave the ship

That kind of swing is unlikely in this line of business. Checking the 8k shows that Yelp had a one-time writeup of tax assets in 2014.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1345016/0001144204150...

I wonder if there was something they delayed accounting for in Q4 of 2014 that allowed them to have that profit. What do the numbers look like for the quarters in between?

Seems likely to me as well. Hopefully it was GAAP compliant otherwise he may be in some trouble.

I wonder when they intentionally crippled their mobile website because that's when I uninstalled their app.

The top three stories on hacker news right now are about top management resignations in three high profile tech companies. Earlier, LinkedIn lost 40% of their value in a day. Deutch Bank lost 11% of their value today.

sorry to be off topic here, but these seem like crazy times.

Of course there's a bubble, and of course it has to burst at some point. There are frankly a plethora of poorly conceived and poorly executed startups on the scene right now, with no hope of ever achieving financial sanity. Just as we saw in the late '90s with any crazy idea being given a ton of VC funding, regardless of whether they had a sane business plan, only to implode when things got tight.

Unfortunately, this time around the successes of the previous rounds actually made things worse, because they succeeded too much. VC funding is now, intentionally, a casino. The RoI you can get from growing a winner fast enough to dominate some new market so outclasses what you can earn back from helping a sensible startup grow at a reasonable level that most VCs concentrate their funding to match. It's all about disrupting and breakthroughs and growing fast. This ends up bringing a lot of "unicorns" into existence even if only a few of them are ultimately viable. It also leaves a lot of smaller, more sensible startup ideas in the dust. Silicon Valley is all about stuff that's "cool", not stuff that's challenging or valuable. Sadly, even this round of the bubble bursting is unlikely to change that.

A business has to make a profit...consumers prefer quality products...investors prefer businesses who are profitable and indicate the wherwithal to ensure future profitability...businesses that sell "entertainment" are vulnerable to reductions in consumer's discretionary spending...

These are old, old maxims...

I've often wondered what percentage of current Internet "businesses" offer consumers a product they could not live without...?

Maybe we actually are adjusting to the appropriate level of risk to take. I remember blog posts from PG that if YC were really investing appropriately they'd have more failures.

I guess it's already bursting.. BTW yc could be arguably one of the chief perpetrators of this bubble..

How to investors make money on unicorns if there is no liquidity event?

It's a lottery, you only need one. One facebook, one google, etc. Those successes bring in RoI not just of double digit percentages (the sort you'd expect from high-risk investments) but in multiples, orders of magnitude even. 10x, 100x returns sometimes. And when you hit those jackpots all of your other investments are now meaningless. The result is that VC becomes a game of searching for jackpots. Everyone wants a little bit of everything, and everyone wants to have their fingers in the things that look most interesting, that seem to have the chance to blow up. VCs also push the companies they invest in to grow fast and hit the point of finding out whether or not they're a "jackpot" idea or not.

At the same time, investors have figured out innumerable ways to get paid out of companies that are obviously not going to make it and won't ever hit a traditional liquidity event. They've gamed the system to an enormous degree but they also pump so much money into it that it's hard to stand up to them.

Good summary. This is the reason tech is in bubble while economy is heading towards recession.. This and stupid fed policy

Deutsche Bank is sort of a bad example as they've gone through some troubled times lately [1]

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34567868

Could it be that the air encased in a thin spherical film of soap be escaping all over the tech market ?

I agree but I also think it is a larger scale problem. like the whole planet.

Do you think the companies that have healthy price to earnings ratios are in a bubble?

Most people will deny a bubble exists until it's incontrovertible, while they keep saying their "twitter for pets" is really worth 1bi USD.

We have to be open to the modest return, small business dot coms. A company of say, 20 people, each making about 150k or so and being completely satisfied with the state of things.

I think there's a culture of expecting reasonable businesses to seek unreasonable goals.

Until the valley can move from "always dream big" to "well sometimes, just plan sensibly", it will be perpetually unstable.

I remember a strip mall across from a corporate office park. Every couple months, a new .com would go in and another would go out of business, but in the strip mall the same places had been there for 20 years. The web isn't going anywhere, there's nothing wrong with providing for the long term.

No, the web isn't going anywhere...many have come and gone, as you correctly point out...and will again...

It's very likely that only so many "home runs" can be hit...that doesn't mean you can't do very well for yourself by focussing on a niche need, a good product, and excellent service...

A winning business model since mankind first began trading and bartering...

You make a very, very good point...

Well, then you can make a lot of money off of them by shorting publicly traded tech companies trading at massively inflated valuations.

Doesn't shorting a stock require that you select a time at which the stock will be worth less than it is now? Isn't that just a slightly different way of trying to time the market?

Presumably someone might think we are in a bubble and be right, but not have enough information to know when the market will correct or to what degree.

A great read before people get on the "Yelp removes bad reviews if you pay" bandwagon: http://screenwerk.com/2016/02/02/reviews-rashomon-plumber-re...

I'm 90% sure that the people calling about removing bad review are shady marketing services companies that are offering this.

The same thing happens with Google. Someone says "hi I'm your local Google specialist..." They're not exactly claiming to be from Google, but it's confusing to an offline small business owner that thinks Google is calling them.

I've heard many of these messages for Google. I don't recall any from Yelp, but if you have any friends or family that claim that Yelp is doing so - ask to listen to the recording. I wouldn't be surprised if it's some other company claiming they can help.

I too have heard from a few businesses telling me directly that they don't trust Yelp and they know someone who got threatened. But like the parent comment said, it's hard to find a direct link.

At the end of the day it's shady businesses claiming to be a Yelp or Google specialist that are muddying the waters from what I can tell.

Then yelp should sue these yelp specialist for trademark infringement.

They definitely should - wouldn't be surprised if they are already.

I'm not on the bandwagon (I don't use Yelp regardless, and I suspect long-term it would be damaging to the brand if good Yelp reviews don't correlate with good experiences), but the evidence Yelp present here is hardly cast-iron. I can see a number of ways such a suggestion could be made without it being evident in those recordings, such as:

- [Unlikely] Recordings have been edited, or certain recordings not disclosed

- Additional contact before/after this series of interactions where review removal was discussed

- Threats not made to this plumber, but another company/plumber who passed on a warning

- Raised by the plumber, and so not recorded ("Will you remove my bad reviews if I advertise with you?" "Yes, sir, we will do that" sounds perfectly benign if you only hear the Yelp end)

- [Not Yelp's fault, though could warn against(?)] Scam by a third party - Attempting to blackmail the plumber by pretending to be Yelp and threatening to post bad / remove good reviewss

If that doesn't convince you, how about this independent study showing that Yelp's filtering algorithm doesn't treat advertisers' reviews differently than non-advertisers'?

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-y...

Wow, there are soo many resignations happening this week! I am stunned. Anyone have articles on how this happened and what it means?

I was thinking the same, but it is earnings season in a down market...

Do they all know that a crash is coming?

It's almost as if everyone wants to see a crash.

It's funny how crashes are almost psychological play at times. I hate "yo" as much as the next guy, but the pain of seeing a significant depreciation in wages for anyone far out weighs the joy I'd see from having my "gut feelings" about a bubble being proved right.

I'll say it: I want a correction. I don't believe that the VC-funded app economy is delivering. I dislike that SF and SV have a de facto monopoly on the US tech sector, and to participate here I have to spend my entire paycheck to rent the shittiest apartment I've ever lived in. I would like for housing prices to go down, or I'd like a nudge to walk away from this place.

You know, you are free to move to any of a list of cities with booming (or at least sufficiently breathing) tech industries and more realistic costs of living, in no particular order:

  - Austin
  - San Diego
  - Washington, DC
  - New York
  - Portland
  - Pretty much any state capital will have agencies with plenty of contract development work

New York, Washington DC and San Diego are all still expensive.

Raleigh/Durham and Seattle are better options.

My point stands. Any city is better than SF in terms of cost of living, including the three you mentioned (I never said they weren't expensive, just less expensive).

There's a decent chunk of certain segments of the tech sector in the Bay area but saying they have a "de facto monopoly on the US tech sector" is overblown. There are plenty of tech jobs in many areas of the country (including but not limited to jobs with companies that are headquartered in Silicon Valley).

Much of the Bay area has had expensive housing for decades. Even if there's a downturn that disproportionately hits SV startups, the impact on Bay area housing prices is probably going to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

Even several years ago rental prices were halfway sane. its not always been this bad. https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-sunnyvale-rent-tr...

A huge economic downturn would decrease your rent, and probably your salary as well. A better solution would be for the city government of SF to stop restricting the housing supply.

SF politics are about as likely to suddenly become reasonable as Yo is to turn a profit.

Would you rather have a correction in the real estate bubble or the tech bubble?

That's the wrong way to look at boom-bust cycles. The mistakes were made when investment unsustainably outstripped underlying value. You can feel bad in the bust times for those beneficiaries of the boom times, but they were simply paid forward for the bust years to come. That's just the economic sawtooth that will continue to happen as long as growth has insufficient pressure (regulatorily or culturally) for sustainability. It's all been seen before.

agreed. I call it #theCapitalCycle https://medium.com/@alexanderbcampbell/more-than-500bn-of-we...

In my case I'm completely shut out of a crazy real estate market in Silicon Valley with a small child to accomodate, and gloomy prospects if we ever get evicted. I'm a tech worker and I make a very nice salary, and I can't wait for a crash to take some of the crazy money out of the equation.

Unless you have big cash savings, i don't see how you can benefit from a crash.

I disagree. I have cash, just not the crazy amount necessary to buy a 1.2M two bedroom apartment. Once prices cool down a bit the 20% of that will be lower, payments lower. I'm not hoping for a thermonuclear war, just for sanity.

Unless, of course, your company goes through multiple rounds of layoffs and paycuts, as does all the other companies in the area. Then you're too scared to buy a place because you're worried about getting saddled with a large debt and possibly losing your job.

It will be a great time to move to San Francisco after the rent prices drop through the floor.

> after the rent prices drop through the floor

Ha, I wish. The market might cool off, but it's like saying it will be great moving to Manhattan once rent there becomes dirt cheap. Barring catastrophic events (e.g., war, a confluence of epic natural disasters, an alien invasion), not in our lifetimes.

These so called "bubbles" are purely psychological because they are based on imaginary abstractions.

>This was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still, in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories...everything going. But suddenly because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor - starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering. It is ingenuity. You see we are psychologically back in the 17th century and technically in the 20th. And here comes the problem. So what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological attitude to money and to wealth and further more to pleasure and further more to the nature of work. And this is a formidable problem.

-Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

Generals are always fighting the last war. There definitely seems to be a correction happening, and that's fine and welcome (and a perfectly normal feature of a healthy business environment) but to expect a full-blown implosion of an entire sector just because it happened 17 years ago doesn't seem warranted, mainly because the fundamentals of the majority of the players are totally different (well-tested and scalable, if not necessarily fully profitable, operation models that drives substantial revenue from a substantial customer base).

How many Yo's have we actually had? Not many.

Can someone help me find the definition of yo in this context? Is it a reference to yo-yo-like fluctuations?

I think he is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

Why does it take any investment to make an app like this?

Other way round: taking the investment is the reason to make an app like this.

Hence the sentiment.

maybe A.I. will be better at avoiding crashes... but are we there yet?

Anon from elsewhere - "It's called smart money cashing out at the top." He's not wrong.

Could it be the hike in Federal Reserve Rates causing credit tougher to find?

Yelp is kind of stuck like Twitter. Product is not shaping up well. I am not sure how they plan to grow without improving their product. Their mobile app still kinda sucks

Their mobile app is one of the most poorly designed and poorly executed major tech products out there. For a company that hires probably a thousand engineers, there has been very little improvements on the web and mobile properties in over 4 years. For a product that's innately social, local and realtime, it has missed most of the enabled affordances of years past.

I'm surprised that there isn't much competition. I was traveling recently, and found Zomato's app to be much superior.

Yelp has a couple hundred engineers on staff. Roughly 20 of them are responsible for the Android and iOS apps.

I really can't believe how bad it is (on iOS at least).

Two rather signifiant UX issues on my end are:

1. bad image resolution (do they resize pictures to be smaller?); this is also worse from yelp.com 2. Why is the regular swipe from edge of screen to go to the previous screen overridden to move from review to review? (same issue with GMail app though too)

> Why is the regular swipe from edge of screen to go to the previous screen overridden to move from review to review? (same issue with GMail app though too)

I completely share your frustration here. I actually met a Yelp iOS engineer once and asked them about this. They said the idea is that it's supposed to feel like the way you navigate photos in albums on iOS; their expectation (whoever designs Yelp's iOS UX) is that users want to read many reviews and don't skim the review previews first to find the ones they like.

I showed them how I prefer to browse reviews: skim the previews, find a promising looking one [Yelp review signal/noise is terrible], "drill into" it, back out, continue until I've read enough reviews to make a judgment. They said they understood my POV, but stood by the assertion that most users don't use the app this way. Maybe they have metrics to justify that.

Or maybe most users don't use the app that way because of their interface? It makes using the app in a preferred (or preferable) way too cumbersome?

It's an interesting take either way.

I can understand why they'd see it that way. But my preferred UX is exactly what you described. I want to find a review that looks like it may hit on what I want to read about specifically, and then exit out as needed.

I find Foursquare's app much much superior than all-- too bad they're gotten a confused reputation over the years. But from an app UI/UX perspective, it shocks me why anyone would use Yelp's app over Foursquare.

Twizoo is also a new competitor that takes a completely different approach by getting reviews from Twitter. It also uses a data visualization over lists which is interesting. However, I think it's only live in a handful of US cities.

> I'm surprised that there isn't much competition.

In Europe, TripAdvisor is probably the #1 most used app in this market. Although I don't personally really like it either, not so much because of any technical problem, but because they've chosen to be extremely annoying about nagging you to create an account, which I don't have any desire to do.

Zomato is hugely popular outside the US.

They're not helping themselves by having a mobile website that's intentionally crippled in order to force users to the app. They need a top-shelf mobile web experience.

This. If you push me to an app by having a non-functional mobile web site I will just stop using your product.

Just use a browser that sets a desktop user agent like Opera or Dolphin.

Responsive design can trump that still.

I'm giving a workaround, not defending crap engineering.

I use the mobile app all the time, and it seems good enough -- why do you think it sucks? What could be better about it?

I don't understand, why hasn't the product changed at all?? There seem to be some obvious wins, e.g. personalization... but no movement at all.

Why is Yelp untouchable by the FTC or DoJ? The company gets up to some really shady stuff but hasn't faced much punishment if any.

Because every time the FTC/DoJ investigate it turns out that most of the accusations are unfounded.

This looks like the California DOJ dangling some bait : )

http://www.yelp.com/biz/california-department-of-justice-doj...

What is the shady stuff?

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-...

""" The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

"""

I call bullshit: http://screenwerk.com/2016/02/02/reviews-rashomon-plumber-re...

It's unclear who's fibbing. My guess in the story I posted is that the sales guy said that stuff but was not actually in a position to pull the bad reviews. Here's a Yelp sales rep talking about the job https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-work-at-Yelp-as-an-ac...

Is this why their operational expenses are growing? Because the mature businesses that are enrolled long time ago quit paying otherwise?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp#Alleged_manipulation_by_Y...

>What is the shady stuff?

just Google it [1]

(by the way everything you see there is an analogy, people don't mean that it's literally associated with the actual mafia, it's still a tech company run by white-collar people just like me and you, people just object to the business model and want someone to get them to stop. there are no guns or the like involved, it's not what people mean. just tactics.)

just read these links: [2] from here on Hacker News going way, way back. choice quote "Yelp has been routinely hiding bad reviews and fixing good reviews to the top. It is a total scam and a total extortion scheme for local businesses." from 1385 days ago (3.7 yrs so 2012)

- [Edit: among large tech companies/startups that get discussed heavily] it's literally the only tech company anyone utters within the same breath as extortion or mafia.

let's compare: a lot of people complain about PayPal, or things like eBay's fees or whatever. But nobody complains about any company literally running an extortion racket using mafia tactics. Yelp is absolutely unique in receiving this charge. [among the type of companies I mention]

of course whenever it happens its old CTO or whoever will come here and be like, 'noooo I would have known man no way. founder here. not even a little bit. nu-uh.' you can go find that quote if you want, it's why I started the second search above, but I realized I don't actually care. :)

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=yelp+mafia

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=yelp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&...

> it's literally the only tech company anyone utters within the same breath as extortion or mafia.

I see you aren't familiar with reputation.com

your comment is the only comment on HN that mentions the company you mention and either of the terms I mention. see for yourself - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reputation.com%20mafia&sort=by...

I've edited my post to reflect that I'm talking about companies that actually routinely get discussed here, sorry I wasn't clear originally. If you change the above to be abut Yelp you get sooo many hits using that language and verbiage, it's a very common accusation that many people are very angry about.

Serious question.

Yelp's revenue model is a bad conflict of interest. They rank the destinations AND the destinations have to buy advertising too.

What revenue model could they do that would work and not be shady? I can't think of one. Charge users?

It's not that strange. Google does the same more or less.

Search for "insurance" on Google. Google ranks a bunch of insurance companies: Geico, Statefarm, etc. They also show ratings for some specific agents. Google also sells ads if you want to drive more traffic and not just be in the organic listings.

You can find nuanced differences between Yelp and Google, but the problem is not conflict of interest. The problem is that businesses are not seeing enough value in the ad product that Yelp offers. Many advertisers dislike Google, yet they still advertise.

How is this different from google or Yahoo?

I heard they also accept payments to remove bad reviews, but I'm not sure it's true. That would be a worse conflict in my opinion.

it's pretty much google and every other search engine model. I believe competition it's the only thing that can make it not shady.

I've replaced Yelp with Foursquare a while ago for finding things around me and trusting reviews. I've found that the character limit and smaller user base of Foursquare makes reading reviews a much more pleasant experience. I also like how there is no star system on Foursquare.

Honest question. How do you know you're in the middle of a bubble bursting?

When it's become so obvious that everyone is asking the question.

What exactly do you mean by "bubble"?

These seems worring indeed, are some bubble poping now? Maybe it's just overreacting, but hopefully the trend won't continue.

It's likely just random, with the human bias to read patterns into randomness hot on its trail as always.

What do you predict will happen to Yelp this year?

Someone will acquire them. The brand and employees are worth a billion dollars, in my opinion. Local is a very difficult market to crack.

Data as well. I can think of at least three companies worth $100B+ (and several worth $1B+) that would love to have comprehensive reviews of nearly every local business in the U.S.

I work for a large company that has Yelp flavored data as part of their services and can confirm that they do pay Yelp money for their data. It's worth quite a lot.

Foursquare will buy them, to get back into the Foursquare business.

This is one of those moments where I wish there was a nice way to express sarcasm. I hope your comment was meant to be delivered with it. A lot of it.

There is a good way. He expressed it, you picked up on it, but you just don't trust the rest of the audience. Honestly, is there any way your type of comment makes sarcasm more enjoyable for everyone else? We get it

Amazon. Alexa already integrates with Yelp, and Amazon would love to have all that tasty local commerce data. All kinds of interesting things they could do to integrate with Yelp (Amazon have _so many products_)

They will be acquired by Twitter or AOL/verizon

Yelp, Zenefits and Paypal. What is going on?

Yelp: Very hard to monetize. Because they chose a model where the businesses who pay them are also the businesses being reviewed, they've given themselves a conflict of interest. They've chosen to sell their integrity, which makes their star ratings less reliable/valuable, which makes users trust them less, which makes businesses want to advertise less. It's a vicious cycle.

Zenefits: Broke the law. Also an insanely ambitious, brilliant, risky business model.

PayPal: Hated by most people/customers. Can't wait until they go out of business completely.

> Because they chose a model where the businesses who pay them are also the businesses being reviewed

Crazy when you think about it.

> PayPal: Hated by most people/customers.

I didn't understand this until recently when I tried to "instant" transfer a few hundred bucks to a friend and was caught up in a 3 day "review" process where I was interrogated about the "reason" for the transfer. Never again!

>> Because they chose a model where the businesses who pay them are also the businesses being reviewed

> Crazy when you think about it.

Who do those guys think they are, Moody's!!!?

@Gibbon1 this is a pretty insightful comment. Luckily for Moody's, they made themselves part of an intricate industrial structure where their ratings drive large parts of the industry (e.g., investment guidelines, lending, etc.)

The payment review stuff happens with regular banks as well. It's due to vague money laundering legislation where banks have to act as police but have no guidelines or rules.

A lot of the other things people hate PayPal for is due to their reliance on the credit card companies and their own regulations.

I don't say this to excuse PayPal, but to explain why ant competitor thst shows up will have the same problem. Just look at the Bitcoin exchanges - they should have the most leeway yet people aren't happy with them either due to stringent KYC rules.

B-b-but according the paypal's shiney new superbowl ad, paypal is 'new money'.

http://avc.com/2016/01/ch-ch-ch-ch-changes/

Could it perhaps be related to the recent LinkedIn plunge?

http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-earnings-q4-2016-2

Executive departures are normally planned months in advance, not 3 days.

Yes and Feb is ripe for C level exec changes... they get through the holidays, use January to firm up their new plans and put their replacements into order and then boom- Feb let it hit the press.

Maybe they're going to launch a startup together.

He was probably told he has to give the CEO a 5 star rating or he would be fired.

edit: i have no idea if they have an internal person-rating system based on yelp, but i hope so

As far as the recent resignations, it's probably New Years resolutions when people realize they value time over money.

It aint his fault, so he must have another opportunity.

Downvoters should be required to cite their reasoning. This would presumaby hinder illogical, kneejerk, emotional downvotes.

We are here to learn & understand (perhaps painfully), not anonymously persecute.

Edit: I did not consciously realize the parent was "logicallee". ;)

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062422 and marked it off-topic.

Downvoting is hardly persecution. It just means someone doesn't like your comment. They don't owe you an explanation and the site's author has explicitly stated one is not required. Think of what would happen if every downvote of a low-quality comment had to come with a polite note justifying the action. Noise explosion.

On the other hand, downvoting isn't really supposed to reflect dislike or disagreement, but rather a comment that is rude, lacks substance or, is otherwise against the guidelines. Unfortunately this rule seems to be pretty universally ignored on HN these days.

I'll generally re-upvote any reasonable post that I see has been downvoted simply due to expressing a contentious opinion, even if I also happen to disagree.

It's very much also supposed to reflect those.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

It is is bit off-putting that you think anything that you downvote will only respond with "noise explosion".

Groupthink much?

What, exactly, is groupthink? If everyone had to explain their every downvote, the site would be unreadable.

"Groupthink" can be Googled.

Are you learning anything from the unresponsive down-voters of your post? The only thing I learn from grey posts is that HN does not agree. Why they do not agree... I often have no idea why.

'Groupthink' makes zero sense in this discussion.

As to the noise explosion, think about what we just did. You posted a bit of offtopic meta (breaking a site rule), I was stupid enough to reply (breaking a site rule), now you're throwing inscrutable condescending non-sequiturs at me (breaking a site rule). We've added a bunch of pointless noise to a thread on the topic "Yelp Posts Q4 Loss, CFO Resigns". Some thankless moderator will have to come clean up after us.

Where can we talk about flaws in the Hacker News forum/comments?

Threads that are about that seem like a good place. As you know, anyone can start a thread.

The second dotcom bubble is finally abouy to burst?

Github, Twitter, LinkedIn, PayPal issue and bunch of small ones.

THERE MUST BE MORE TO THIS STORY. -recent paranoid end is nigh HN user.

Well, come on. A few days ago 3 news stories about companies losing stock value. Now, 3 stories in a row about company executives resigning. What's going on in the Valley? :O.

When a story gets hot on HN it tends to lead to other stories like it being upvoted. You should've seen it when the whole front page was about Erlang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

In case anyone's wondering, there was a reason for the Erlangomania: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

The bubble is burs* * * slap * slap*

I've decided too keep this opinion to myself. So a year from now when the bubble has burst, I'll get to lay down a nice "told you so" to the world. And you can rise with me as my second in command and we will rule a post bubble world, the carnage of the bursted bubble landscape will be ours till the end of time!

How often does this stuff normally happen and how much is it the hot thing to report on this week?

I don't wish to lose my confidence.

liquidity event ... :-o

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