It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value.
In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced the restaurant this was a good deal?
What value did they provide here?
Meanwgile, Yelp used to be a resource to find good businesses. Now it's... Something else. It's leveraging it's market power to make money rather providing customers with any value.
I don't know what the answer is but it feels like society needs to come up with a new word, new idea, (or probably an old one we've forgotten) and make it both an ethically bad thing and then also an illegal one (or at least one that is taxed higher).
"Something else" indeed. Recently a scam site popped up that copied the branding of our site, autotempest.com. (They registered autoStempest.com and copied our logos and such.) They claimed to be a dealership based in Texas, but were actually posting fake vehicles and having people wire them money (which they obviously kept).
One of the things these scammers did to appear legit was set up a Yelp page with a bunch of fake reviews. We informed Yelp, but they refused to remove the page, because they "believe that the public benefits from sharing their experiences with local businesses." Obviously that doesn't make any sense since the entire business is fictitious, not to mention trademark infringing, but that was their response. So I did the only thing I could—posted a 1-star review of the fake business, warning people about the scam. Yelp removed my review, with the explanation that I did not appear to be a customer of the business.
Google Maps? I mean, it's not perfect, the reviews aren't great, but usually anything rated 4.5+ is at least solid and they don't mess around with restaurant phone numbers.
I've always used Google maps just because of the integration with Maps. Yelp's constant nagging to install the app and create an account also damaged their user experience enough that I never felt the need to switch over. Google generally has less reviews, but I don't spend any time in small towns in the US and when I travel Yelp isn't that helpful anyway.
We could use some kind of open reviews. That is more tricky, which is also why the commercial platforms are not that good.
Wikivoyage.org is great for tourist, but too limited for locals (you cannot have every single pizza and burger place in travel guide).
The Osmand app with Wikivoyage is a great example of what can be done with free software and data. It is all offline. You can search for restaurants near you without revealing you location to anyone. When you click on the the webpage of a restaurant, it opens in your browser without redirecting from Yelp or sending the URL to Tripadvisor. And when you click on the phone number for the restaurant, your phone just calls directly.
Unfortunately it's a lot of blockchain babble so I am afraid it might be super overengineered, but whatever, so long as it works. Not sure when this is going to be released. There is a Telegram channel at https://t.me/openplacereviews
Probably because most users are blissfully ignorant of the less ethical bits of how Yelp conducts its business.
As long as there isn't a huge discrepancy between the expectation and the services/goods rendered, most people can't tell the difference over something that is largely subjective anyway.
This and many users are hooked on the social networking effect where other users are liking their reviews. Twitter is much the same - you get a constant stream of endorphins every time you see people liking and retweeting your crap. It's socially toxic but effective.
I think there is that, but also the yelp user experience is mostly pretty polished, there's a nice app, maps integrated, large amount of restaurant info, reservations, take out from the app, probably forgetting other things but that's a lot of work and polish to just get to the point where you can ask other people to put the effort into leaving reviews. There's no guarantee any one will
An American version of tabelog would be amazing but idk if it would ever happen
It's something I've wanted to do for awhile. Do Things that idk yelp does like give older ratings less weight.
I also think the the ratings are mostly useless. 4 1/2 star restaurants in the same area are not comparable. The rounding to half puts restaurants that are miles apart to close together. Ratings below 3 are useless. Sushi in sf is frustrating with yelp. Michelin stared restaurants have the same ratings as local sushi places. The whole scale needs to be used. There also needs to be separate ratings for food and service. Places get hit hard for unreasonable service expectations when the food is great. I'm pretty sure the average yelp reviewer has crap taste in food. Especially in tourist areas.
> 4 1/2 star restaurants in the same area are not comparable
This. If I am not local, I can't know if 4.5* listing is a local diner that locals love, not necessarily for the quality of food, or a venerable Michelin-starred restaurant. Photos and descriptions do not always help.
I completely agree that this is a blind spot that current has no solution because it is ignored.
One can argue that a Michelin star restaurant is objectively better than the neighborhood McDonald's, but they could have identical ratings because the expectation of service is different. What is considered above and beyond at McD's is merely baseline at the other.
However it also works in reverse as well! Many sit-down Chinese restaurants in my area are rated poorly due to substandard service, but this is de rigeur at these establishments. The waitress is gruff, rushes you along, gives you the bill before you are ready, and in some cases, you have to make your own tea because they're too busy.
The food could be great but the ratings don't show it.
I think for ratings the whole scale 1-5 should be used and a user should be able to rate with a decimal point of precision. And show ratings to the second decimal place. I think that would remove reviews like "great 5 stars" or poor service 1 star.
Average reviews should be added. I don't think every restaurant is perfectly average. Some are better, do a dish particularly well, have some thing else that might just slightly set it apart. Others might be average but unusually cheap. All of that can be part of an average review and influence a rating and help people find meals they're in the mood for.
A service I loved in UK was Hardens, all restaurants reviewed for FSA (Food, Service, Ambience) by customers. It was very reliable. Much better than a single generic rating.
Scale effects? To be popular, you need large database. It took Yelp years to get there. It will take another company years too, but now their risk is much larger since there's Yelp already which dominates the field. So company founder has to get somebody to invest not in just developing a new field for years, but in developing for years a field where there's an entrenched and popular (even if shady) competitor. Ultimately, I guess, if Yelp continues to be shady, it will pop up, but may take a lot of time until it's useful.
Yes, and as a side note, Foursquare has a free tier (ratelimited) Places API. Now that Google Places API is ludicrously expensive, I tinkered with Foursquare and it was a very enjoyable experience.
I suspect it is a downside of the financialization - silicon valley has become more generic business than any technical sophistication or engineering drive.
It has become way more finance and marketing over time - if Google was "tech" (indexing algorithms) that evolved into more marketing (their advertising role) then social networks started fundamentally "half-marketing" by being social oriented as opposed to sophistication of number crunching. This isn't meant as a slight - some business domains are just fundamentally are more one than the other. But that still shapes the culture.
Symbolically Juicero and Raw Water merchants show the shift to the lack of vision and smarts in a drive for cash. This isn't new of course - pets.com wasn't that bright either technically nor in the business sense but they were at least trying to move retail onto the internet.
As for society - the term is rent seeking and ridding us of it entirely would be a major commitment and ironically unpopular.
Unfortunately Yelp does have some value if not concretely - their name and reputation. If you were to try to launch a "zelp" tommorow nobody would stop you but chances are nearly nobody would go there because nobody heard of it and there is no good user content.
It isn't quite classical rent-seeking as they are not enacting barriers and anyone could enter technically. The issue is size and how people use it. If the market share was split or anyone could enter the delivery market with no overhead their share would shrink.
It is a side effect of consumer useage - there is a strong winner takes most tendency with the resulting network effect in spite of the fact the barrier to entry being so low and people going with the path of least resistance.
> It's leveraging it's market power to make money rather providing customers with any value... feels like society needs to come up with a new word, new idea
The term economists use is "rent seeking behavior". There's a more interesting data play here, but I'll get to that in a sec.
Now, ostensively the value is driving traffic and increasing number of customers.
What they're actually doing is the blitzscaling playbook: become the only channel people go to online when looking for restaurants (last 10 years) and now monetize the captured audience (next 10 years). Because as people have moved online, what else are you going to do? Take down your yelp page?
That's the pessimistic take.
The optimistic take is the data play here. It's confusing, because they said two opposing things:
> Grubhub says it retains these recordings and uploads them to the private page that restaurants use to manage their service so that restaurants can audit them and dispute any errors. Grubhub says it does not use the recordings for any other purpose.
vs.
> "There is a restaurant on the Upper East Side that serves sushi. We worked with them and we said that there's a trend for poke bowls. We suggested that they start adding some of these items to their menu,” Grubhub senior vice president Kevin Kearns said at the hearing. “They did this and within one month, they doubled their orders, and within three months they 7x’ed their orders to 1,600 orders a month..."
So the data play is aggregating what people are ordering and turning that into analytics. Now that 15% take isn't just the cost of online rent, but it's also your cost to get insight into what everyone around you is ordering.
That said, the next question is whether the indian restaurant around the corner is actually going to use grubhub analytics to optimize their menu by placing their matar paneer higher up because that's what's being ordered at similar indian places and grubhub's telling them they can improve conversions by 6.3%, but that's effectively what some engineer or PM at Grubhub thought up.
If that story is believable, then it's a more-than-just-rent-extraction narrative. It's still kinda shitty, but that's why you sell jeans and shovels, not become a gold miner.
Or to put that last line another way: if you're making a data play, you aren't going to win over many early customers if you blindfold them and tell them to use your data analytics with a gun to the back of their head.
Grubyelp's data play may be a fantastic way to collect order data and help restaurants "Optimize Everything", but if the monetization is done in a way that people cry hidden fees and the onboarding is a binding arbitration clause buried in a contract, well, we know what a disregard for your customers does. Many people use Lyft because "it's not as scummy as Uber" despite Kalanick being gone for a few years now. Just last week DoorDash got a huge backlash when people learned where their tips were actually going.
This kind of growth hacking works to pad short term numbers, but long term it only works if you're a Comcast or Equifax and don't actually need to give a shit what people think of you.
To me, this is a sign of grubhub/insert copycat delivery service circling the drain, trying to extract whatever cash they can get before the inevitable. Anecdata, but among my peers people sort by delivery fee or try to game the system for a new user discount. Delivery fees can easily be $7 now which is like buying another entire portion at some restaurants.
Personally, I use grubhub a lot--as a menu to look at for when I call the restaurant directly with my pickup order.
I dont want to cycle back to the content of the article (and parent comment), but is this not exactly the behaviour that these dark patterns are attempting to capture? They (both Grubhub in the past, and Yelp now) have been caught providing "alternative" restaurant phone numbers so that your order, despite being delivered over the phone to the restaurant "directly", is still attributed back to Grubhub. They claim their fee from the restaurant just as if you purchased through the app itself, even though they were not in the transaction process at all.
> Personally, I use grubhub a lot--as a menu to look at for when I call the restaurant directly with my pickup order.
Which is of course exactly what the article is about. Depending on where you got that phone number, turns out you may be using grubhub to place the order and give grubhub a cut, when you think you are calling the restaurant directly with your pickup order.
> It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value.
This isn't new. So much of what we consider "value" today is just information asymmetry. Hiding phone numbers, hiding true costs, stuffing data into a proprietary database with a service contract, hiding whoever the real manufacturer of something is… that is where the money is made.
The Internet was supposed to fix that, but instead of getting an "Internet" we got a series of private networks, loosely connected, with gatekeepers. You can visit different ones, but they don't' really talk to each other. You can add your own information, but it won't really get seen by anyone because everyone has been conditioned to go through one of the big gates.
We tried for a while, with things like open protocols and semantic web, but most people quickly realized there was a lot more money to be had creating walled gardens.
Ummm, do you not see a difference between forcing people to pay you money on threat of violence, vs. choosing whether to allow people to market on your platform?
Yelp forces businesses to pay them money on threat of lowering their ratings, which can destroy the business. This is quite well-documented. One example appears below. I stand by my assertion.
Grubhub's value to me is that they send out surveys to most (or all?) customers who order from restaurants, so the star ratings are actually useful to me. A lower rating is a huge red flag when I'm checking out new places, at least. But is that worth 15%? Most definitely not.
The problem with that is food quality changes with transportation and time. Unless a dish is designed for delivery it can be much lower quality since it is not served properly.
The problem is that low quality is most commonly due to the delivery process, and Grubhub is thoroughly dishonest about this. I stopped using them after they twice lied and tried to blame the restaurant for cold food, not knowing that I had called and verified that the food had been ready and waiting for the driver an hour earlier.
I've never been a fan of Yelp as either a service or a company, but the assumption that they used yelp to look up the phone number isn't warranted here. Yelp's whole value prop has always been reviews and discoverability, and you're just handwaving that away and claiming that the only relevant workflow here is googling a known restaurant after having made the decision to order and using Yelp's page simply to find the phone number.
That isn't to say that I don't think Yelp's behavior here is gross, but the broader picture you paint of pure middleman rent extraction with no value created, eg with:
> The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant.
Is circular in that you assume your conclusion and then point to it as evidence.
Wouldn't they have a menu at home from their favourite sushi takeaway? Then they can just call the number on the menu, and even store it in their phone.
It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value.
Down vote me to hell for the "+1", but man that struck me as profound, and I wanted you to know (no contact info in profile). If only briefly, I had a moment of clarity that put a finger on that yucky feeling I feel about the tech industry lately.
I think the bad actor here is as much Yelp as Grubhub in that they are using Grubhub's relationship and ability to charge a restaurant to monetise their own listings.
That's where this is unethical and possibly fraudulent when you look at there action as basically generating fake advertising clicks.
I really wish there was a GrubHub competitor that charged a monthly fee instead of the model of paying more the more successful you are. Restaurants pay x per month with normal processing fees and that's it.
This was GrubHub's original model. Restaurant's don't want to pay a flat fee when they don't see enough orders they feel is necessary to justify said fee.
If there was no or little value, people wouldn't be using Yelp. Clearly there is value being provided, such as discovery, search and reviews. Now the quality of those three is debatable and changes from person to person, but to say they are providing no or little value is disingenuous.
This isn't about Grubhub at all. This is about Yelp. Grubhub is just the vendor to Yelp that is allowing Yelp another way to monetize its service.
If somebody is willing to pay the GrubHub fee, then they’re worth it. Really basic supply and demand, even if you personally don’t find the service useful.
Yelp is still my go-to as an index of nearby restaurants and bars.
They're worth it only because without paying them protection money, your restaurant gets no visibility due to overcrowded marketing by other restaurants that do use GrubHub. Without them, or without Yelp, some other yellow-pages equivalent would be used, and the same total number of orders would be placed.
Lets say the internet isn't around yet, and people still use the yellow pages. One day, they decide to charge a 10% tax on all the revenue of a business, if they want to keep their listing in the yellow pages. Those that don't pay, get delisted. There is a competing service, the blue pages, that charges only a few cents for a listing. But it has far fewer readers, so any business that has only a blue page listing, not a yellow one, will see their income drop disastrously.
So they are stuck paying a heavy tax to the yellow pages, even though if the yellow pages were to completely disappear, all the readers would switch to blue pages, and everyone would get the same search/aggregation service, for a fraction of the cost.
That's pretty much the situation with Yelp/GrubHub, and I think that qualifies them as parasites (or rent-seekers, if you prefer).
I've been in this industry 30-some years. I thought I'd seen the worst SV has to offer, but my jaw is just on the ground. I mean, I knew Yelp was constantly up to no good, but...just wow.
I suppose I should be furious at Yelp (or GrubHub, or...someone), but I'm really more furious at Apple for having not cut that partnership a long time ago. It just gets my goat every time I click an icon in Apple Maps, Yelp pops up, and there's no way to change data sources. And now this? I'm normally not one for a strongly-worded letter, but I might fire off some feedback on this one.
The 7 years that google owned zagat correlated with a massive improvement in the quality of their reviews.
I have done the google maps local guide program a bit and the way it is structured is great. The google map slowly switches into proactive mode and solicits photos, ratings, and reviews.
A few months ago a friend asked me what I was up to, so I sent them a photo of 2 flights of beer in an attempt to get them to meet me at the bar. later, Maps asked if I liked the bar and wanted to upload the photo. For the last 2 months that photo has been the official picture of the bar and received over 250k views. Minimal input or interruption for me, large return for google.
It only does this if you have location services turned on. You actually told Google it was ok to use your location to provide location specific services. That's not what I would call "tracking", which implies something clandestine.
Google requires this permission to do anything remotely location-based and uses it extremely liberally. I shouldn't have to agree to have them link my photos to the restaurant I'm in just so I can save a home location for driving directions.
It doesnt post anything without your permission. And you can long hold the notification to suppress and never see them again. It's not that big of a deal
Meh. I remember we used to use Yelp to find the best restaurants in a city. It worked incredibly well.
It doesn't anymore, but Google maps is not better. For example, I tried to use Google maps to find good buffalo wings in Brooklyn. But, the top suggestion didn't even have buffalo sauce on the menu! Just soy!
I tend to blame SEO first and ads / paid promotion second.
If you're looking for good restaurants in a city, TripAdvisor is probably your best bet. It does have the downside of terrible location-based search though (what decent restaurants are within 50m of my current position?).
TA is pretty close to last on my list for restaurant search. The top of every ranking in any even mildly touristy city is going to be spammed to hell and back. It's basically a list of "where do tourists go who can be preferentially selected into leaving a review?"
(TripAdvisor-owned) TheFork, aka La Fourchette, is the way to go in Europe. The quality of the reviews on that site is impressive, and there are numerous torch-the-unicorn style discounts to be had. Europeans take their food seriously :-)
Chowhound basically got destroyed a few years ago when it got acquired and redesigned into an unusable mess, and now traffic has cratered. Some of the regulars split off into new sites - HungryOnion (mostly SF Bay) and FoodTalkCentral (mostly LA), but neither seems to have the critical mass that Chowhound used to have that made it a useful global resource.
This happens to me too, also if you say the city and the name of the place it will definitely not find locations that are outside the official city border, even if it's 25 feet from that border. So crazy too because I can literally be next to a restaurant, ask for it, and not find it.
The other thing that absolutely drives me bonkers - Google maps keeps routing me to the back of something, like literally to the truck entrance of whatever grocery store or restaurant I am routing to. You would think they would employ ML to visually figure out where the parking lot is vs the truck entrance.
Have you compared Google maps' results to those of Yelp's in Brooklyn? Did they show you anything that Google Maps didn't show?
Last time i checked Yelp was not available outside USA (checked while I was in India/Japan ~two years ago) while Google maps tons of data in those locations.
Google maps has definitely improved, but they are even worse than most review sites in the near worthlessness of their review scores. The vast majority of restaurants are rated between 4 and 5 stars, with the difference between a 4.1 and 4.6 being huge - the former being 50/50 that its good, the latter being the sort of place worth waiting in line for. The closest Michelin starred restaurant to me is rated 0.2 points higher than the forgettable greek restaurant across the parking lot from where I work, and less than 1 point better than taco bell.
Well sure, because a rating doesn't measure how good a restaurant is compared to all other restaurants.
Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from.
It's also unfair to rate both a $1 coffee and a $8 coffee on the same basis, it's clear that the cost constraints put pressure on how good you can make that coffee. It's not unfair for an $8 coffee to be higher quality, but worse rated than a $1 coffee.
I rely and rate on Google Maps excessively, using it to plan trips and to eat out. It has consistently been the best source of information. All you have to do is first filter for the type / class of cuisine you want.
>Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from.
See above, but I find the opposite to be often true. I see reviews for restaurants I am very familiar with, that I know to be excellent and basically the best option for innovative cuisine in a 100 mile radius, which say "Way overpriced small portions". Pretty clear that whoever wrote that review was operating outside their preferred restaurant class.
> Ratings measure how good a restaurant is compared to other restaurants in the same class because that is where their patrons' reference frame comes from.
In the US, ratings measure, in significant part, race/ethnicity/subculture from which the restaurants clientele is drawn, because White Americans give higher ratings for similar descriptive satisfaction levels than other demographics (tending toward not unacceptable = 5/5.). Asians give the lowest scores for similar descriptive satisfaction levels.
I never look at aggregate scores (unless, I suppose the score is "one star"). Instead I read individual reviews, and keep reading until I'm reasonably confident I'm seeing a consistent pattern (either good or bad). This is time consuming but seems to work for me. One example of why this approach is necessary: very often people will give a restaurant a low score with a comment like "Way overpriced" or "Portions too small". Well, I actually want to pay more money if I get significantly better food (often, but not always, there is correlation), and I don't really care for huge portions.
I used to work for a company that owned a bunch of traditional broadcast stations. The day the CEO got up in front of the local branch of the company and asked the question (roughly) "How do we get people to watch broadcast TV again?" I knew it was time to get out there. The company is still around and probably has enough inertia to keep going for a long while, but with that kind of thinking in the leadership, it's pretty much a zombie.
I don't find reviews helpful at the best of times, food is simply too subjective. Some people want "authentic" dishes, others want anglicized (think texmex) versions, each will give poor rating to the other. Some people will want something sweet others will find the sweetness too strong. Everyone has a different definition of "too spicy". "Restaurant" is often to granular too, sometimes a good place will have some bad dishes, should I care about the reviews of people that bought those dishes?
For me finding good restaurants is still a trial and error process that technology can't improve on.
I'd love to not see all the reviews from "This guy who thinks Dominoes Pizza is the best pizza."
Like I might eat it too and it's ok... but man I don't want that guy's opinion on other pizza places.
I do wonder how a system like that might evolve ... if it even does. Google News determined I like a certain sports team. I do not, but it shows me news from them endlessly and not the team I like no matter how much direct feedback I provide..... Tastes change, that system could make Maps kinda useless if someone's tastes change but they get a bunch of garbage reviews.
- Our waiter, Bob, was really good. Bob took our order,
brought our food, and kept our beverages filled. Bob is
a great waiter. <signed> totally-not-Bob.
Also "the staff is so RUDE!". Any review which uses the word "rude" can be safely ignored, because it's written by the kind of person who considers it rude that his/her water glass went unfilled for nearly 30 seconds after being emptied.
That's not the question. It's natural not to want to go back to somewhere something bad happened. The question is why anybody else would care about bad luck that someone had, as opposed to a bad experience that was representative.
There is no canonical bad experience. The best estimate is the ratio of good to bad reviews, and most will be from a single experience, unless people suddenly start volunteering to visit restaurants that treated them poorly the first time...
I think that relates to my point in the sense, I really don't care about reviews if they're that ephemeral / arbitrary.
People might post a lot of those, it might be human nature to some extent to do it.... but that kinda fits my point that the reviews become useless at that point.
I like Google Reviews too and use it more than Yelp. Especially when Yelp forces me to download the app.
But I find it difficult to generate a link directly to Google reviews for a particular place... I can link to the Google maps results, but a review page by itself to read/write reviews would be nice.
Yelp still has the best (as in the most comprehensive) reviews of restaurants. Google's reviews are littered with one sentence reviews which is rather unfortunate.
Having said that Yelp is absolutely, positively removes negative reviews from places that pay it for promoting. Having written a few and having opened tickets after those reviews disappeared I found the fun tricks they use to be able to claim that they don't censor reviews. They absolutely do. The only way to ensure that your review stays up is to post a copy of your check as a part of your review ( that's why you are seeing them these days ) which of course makes you totally identifiable and open to the lawsuits. Otherwise whoever "owns" the listing can dispute the review by claiming the person who left it is not sharing his or her personal experience.
When I was in physical therapy about a year ago they told me to leave reviews in Google rather than Yelp because research showed it was more effective. I found it hard to believe since my peers and I both used Yelp way more, but I find this recent behavior from Yelp abhorrent so it may be time to switch
Does google maps have a search by rating, open time, and so on?
I usually eat dinner around the time most restaurants have closed in the area. I find when I search google maps it gives me places closed, and often the hours in their listings are off. To be fair, hours have improved quite a bit in the last year.
I don't like the incentives that things like "starred" users (aka local guides) creates. I feel like it's only a matter of time before they become the G Maps version of "influencers", who get paid to post glowing reviews.
I'm much more likely to trust reviews from regular users. They don't have to be well written, just descriptive enough for me to make a decision.
Lately I’ve noticed Google Maps had better images. Not sure if they scrape some of them but they didn’t overlap with Yelp. Google Maps reviews also tend to be more positive.
The two bad things I noticed were fake guides and a few bogus sounding comments.
Really wish they'd make it easy to show images of menus in restaurants. I usually use Yelp for easily viewing photos of different aspects from interior/exterior to menu, etc.
Google Maps is also shoving Grubhub down our throats. Every time I try to call a restaurant's phone numer in the new Maps app, I end up accidentally opening a Grubhub tab in Chrome.
I... can't confirm this at all. Opened maps, clicked on a restaurant, selected "call", and brought up the phone app. The only way I can get to a delivery provider is to click a button marked "Delivery". And even there it seems to be suggesting DoorDash to me, even for restaurants that I can find listed on GrubHub's site.
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.
It's hard to make money as a directory service with Google and Apple Maps around. The shadier they get, the bigger of a sign it is that they're in trouble financially, I would think.
> The shadier they get, the bigger of a sign it is that they're in trouble financially, I would think.
Has Yelp's position on the perceived shadiness scale changed in the last several years? There've been allegations of extortion, defamation, and rigging, that entire time. I don't know that allegations of faking phone numbers is any worse, only less familiar.
Steve Jobs FTW yet again. I thought he was wrong about Dropbox for the longest time. But their latest attempts at "productizing" their service (Adobe / Zoom / Slack / Atlassian / Google Docs / Office integrations, "social" features, etc. etc.) have convinced me that simple file sync, which is all I ever wanted from them, is not enough to sustain a company. Meanwhile the shareholder-induced march downwards continues.
I wouldn't necessarily frame that as an inevitability of Dropbox as a product, as much as an inevitability of the traditional VC funding model.
It's likely you could build a very healthy business selling people file syncing — I personally use a tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor that seems to be doing just fine. The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.
> The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.
This.
The local pizza joint is probably a great family operated business with a enough profit to support the owners + employees (but probably not enough profit to support the owners, employees AND investors).
If you take that same pizza joint and give them $10m from investors, the pizza joint will attempt to franchise their store to a dozen new locations, and they'll probably fail in the process.
Some companies simply aren't meant to be billion dollar companies, yet raise money as if they will be.
>Some companies simply aren't meant to be billion dollar companies, yet raise money as if they will be.
Well, according to some quick searches the founders seem to be doing pretty alright by themselves. It depends if your objective for founding a company is "do something useful" or "get filthy rich as soon as possible"
When I did my (one, never again if I can help it) venture funded startup, "the only goal is an exit strategy" came up a lot, and always when one of the founders talked about a growth opportunity that would pay off over years and not months.
If that's your success metric you are acting fraudulently as soon as you take investor money, because you won't get that without claiming to commit to the goal of making them rich(er) as well.
This was one of the biggest takeaways from the "Startup podcast". If you haven't heard it, it details Alex Blumberg (of this American Life fame) attempts to create a company producing high quality long form podcasts.
At one point he and his partner are getting excited that they are on the road to profitability in 6 months. One of their VCs gets upset by this saying that targeting profitability is a sure way to end up with a lifestyle business.
The VC isn't exactly wrong about this. If you want a valuation in the hundreds of millions or billions, your goal is to figure out how to grow fast and capture defensible territory in a market. Profit is less important than growth—as long as you have a path to profit based on that growth.
If you're not aiming for this kind of territory, you're not really compatible with the VC financial model, which is designed around high risk and high reward. 30–40% of startups end up in liquidation, and 95% never meet their projections. Unless some your successful companies have fantastic returns, your fund will fail.
This is something you should understand before you take VC money.
This has been the SV narrative for the last decade or so but I'm not sure that it will stand the test of time. It seems likely that the bubble will pop on these companies going public without having returned an honest penny.
But there is probably a reason I'm not drowning in money like most investor types.
A bit of a tangent, but it feels to me like using wads of funding to try to create hypergrowth is a good fit for "winner-take-all" markets, like those with network effects.
Social media fits.
Syncing documents, maybe not-so-much.
So Dropbox invests in areas where there are possible network effects, like collaborating on documents. Because that's what fits its funding model.
But simple file syncing... This is not a winner-take-all market.
> But simple file syncing... This is not a winner-take-all market.
On its own, probably not. But you could imagine several avenues they could naturally grow into, that would _eventually_ turn them into the equivalent of a full OS. Its not something I would personally bet on, but also not something that, if it worked out, would totally surprise me. E.g. maybe _they_ should have invented Google Docs, and then...
Analogy: I offer to cut your lawn every week, and to shovel your driveway/walk when it snows, all for an annual fee you find attractive.
I get a lot pf customers, put together a pitch deck, then raise a bunch of money to expand.
With the money, I buy a fleet of massive snowplows, trucks that can carry ride’em mowers, equipment for doing landscaping, and while I’m at it, I start up a property management company that specializes in AirBnB owners.
“Sorry,” I tell you, “But I have to raise my fees, your property is too small for me to take a advantage of my equipment, and Also it’s inefficient to have lots of small customers so I’m tacking on a per-invoice surcharge.”
Lawn-cutting can indeed grow into a bigger business, and for me, that’s great. But for you, maybe the best thing would be to hire a teenager who is happy cutting lawns for a decent price.
Summary: If a company is in business A, but it isn’t happy doing A and really wants to do B, C, and D to satisfy its investors’ ambitions, that may be an excellent play for the company, but a terrible play for its existing customers.
TL;DR -> Please give Syncthing a try, it does just what it says on the tin and with no fuss once setup.
In the beginning, there was the 3.5" floppy disk, trudged along in my backpack in its little box with the 4 blank ones (which only ever got used by the slackers who forgot their own), used for little notes on the single README.txt featuring a .LOG at the top so each time I opened it, Notepad would insert the time/date.
Then along came the 1GB Kingston DataTraveller flash drive, what an amazing device! It held not only that increasingly read-only README.txt file, but also a portable knock-off of Onenote 2003 which name I forget (Agilix? Wikidpad? I no longer remember)
Then in 2012, Dropbox rolled into my life and I was in hog heaven, getting up to 5G from various referrals before moving in 2013 to Skydrive (now Onedrive) because a recent HTC purchase included 25GB of free storage space in addition to the already commodious 7GB(!) of free sync space. Clearly I want to be offline first, so I'll keep syncing the briefcase on the flashdrive (now a 4GB SanDisk) and carry that last floppy disk...after all if I still have an IBM USB floppy drive, might as well carry the disk right?
Fast forward several years. The 1GB and 4GB flash drive are keeping each other company in the retirement home of the electronics drawer, ready at a moment's notice to hand me a zipped up copy of Sim City 3000 or Timone and Pumba's Jungle Arcade or other such digital hoarder file from old CDs I dare not read any more but still want their contents.
In my pocket is a whopping 32GB Samsung stainless steel drive, and in my bag where the floppy disk used to live in honor is now a SIXTY-FREAKING-FOUR GB SanDisk extreme pro flash drive featuring Hiran's boot CD, DBAN, Ghost, Kali Linux, Peppermint OS, and more at the touch of a fingertip.
But the files? The briefcase has been synced oh, 4 months ago now? These days I don't plug it in as much, the old habit of plugging it in to work, home devices as soon as I log in long gone. Why do that when I can use Syncthing, an amazing tool that syncs the files with any and all devices however you want to slice n dice em. All you gotta do is introduce them with a handshake and boom, files are synced all over the wire, automatically and without being uploaded to Google's, Microsoft's, or Apple's cloud servers for heuristic analysis and advertising targeting.
I have arrived at file portability nirvana, and it is with Syncthing.
Same here. I used to run a local Nextcloud server, but Syncthing is simply so much easier for what I need. And adding a "server" that's constantly switched on is as simple as installing it on one more machine.
No idea what he's talking about but try out Unison! I use it to keep files on my computers synced to a central server. It works absolutely great and handles conflicts in the most sane way (imo).
The only caveat I've found so far is that you may have to increase the number of filesystem watches if your default value is too low, otherwise unison won't be able to monitor all of the files you are trying to sync.
It just fucking works. Took a few minutes to set up and it's been working great. Several TB of storage for the price of hardware I already had lying around doing nothing.
I heard you can do it quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each? I’ve never tried it, but unlike Dropbox, with OneDrive you can share folders without the shared folders taking away from your storage.
With Dropbox for instance with the free account, if you have 2GB of storage and use a shared folder with 2GB of storage you still have a total of 2GB.
If you are immersed in the Apple ecosystem, iCloud Drive will be a better solution once they add shared folders in the fall.
> Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each?
Well, what is Dropbox doing wrong that they have to charge so much more? (Given that offering more products for the same price basically equivalent to charging less per product)
Who's to say they're doing anything wrong? Microsoft is a huge company that can subsidize products using their profits from other products. They book Office 365 revenue as cloud revenue, and they're eager to grow that portion of their business to make Azure look good. So they're basically giving away services and throwing money at it to pad growth for Azure.
If anything, it's likely Dropbox's prices are closer to the true cost of providing the service.
Commercial cloud revenue was $9.6 billion in the third quarter, up 41 percent from a year ago. Revenue in Microsoft's productivity and business processes unit was $10.2 billion as commercial Office revenue grew 12 percent.
> Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each?
Dropbox's entire business relies on reliable file sync. Microsoft on the other hand, has OneDrive as one of many services. If I'm setting up cloud services for businesses that need years of guaranteed service with little change and good customer support, I know Dropbox will be there. Microsoft on the other hand... not so sure.
Remember when OneDrive offered "unlimited" file storage then took it away 1 year later?
The OneDrive client sync (until maybe the past year) was extremely slow and unreliable once you hit 100k+ files. Dropbox was the only one that would get the job done.
Long-term viability is a funny thing financially. If a company is worth their discounted future earnings, then a long lasting low number and a quickly dying high number might be the same. As far as investors are concerned, being a long-term viable business (in the usual sense) might not matter, even with the big-picture view.
Simple file sync is a plenty big enough market to sustain "a" company. Just not one with Dropbox's valuation. The lesson is about investor overreach, not whether or not there was an economic need being filled.
I will never forgive Dropbox for limiting free users to 3 linked devices, which promptly resulted in half the people I preached the gospel of Dropbox to ringing my phone and being pissed at ME.
Maybe they could give you more devices if you get people to sign up, like they used to give away additional storeage if you got people to sign up for dropbox
Updated, but seriously, the Steve Jobs quote is tired. Dropbox is a legit company with a good product. They are as much of a company as Apple was with just a niche computer product.
Steve Jobs made the comment because he probably realized that storage was a big business and he also realized that Dropbox is a direct competitor with iCloud.
Apple out performed Dropbox, but Dropbox is certainly a real company.
They aren’t profitable and don’t have a clear road to profitability. They may have a “good product” but if they can’t make a profit, by definition, they aren’t a good company.
I've tried using Google to find places to eat, but Yelp's search is just so much easier. If I'm in a new place, I just pull up Yelp, click "Restaurants" and go with the first thing that has food I like. It's never failed me yet. It might not be the best or cheapest around, but usually the thing with 4+ stars is still pretty good. We've found a couple of places that way where we keep going back every time we're in town just because we liked it so much.
When I pull up Google and search for [restaurants near me] or [restaurants] in the Maps app, it's a mess. I can't tell what is good or not. Also they usually only have a few ratings. With Yelp I can find places with 100+ ratings out in the middle of nowhere.
The problem for Yelp is that there is no money in providing a great service like that, so they have to do shady things to make up for it.
Are you perhaps in the Bay Area? Yelp has a very strong presence in the Bay Area. However, when I travel to the EU and outside of California, I notice that the quality/quantity of reviews from Yelp vs Google is reversed. People advised me to find restaurants using Google Maps instead. Restaurants owners also put up sign asking to be rated on Google.
I am in the Bay Area, but my biggest use case is when I travel outside the area.
I agree with you though, Yelp totally breaks down outside of the USA. Seems to work pretty well within the US though. We found some great places in Wyoming near Yellowstone for example.
I tend to use TripAdvisor more overseas, it feels less shady, though a year ago an app update made it suck battery like nobody's business, and I had to delete it.
Thankfully, last trip (June) it seemed to work fine.
I would be happy if people started using more locally sourced info on restaurants and places to sleep. Tripadvisor/yelp etc. can destroy any local restaurant scene. IMO there is nothing more soulless than picking a tripadvisor top 10 restaurant just because it‘s listed there. I usually ask people i know or random locals for tips where to eat. Or look at local blogs. Or you just pick a random place. I feel like some people just don’t do that anymore.
For that precise reason I don’t use Yelp (or similar) at all. I love serendipitous discovery and my favourite places wouldn’t win any such popularity contest (and I’m thankful they don’t).
I believe that this quantification of all aspects our world leeches much of the enjoyment and discovery from it, so I prefer not to participate.
Some of my favorite restaurants no longer exist because they weren't discovered. So I'd just caution that that feeling of having one's personal list of hidden gems may not align with the interests of the people that run those places.
Google maps also likes to hide results unless you are zooming in/out/researching the area constantly. Just show me everything in town, the full picture. I don't care if I have to wait seconds longer.
Would have happened by now if they were going to. Yelp was integrated into Apple Maps from day one and Siri before that. If anything, Yelp has gotten slimier since then.
Antitrust regulations would certainly not be achieving the goal of reducing customer harm if they were to _prevent_ Apple from delivering a better, less-slimy solution to replace Yelp.
Which is really stupid because you have to download the app to actually read any of the reviews. Google, at least, displays the reviews right in the listing.
Yelp 5 years ago was a truly valuable service. You could go anywhere (in America) and find good food.
Then they lost focus. The app has not improved an ounce since then (seriously why is 'open now' not a default filter) and they've spent a lot of time doing shady things or complaining about other companies. They've tried to get into reservations, delivery, and non-food services but with half-assed attempts at each. They also did a really bad job at maintaining a healthy reviewer community (Google has done much better).
It's a shame because I don't think any other app took the lead here. Yelp just walked backwards into the pack.
> seriously why is 'open now' not a default filter
What app are you using? It’s a default filter for me on iOS, and I’m likely not running the latest version. It’s actually a one-tap filter (button) that appears on every results page. I remember it behaving this way for at least a year or two, and I don’t frequently update my apps.
It incorporated elements of delight, too, like a rocket ship that showed when you scrolled the page. I feel these lighthearted things are symptomatic of a product-driven culture, or at least a culture that empowered engineers to add Easter eggs. Now that its sales driven, I’m not sure that jives well with recruiting engineering talent.
Amazing. Yelp redirects the customer who intended to look up their number in Yelp, redirects them GrubHub. GrubHub then grifts the restaurant for it.
These online order companies are grifters. With tricks and sneaky fees, they exploit the restaurants, they exploit the customers, and if delivery is involved, they'll exploit the driver too.
Grubhub isn't grifting anyone. These restaurants have to sign up with Grubhub for the phone referral to do anything.
It works both ways though. Restaurants will regularly put up menu items with titles like "Call in for discount for free delivery" or something like that so they can subvert the Grubhub fees while still getting the Grubhub traffic.
Grubhubs phone referral system is broken because they count any call longer than 45 seconds as a phone order. When their algorithm determines that a wrong number call will cost the restaurant $8 that is not okay.
I wonder what the solution is? Restaurants really should be running their own delivery, but that means hiring more staff which many cannot afford to do in a major city where commercial rents are extraordinary.
The solution is to enforce business transparency, and fair labor laws. It should be clear on the Yelp UI that they number they give me is for grubhub. If I want food delivered, it should be by drivers who are fairly compensated.
Sustainable business models?
Popping the VC bubble that insists these companies employ parasitic business practices to prop up their massive valuations?
Funneling things through the app is just unhelpful on many levels.
The interface when clicking on a web page from Yelp is worse than using the browser directly; therefore, instead of tapping, I read the web address and just go type it out.
And don’t even get me started on E-mail/communication with businesses. Recently I tried contacting a contractor, and happened to start the request from a form in the Yelp app. Since the very first thing on the form was asking for my E-mail address, I logically assumed that I would receive an E-mail reply. Instead, nothing; after awhile, I assumed just needed to find somebody else. Then, days later (or whenever I wandered into the Yelp app again), and only after I just happened to tap on some stupid icon in the corner, I finally see a reply: in the app. That is utterly useless! In fact, all of these “E-mail look-alike” interfaces are useless: I don’t need your company to completely recreate your own in-box interface that will surely suck in some way, when you could have just allowed E-mail to be used. Heaven forbid I dare to communicate with someone without your knowledge. So, yet again, like with URLs, now I just dig up the web site manually, dig up a real E-mail address or phone number manually, and contact them manually.
I had to install their app to get in line at a local restaurant. Immediately uninstalled.
I don't see why people use Yelp other than the fact that they have a mindshare dominance on ratings. User generated/internet 2.0 style food ratings are basically useless anyway, add in all of the other shady stuff Yelp does and you have a hard pass from me.
> I had to install their app to get in line at a local restaurant
This happened to me somewhat recently, though I'm unsure whether it was Yelp or some other app I was asked to install. It's a little arrogant for a restaurant owner to think it's fair to assume all their patrons are willing (or even able!) to install an app on their phone for the sole purpose of getting on their waiting list. This was not a fancy, special, or unique place, and there are tons of options for dining out in my town. When they said it was my only option for getting in line I told them thanks but no thanks and went somewhere else.
I'm not sure what app it is, but I really really like the feature where you can see exactly how many groups (and their sizes) are in front of you in line. Makes it easy to decide when to start heading back to the restaurant or when to order another drink at the bar you're hanging out at.
Maybe not Yelp, but I thought most had a basic texting option as well? If not, that's lame.
Yelp has a texting option; the app is required to view your 'live' place in line. The app (or website, or mobile site) also allows you to get in line without having to physically arrive at the restaurant and talk to the host.
Yelp does have that feature that tells you how many people are in front of you. It's a really nice feature, too. I was able to walk around the Japantown mall in SF while I waited for our seat. I'd actually be happy with it if I didn't already hate yelp for their scummy things.
I had that same experience. Google Maps is already on your phone for navigation and I've found that it's ratings & reviews to be more reliable than Yelps.
I use Yelp since its significantly harder to fake reviews on it than it is on Google. That, and the community culture is centered on high-quality reviews.
The quality of Yelp must be location-specific. Where I live, Yelp reviews are borderline worthless with chain restaurants with mediocre food and service scoring at or above legitimately worthwhile restaurants. I don't know whether to attribute that to the gaming of reviews or the pedestrian tastes of the Yelp reviewers in my area.
The quantity of reviews is super important. Anybody can build a 5 star rating by getting 3 friends to post reviews. Do these restaurants with "mediocre food" have many reviews?
I've seen plenty of yelp reviews that look like they came from a competing restaurant, I don't think its any harder to fake reviews since the impetus is on people reporting reviews anyway.
I like and have used Google reviews for a while after having had enough of Yelp's issues, to the point where I removed my many reviews from Yelp. However, I think Google has a ways to go to remove junk reviews. For example, 'Baguette et Chocolat' near Austin pissed off some open-carry person, who I think also runs a gun blog, last year by asking him to leave when he ignored their state-law-compliant signs prohibiting the same. He then proceeded to command his fans to leave bad reviews for this restaurant, and they complied in droves leaving useful gems such as 'Found out the owners are hoplophobes. Never giving them my business again.' . I spent quite a bit of time reporting these and I think many others did as well. Yelp shut down review logging for this restaurant fairly quickly at the time but I am not sure Google did anything - the above "review" is still present as of today. I am disappointed with Google but have come to realize that they embody the opposite of the motto: "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well." Edit: Google still allows logging reviews without comments, which further worsens the problem.
The volume of fake reviews is simply too much, and its much cheaper to create them, than it is to combat them. A good measure of this is, compare the prices for fake reviews on both platforms, I suspect Google will be significantly cheaper.
Its a tough problem to solve, no doubt, but Yelp chooses to error on the side of caution, and will sometimes flag legitimate reviews as "not recommended reviews" as a result.
If you walk in to the restaurant, you don't need to install the app. The app will let you view your live place in line, but you can leave the line/get notified when your table is ready vis SMS.
If you want to get in line before you show up the restaurant, you can do that via the app, or the www site, or the mobile site.
I worked on it from the Yelp side during the intitial partnership/integration.
So, I can't comment on the NoWait perspective, but I will say that almost all of the NoWait software team is still working at Yelp 2+ years post-aquisition.
What's the general Yelp employee vibe like when news like this comes out about features they've worked on?
Is it a feeling of "meh, we're growing revenue" or more of a "they completely misunderstood the value we're delivering based on what our users asked for" scenario?
Some of both; people do care, but not everyone loves every feature.
I feel that small business owners tend to be less tech savvy and more open to conspiratorial thinking, which leads to a lot of attention to anything Yelp does. If you read the comments even here on hn, many are not about the actual thing in question and many make accusations of unfair practises which have neve been accompanied by evidence.
In this particular case, we redirect calls about delivery just for restaurants who have signed a contract with GrubHub (which presumably included language allowing GrubHub to do this), so that GrubHub can attribute orders as coming "from Yelp" and charge for them the same way as they do online orders. I think there's some interesting things to discuss there, but it's not an obvious "this is wrong" feature to me.
(and the delivery market as a whole is a little messy -- see the Doordash tipping controversy for an example of something that I do feel is wrong and I would not be happy working on)
Thanks for the insight and for wading into the firestorm here.
From the screenshots in the article, it appears there is zero indication to the user that this will be going through Grubhub when they tap that button. Was that discussed? How do you feel about that in terms of it being sufficient notification?
Would you agree that in addition to the limited tech savvyness of restaurant owns, there may also be limited business savvy such that they would have been aware of a term that would allow Grubhub and Yelp to do this? In this case, the restaurant owner seemed to have no clue it was occurring. So presumably if the user and restaurant owner are clueless, and Yelp and Grubhub are taking a cut they may not have otherwise received, I'm a bit unclear as to how that could be viewed as any sort of positive.
Do restaurants receive any reporting of "Grubhub via Yelp" orders/calls?
The whole VC-funded industrial complex and their bad behaviours will start collapsing rapidly within 10 years - their bad behaviour and tactics have just gone on for too long; it could be faster, hard to predict exponentials.
Call me a cynic, but why should it stop if it works for the VCs? They don't care about the product or the devs or the users experience, just their return. Plenty of things on this world are absolutely abhorrent but continue to this day because they make someone good money.
Because regulation is coming, or the old saying "this is why we can't have nice things". They are making money out the ass but are conjuring up one hell of a storm that is about to brutalize the industry.
I don't understand Foursquare. They are perfectly positionned to compete against Yelp, and I even try to make an effort to use them but their insistence on gamification is very off-putting. Meanwhile, Facebook has been aggressively building its own database.
Would any Yelpers here care to comment on the issue? I interviewed there in the past, and know friends that work there. When I asked what they thought about the "blackmail" rumors from a while back they just laughed it off, because they honestly thought they were just rumors. And they enjoyed their work, and their work-life balance, and all that. Sounded like a fun, positive place to work, if you ignored the headlines.
So there's a disconnect here. Is there a dark pattern and slimy business going on in Yelp, or is this simply a weird situation that got sensationalized by a news article? I'm hesitant to make any assumptions.
I am a former Yelp engineer. I think the thing this story describes is dumb and bad and they should stop doing it. Inserting yourself as a useless middleman is a classic shitty startup move.
Here are some great reasons for current and former Yelp engineers not to engage in internet debates about accusations of nefariousness in other areas such as the review filter or sorting algorithm:
1. Being in internet debates mostly sucks in general, especially with people who by default hate you.
2. Yelp has a blanket policy that you shouldn't engage in these debates.
3. Yelp has been sued some number of times and might be again. I would be paranoid that something I said here would be used in another bullshit lawsuit, especially if I were truly in a position to know things.
4. It's pretty clear that the PR battle was lost long ago, regardless of the truth. Leaving a comment on a thread like this changes literally nothing and is a waste of time. Yes, that means I think I'm wasting my time right now. :-)
Every Yelp engineer I've met has intentions at least as good as, say, the average Google engineer. Sites like Yelp can have negative effects on small businesses the same way e.g. Spotify might have an effect on independent music or Airbnb has an effect on the apartment rental market in a city, and engineers aren't always good at recognizing those effects as problematic, but Yelp engineers are certainly no worse than your standard Silicon Valley type.
I still trust Yelp reviews more than I trust local business reviews on any other platform.
Developers who have been asked to implement a UX dark pattern like this one (or Yelp’s decision to forcibly open the App Store without warning in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625852), did you implement it? Why or why not?
I can’t imagine a case where I would be skilled enough to obtain employment at Yelp, and thus at other companies too, and yet would agree to implement something particularly slimy instead of quitting.
Obviously some people make different decisions, though. If you worked at a well-known company when they implemented an intentionally deceptive darkpattern, perhaps others can learn from your experience.
While I haven't implemented anything like this, and have pushed back when I've seen dark patterns like this before, it's not hard to imagine a situation where someone would feel like they have to.
It's a fairly privileged position to be able to just up and quit. Even in the bay area where you can in theory get another job fairly quickly, not everyone has enough savings to bridge a gap, and health insurance I'm sure could play a part. Not even mentioning what I'm sure is the most common reason of all: predatory visa statuses that are tied to an employer. Ie, you quit, you have to leave the country "immediately".
Edit to add: Perhaps this is just another reason why having high skilled visas and work statuses tied to a specific employer is not the right answer.
It’s also not hard to imagine a situation where developers happily implement it. Developers can get invested in their employer and rationalize their decisions just like anyone else. Management will provide plenty of help in doing so.
I’m sure there are some who say, “this sucks but I can’t afford to say no.” But I bet there are a lot more who say, “cool, this will help us make money.” Developers aren’t uniquely virtuous.
Grubhub's process of creating fake websites that compete with the restaurant's official site so that they can take a cut of any direct orders is so scummy.
I refuse to have anything to do with either company. I care about my local restaurants, not slimy practices like that.
>“I definitely implore people to forgo the three seconds of convenience to help neighborhood businesses,” he said.
Interesting way to end the article. I think we have all seen lines around the block for the new hotness in local resturants. If the owner is trying to get people in the door like this, then it is likely that these apps are not the culprit in the issues that the owner is facing.
In the article, grubhub points out a business that they helped out by pointing the business to switch to poke' bowls. There are some interesting points about that:
1) Per my reading, they only can point out one example. I did not see any stats or talk about a population, just an anecdote. I may have missed something though, or the writer decided to not use that sound bite.
2) That is consulting. They are mixing referral fees and trying to point out that they are sucessful un-solicited consultants too. This is not initially murky stuff, but it can get mixed up really fast. The incentives are not well aligned.
How does your anecdote of dining at a hot new restaurant refute the challenges restaurants are facing with GrubHub's fees getting tacked onto typical phone-in orders?
Streeteasy started employing the same dark pattern a few months ago. It seems like companies who have an effective monopoly just cannot resist the temptation.
They replaced the listing agent's number with a number that takes you to one of their agents. (After a while they added back the option to contact the actual listing agent, but you have to first click on a link to get to another page.)
Also, as soon as I contact an agent about a listing their agents start spamming me with texts and emails written in a way that try to obscure that they are not the ones who have the listing. At this point I never contact an agent through the Streeteasy platform. I just google the agent's name to find their contact info.
My favorite sushi-restaurant SugarFish was originally a take-away-sushi shop, the sushi is very high quality and somewhat inexpensive for the quality ($40 a meal). Also dine-in lines are consistently super long (they don’t take reservations), so I like to order pick-up / take-out. Except, now they force you to order take-out through Postmates which charges a large 15% fee and a flat service-charge (that I don’t recall but will update here when sugar fish opens). Sucks because I love the restaurant but really don’t appreciate paying Postmates fees when I’m picking it up myself. When you call in an order they auto-direct you to Postmates.
You misquoted that. Sushi is expensive, the point is it’s all relative and I think for the quality it’s typically more in the range of $60 a meal. Very expensive compared to other meals sure, but a good value for the quality of sushi.
I think it's high time for a full-blown FTC investigation into Yelp for restraint of trade, consumer fraud, false advertising, and whatever else the FTC can think of. These parasites have outlived their usefulness.
Failing that, a high-profile class-action lawsuit might get their attention.
I'm no lawyer, but to my layman's eyes this has class action lawsuit written all over it. Would love to hear an actual tort attorney's perspective on this.
Isn't agreement to no class action an ipso facto law violation and unenforceable in most states -- e.g., the way noncompete provisions are in California?
Very hard to prove damages. You would have to prove the calls that you didn’t receive and sales that didn’t happen. There also isn’t any particular “wrong” that has happened unless the restaurant paid money to have a listing and in the terms of that listing there was a clause that required GrubHub not be used. But essentially, paying for Yelp is paying for the service of lead generation which seems to be the exact service Yelp provides.
GrubHub is not involved at all - the equivalent of shaking down people in line. They didn't market anything. They didn't take the order. They just shoved in line and insisted people pay them for … nothing. I can easily see this being a class-action lawsuit.
My local handyman (he is a real engineering, just does this after getting out of working a corporate job) that is booked months in advance told me a story. He was listed on Yelp with perfect reviews. One day Yelp called him and ask him about some paid for service to improve his listing. He said no thanks. A few days later he when from showing up in the top of the search to near the bottom. He is a great guy and does fantastic work. I was done with Yelp from that point.
> “There's a button where you could hit play and so I was like, what is this?” he said. “I hit play, and the first call was me on the phone, which freaked me out because I didn't know I was being recorded.”
So is grubhub providing a notification to the restaurant that they are being recorded in two party-consent states?
And is it possible to get on the grubhub platform without agreeing to pay the marketing commission for phonecalls?
Some of the practices in the article sound criminal. Grubhub appears to be recording conversations to which they are not a party as far as either the customer or the restaurant knows. The message they play does not sound like a notification that GrubHub is recording the call. I am not a lawyer, but I bet this is an illegal wiretap in at least one state.
Yelp is terrible to work with. From my personal experience they've crossed over into spam territory. They will call, email, leave lengthy voicemails (with rather extortionist language), non-stop trying to get you to pay for their premium services.
Really slimy. I'm not one to advocate for big G but hoping them or Apple makes them irrelevant.
In a rush I once had to find and call a hotel and get a reservation. The site I used looked like a typical priceline or whatever- looked legit. Instead of providing the phone number of the hotel front desk, it sent me to some shady hotel booking service. I was tired and probably not thinking straight - but they took my card and the room was booked. After arriving at the hotel I indeed had a reservation, that was nice. What wasn't nice was that it wasn't paid for. I had no idea who I called, and it was super late so I had no options. If I wasn't in a gigantic stressful situation at the time I would have done more to figure out what happened.
Not saying that grubhub or yelp is THAT shady, but that kind of business practice is.
Fun fact: this is not the first time Yelp has done this. I recall over ten years ago they tried exactly this feature as a way to monetize listing phone numbers as part of premium business listings, or something like that. They would charge for phone calls like ad clickthrus.
An interesting technical detail: they made the phone numbers gifs so they wouldn’t be indexed by search engines.
I could be misremembering details and I can’t find anything online, but I’m pretty sure this happened.
In my area, Slice bought domains containing local pizzerias' names. Slice then set up the domains with sites branded with the local businesses' branding and replaced the phone numbers and online ordering with Slice's.
Turns out Slice was able to beat those businesses at the SEO game and now those fake sites are the first results when looking for local pizzerias' contact info.
With Yelp around, I'm genuinely glad to not be in a retail or restaurant business.
They are the digital equivalent of "nice shop you got there, it's be a real shame if anyone broke the window, for just a small payment, we can protect you..."
As a potential user, considering how they actively "manage" the reviews, I simply do not trust them. I find far better information elsewhere.
Considering that you can't opt out of a Yelp listing, I think they've crossed a line here. They're basically putting up misleading directory pages for real businesses that intentionally have wrong information.
I hope someone can successfully argue that willfully spreading misleading information about someone else's business is wrong and actionable.
I assume Grubhub's Eat24 acquisition from Yelp came with some poorly written contract clause that allows them to force Yelp to implement this absurd feature as part of their "ordering partner integration", but maybe Yelp is unethical AND stupid after all and is doing it for part of the take. We'll probably never know. Either way their reputation will be ruined.
Disclosure: I interned at Yelp engineering and enjoyed it. The engineers were all nice people with as much integrity as one would hope.
Yelp should obviously have just been upfront that they were going to be taking commissions, the fact that they weren't strikes me as symptomatic of a dysfunctional org (that failed to actually align on this decision but pushed it out anyway in a shady way).
The “we bring you new customers” pitch that food portals is incredibly deceitful. Portals didn’t arrive on the scene with millions of customers to send to restaurants. They arrived with zero and siphoned them away using these dirty tricks (mini sites pretending to be made by the restaurant, phone numbers owned by the portals, requiring the portal stickers on the restaurants’ windows).
I'm curious whether Yelp is only doing this in states without two-party consent to record. In the article the author (Yelp user/restaurant customer) is told the line is recorded before being connected through but the restaurant employee on the other end appears completely unaware. I would guess there are at least a few Attorneys General who would take issue with this approach.
It's not even close to the shadiest part of Yelp's business but it's one that at least some businesses could work together and push back on without running afoul of the binding arbitration/class action prohibition in Yelp's ToS.
... yes. In states that require two-party consent to record a conversation (CA & MA, for example) Grubhub can't record a call without telling _everyone_ on the call it's being recorded. The article opens with a story of the author having a conversation with a restaurant employee who's clearly unaware of the recording.
How do you use Yelp when you know that a business can bribe Yelp with advertizing and they will suppress negative reviews? and vice versa -- if a business refuses to advertise, they will suppress positive reviews .
I use Foursquare and really like it (compared to Yelp). As it's crowd-sourced, the data can be iffy (missing hours, phone numbers) in some lower density regions, but that hasn't been a huge drawback.
Loved Foursquare, but stopped using it when it seemed all the recommendations were a few years old. Even now I go into it and most reviews/recommendations are from 2014. Shame it fell off.
For food, I've enjoyed Foursquare for a better signal:noise ratio in reviews. I am generally quite satisfied eating at its top-reviewed places for any given search term. Coverage of locations is almost as good as Yelp although you'll miss a few restaurants here and there (I'm in NYC).
Just be sure to turn off the always-on location tracking and go through the other privacy settings.
I typically cross-reference Foursquare with Google Maps reviews to make sure the overall rating is similar, since I'm a stickler like that.
Does anyone know of a good alternative to implement a waitlist for restaurants that inst yelp? Plenty of small restaurants use it because it's easy and texts customers about their position in line.
Someone should build a product for restaurants that receives the call, terminates it, and immediately calls the customer back directly. If you can quietly get a critical mass of restaurants onto it, then Yelp wouldn't be able to punish those restaurants.
Lots of sites replace emails and telephone numbers, this is essentially twilios whole service. They can record phone calls and read all emails back and forth. Mostly just to do analysis and maybe increase the quality of responses
Yelp is now in free for all mode and monetizing whatever they can. They forced a bad ZocDoc integration, which was an absolute nightmare, and broke our Yelp pages overnight. Not surprised at all to see this.
What value does Yelp provide to end users? I've tried it in the past, but it never feels like I get any value. A simple Google search (not Maps, just search the usual way) works just as well, if not better.
Pretty much. I've never used Yelp nuch. I guess they never focused much on the world outside the US. I just checked my area in Berlin (which has loads of really nice places) and they have almost nothing for this area which means their data for Berlin is 95% incomplete. For reference, several of the top places for Berlin on Foursquare are in the same area. Yelp seems to have none of those.
From working on POI data in Nokia Maps back in the day, I remember that this is a tough market. A lot of sites from back in the day no longer exist. Yelp apparently bought qype at some point which used to have pretty decent coverage. I actually worked with their data at Nokia so I know. It seems all of that is missing in action in Berlin (where they used to have most restaurants covered). I guess that was more of an acquihire/competetitor eliminating move. Either way, their data was pretty bad as I recall but not this bad.
Google Maps typically has most places, even the really obscure/shitty ones. Foursquare is a bit less predictable depending on how many users they have locally but it's typically great in popular areas. Both have invested in great user feedback mechanisms to improve the accuracy of their data. E.g. knowing when a new place opens and an old one disappears or changes name is key. Between those two, you get a decent impression what is good in an area. The reviews in Google Maps are usually pretty helpful and I see little evidence of cheating (though that obviously happens).
I guess what happened is that Yelp used to be a cool hop user driven review website and then VC money took over and now the users are the product that they sell to their customers the restaurants.
Makes me think really hard about tech’s blind adoration for the “PayPal mafia.” I find myself seeing more instances of soul crushing amoral behavior from this group of entrepreneurs than just about any other group.
Every person I know in tech thinks the lot of them are different forms of Satan. It's the people outside of tech, that don't know of their exploits, that don't think that.
But it's not just one tech company. Readers of HN are leaning to most, at least a lot the big ones, as forms of Satan. Facebook, Amazon, Google, PayPal, Uber, etc are all companies I go out of my way to not conduct business if I can help it. I'll also just add any too-big-to-fail bank to that list of forms of Satan as well. While not the tech companies people think of, they are nothing but tech on the inside. Why does it still take overnight for checks to be deposited vs an immediate transfer? (only slightly rhetorical)
I'll caveat with saying not all entrepreneurs are this way, but the 'entrebroneurs' are the ones allured to the douchebag persona of being a "Russ Hanneman" type of founder.
I can't tell if you're saying he's a good or bad example. But Musk has managed to get himself wealthy from many businesses that mostly burn capital, including the biggest CEO pay package in history. He may be the ultimate example of the PayPal Mafia.
Criticism of Musk or the operation of any of his companies (such as the arguably nepotic acquisition of SolarCity) are generally downvoted to oblivion here, and it's hard to tell if everyone is an investor or just blindly support him. Actually surprised that my comment managed to get upvoted back, it was -3 within a few minutes of posting the comment.
The problem with using another form of payment is I won't purchase from a small business online without PayPal. PayPal offers consumer protection so I can take a risk with a company I don't trust yet. if it goes bad I can file a complaint and it will almost always get resolved.
Unless they stored the number and are using it at multiple "merchants", your bank can stop all transactions from them from going through. There's also virtual card services like privacy.com and those provided by multiple banks.
Tech is the new wall street. Between privacy concerns, screwing of small businesses, blindly supporting mega corps with copyright... sometimes I feel even wall street is better :(
It's worth pointing out that Google shamelessly cloned Yelp and funnels everyone into using their clone when they search for restaurants. If Yelp is in desperate spot its because Google put them there.
Most companies face stiff competition and that's no reason to excuse immoral behavior. Not to mention that Google tried to acquire Yelp and was turned down. Either Yelp's plan to take on Google always included copious dark patterns, or their earlier plans totally failed and this is what they've fallen back on. Either way Yelp can't die soon enough.
Hijacking search results because they are sour the Yelp deal didn't go their way isn't competing LOL. They've already been fined billions for similar behavior.
the moment became apparent that bad review removal (or yelp "sorting" them to the very bottom) was available to paying users yelp lost my trust. they don't have anyone else to blame for that.
In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced the restaurant this was a good deal?
What value did they provide here?
Meanwgile, Yelp used to be a resource to find good businesses. Now it's... Something else. It's leveraging it's market power to make money rather providing customers with any value.
I don't know what the answer is but it feels like society needs to come up with a new word, new idea, (or probably an old one we've forgotten) and make it both an ethically bad thing and then also an illegal one (or at least one that is taxed higher).