How to destroy your business with one email
yelp.com
yelp.com
this is a scam. threats of litigation. withholding of property. unlawful contracts.
you used "mob mentality". that's a big red flag to me. are you perhaps the owner of that small business?
The evidence of this being a scam is that someone posted an e-mail the owner allegedly sent. That e-mail could be a total sham, or it could be exaggerated, or there could be a huge other side of the story.
There are absolutely scammers out there, and this business might be one of them. There's no hard evidence either way, though.
- "Anyone who is defending this child molester was never molested as a child."
- "Anyone who is defending this racist has never been the victim of prejudice."
Some events overtrain our minds, such that we can never emotionally react to them in a genuinely rational way again. However, we can stop ourselves from doing this, by holding fast to the one principle that has always, always worked: Innocent until proven guilty, please.
I think you really need to reexamine your perspective as it will seriously make working with other people on projects quite difficult.
To put that another way, in an isomorphic situation with forged evidence of, say, spousal abuse (pretending that that has some relevance to HN for some reason, and wouldn't get flagged), do you think the votes here would go the same way on your, the parent's, and the grandparent's comments, even if there were many people here who had been victims of spousal abuse (like I am assuming that there are many people here who have been conned by a business at some point)?
On the other hand, when a magazine was shown to have lifted content and then told the original author she should be grateful for the portfolio assist, HN did pile on. In that case, the evidence of wrongdoing was clear and widespread: an admission by the publisher that she'd lifted content, links to the original which was clearly older, and links to content lifted from other publications. This led to the opposite pattern in comments, with evidence being highly upvoted and "let's not jump to conclusions" sitting at only a few points.
I don't think "sympathy for small business" is the driving force. I think it's a focus on evidence rather than narrative (which happens to help us avoid that particular cognitive bias.) We are, after all, Hacker News, and the hacker ethos is one of making stuff that works, A/B testing, and following the evidence.
if($customer->has_paid && $review->score < 4) {
delete_review();
}Seems like the right sort of solution to me.
Random example: http://mfisurvey.marketforce.com/raisingcanes/
"They quoted me $155 and ended up charging me over $500 and STILL wanted me to pay for some dumb protection service at $85 per year. AND THEY DID NOT EVEN FULLY RECOVER THE FULL DATA!"
"John retrieved the images as promised, but once he did he held them hostage demanding more money!"
"This place is extremely unprofessional. They charged WAY more than the original quote, and then demanded payment before returning my item. Also, they accused me of "harassing" them when I called to discuss the difference in price from the quoted cost."
"Wish I'd skipped them. My laptop hard drive crashed and I needed to recover some Word & Excel docs. A month later they haven't recovered all of my data and are completely unresponsive to calls/emails. Now I'm out $460, I don't have the data that I paid to get back, and John still has my hard drive, so I'm stuck."
"The data recovery was more expensive than quoted by Tekserve (by $200). Actual price was way over estimate (by $400). Communications were unclear. Terms were nebulous. Service was always late."
And where was the withholding of property?
> As of this time, I still haven't gotten my circuit board back.
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the...
> J-Ro is a professional political activist; he's paid to influence online opinion (or has been, on some past issues; no idea whether he's specifically paid on this one), and he's primarily concerned with getting people outraged, not with accuracy in discussion; hence his entirely false claims here.
The other thing is more complicated. If a business owner rips me off, that's bad. In the past, my only redress was the courts, which is a slow, cumbersome, expensive process. Now there's this new avenue where I can try to make the Internet hate the business owner. This can be a useful corrective, but it's very vulnerable to abuse.
Remember John Engle vs Stockart?
In this case, nothing is verifiable.
the email in this instance could've been completely faked.
Is there a meta-business that keeps track of customer perception on the internet for you?
Playing along with this idea a bit, everybody says that Facebook is bad because the stupid things you do when you're a kid can haunt you forever.
Well this just takes it up another level, doesn't it? Ever have a bad day, get pissed at somebody? Maybe say some things you probably shouldn't?
Of course you have. Everybody has.
But now, through the marvels of modern technology, your words stay with you forever.
That means -- and I don't advocate doing this at all -- that if I'm running a business that's in competition with you, I don't have to perhaps develop the best product or service. Nope. Instead I can develop a just-average product, and then do a little digging to find out what sorts of shitty things you've done or said on the internet. Wait for the right moment, use a social network and a trusted poster as a conduit, and voila! I just helped you trash your own business. And my fingerprints are nowhere on it.
I'm not saying that this is what happened. For all I know, the guy might be a jerk. What I'm saying, along with plusbryan, is that there is no way to know from the information available if you are being purposely manipulated for a response or just being honestly told a story
That's kinda scary.
Of course you have. Everybody has.
But now, through the marvels of modern technology, your words stay with you forever.
I just hope that one day this becomes a universal revelation, and we as a society become much more forgiving. The combination of harsh judgement, poor decisions being easy to make, and a public permanent record of anything you say on the internet can have potentially life ruining consequences, and it's easy to find plenty of examples today. In the past, only people who were in positions that would be in public scrutiny (politicians, CEOs, PR people, etc) really had to watch what they said all the time. Now that we have the internet, which doesn't really forget, it's easy for past mistakes to come back to haunt you. I just hope society becomes more lenient about foolish mistakes...
I think in some ways the Mob just wants to see a more friendly business atmosphere that respects them as customers, and they use the power they have to try to achieve those ends.
Bad customer service (in fact preferably rude and near insane) is good for your business growth - plus you get to keep the excess profits every time you rip someone off.
Google has inadvertently created a new business model.
However, tweets and certain blogs (the ones with nofollow diabled) may be contributing to pagerank.
So, the lesson is, if you complain, complain on a site dedicated for that purpose.
He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client - except this time, maybe the causality runs the other way.
This seems to be more an example of "How to destroy your business by being (at least perceived as) consistently fraudulent".
If you scroll down further, there's the same email in the comment that was posted on 12/8/2009
I just posted this as a great example of about the worst way to deal with customers I've ever seen. If the company isn't a scam they could have asked the customer what they could do to get rid of the rating. If it is a scam he could have just shut up, maybe posted a few fake positive reviews and left it at that. Instead he wrote an amateurish fake-lawyer letter threatening the customer angering a portion of the Internet against him.
To be fair, Cooper Laurence did a little more to enrage the Internet Justice Machine, but on the other hand she didn't threaten to sue anybody.
Any given post could be made by a shill or astroturfer, it could be made by a competitor, it could be made by a child or teenager with no perspective, it could be made by a prankster, an idiot, a mentally disturbed person, by a spidering script/bot, or could even be fake data planted by the site's owner in order to make the site look like it has a bigger base of real users. You just don't know, in most cases, on most sites.
Therefore, it's mostly noise. You can't trust it! Crap. Some of it is not, of course. There is some signal out there. But this fundamental problem of having trusted signal buried by untrustable noise is the weakness to all these web-based systems. Even a stars-based system is useless. It's irrelevant if a particular app or entity has a lot of five-star reviews or one-star reviews if it's crowd-sourced, because you can't trust the crowd. ("I gave it five stars because I'm shagging the creator." "I found a button that had a color blue that displeased me: ZERO STARS!") At least not when commercial interests are at stake.
I trust crowd-sourcing a little more when the entities being reviewed are (a) for hobbyists, and (b) niche, and (c) with a highly filtered review demographic (not just anybody and their sister can fire off a review -- there has to be some filtering process or bias that weeds out most folks.) Even then, it's hit or miss. At the end of the day, reviews have signal only if the reader already has some explicit trust relationship with the reviewer, based on past performance. If the reviewer is some faceless random stranger, it's noise and cannot be trusted in general.
Someone else in this thread made a comment about mob mentality. I agree. I think that's another flaw to these crowd-sourced systems. Humans are prone to mob thinking. They take things out of context and blow something all out of perspective, often in proportion to how ignorant they are.
That was sort of the point of the comment. :)
People should be less edgy...
Might be wrong and misinterpreting.
Did everyone who originally downvoted the "epic fail" post realise the context and just not like jokes on HN, or did a couple of people choose to downvote, and then more people see what looked like a Reddit-esque joke that was being downvoted and just join in without understanding the point of the post?
As others pointed out, a similar mentality could explain the results on the Yelp page we are discussing, even if the entire thing was actually orchestrated by a competitor and/or triggered by a single unhappy customer where we don't know the full story.
On HN, I downvote that comment.
On Reddit, I leave it alone or perhaps upvote it.
On Slashdot, I probably make the joke myself if I'm the first one to get to it.
I appreciate HN's "no class clowns" tone, as I can (and do) easily get my fill of that elsewhere.