Extortion. This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up. Google's running more or less the same racket. It's "soft"...there are no threats, exactly. But imagine if the Chicago Tribune called vendors and threatened to run a miserable review of them if they didn't pay?
So why hasn't that happened? Because of libel laws, for one thing. RICO for another. Best answer would be a class action to subpoena Yelp for the IP & personal info of the posters of questionable negative reviews that had survived the removal of legitimate positive reviews, and file a lawsuit against the authors and Yelp for libel. A few thousand of those and they'll be pushed back into their corner.
Apparently, suing them for libel laws is impossible because of CDA, but suing them under RICO might work. CDA says that you can't sue someone for content posted by their users. RICO is an anti-mafia law that says if you are part of an organization that causes illegal things to happen, you could also be liable.
I think if one were to try to sue them, one would have to mount an attack along this vector. The editorial nature of their review system could be seen as a generator of new content (even if it is based on used-submitted content); the end result (in terms of message and tone) is considerably different to the initial material.
I wonder though if such an approach has any legal merits. I've heard of something similar with copyright, where aggregating data for example and presenting it in new ways is copyrightable. I think one could expand upon that approach and use it as a basis for the complaint.
Yep, it's the modern day version of the good old fashioned shakedown. Maybe not as ruthless as the mafia of the 1930s, but the basic idea remains the same.
Am I the only one who believes that yelp is prolly telling the truth and that it was just a coincidence? It sounds quite plausible to me that their algorithms work in the way, that are described in the article.
No, you are not. I am fairly confident that Yelp behaves above-board. It has a few hundred sales people making a lot of calls and I don't doubt that there are isolated incidents of questionably behavior. I also believe there is a lot of mis-interpretation. For example, advertisers get to choose one review to display at the top of the list. This feature is usually twisted by detractors beyond recognition.
It certainly seems like the majority of people complaining about tend to be mom and pop operations with little or no internet savvy. This tends to foster a paranoid attitude, sort of like when you know nothing about cars and take your car to a new mechanic.
On the other hand, Yelp is walking a thin line with their business model.
Just because it's algorithmic doesn't mean it's legal or clean. I can write an algorithm that searches your cookies for porn sites, figures out who employs you, and emails you a customized extortion threat. If their algorithm works the way it's described in the article, then it'll downrank or remove 10 legitimate, positive posts from real customers if they're made in one day, and will preserve and uprank 1 illegitimate negative post from a competitor, unless the unwilling subject of this debate agrees to pay to remove the negative review. That's the definition of extortion, and if ever there was an algorithm written for that purpose, the one described in the article is it.
The way I understand this is, that he was not asked to pay to have the negative review removed, just for advertising, which was totally unrelated to his reviews.
He was asked to pay for advertising. He wasn't happy with previous dealings with yelp, so he declined. Then, all of the positive reviews that were on the site mysteriously disappeared. One plausible explanation is that all of the positive reviewers removed their responses. Another one is that all of the positive reviewers weren't real. But a third explanation is that they were removed precisely because he chose not to pay for advertising. And in the business owner's mind, that is what happened.
If there was a reasonable or non-negligible possibility that removal of the positive reviews resulted from his failure to pay the bribe, then the onus is on the company to provide records to the contrary. That's the point of subpoenaing the poster of the negative comment that survived; not to sue him directly, but to establish the mechanics of and facts arising from Yelp's algorithm, and to establish a pattern of extortion.
Consider: Yelp's algorithm could just as easily flag EVERYONE who gets a single star review for a sales phone call.
> Ironically, mild extortion is the point of the Tribune's "What's Your Problem?" column.
I don't think so. I can see why you'd say that---there's a certain family resemblance---but extortion when someone threatens to reveal a bad thing for their own gain; WYP is actually revealing a bad thing for the gain of the reader. If Jon Yates (the WYP author) ever ended a phone call "if you pay me (or otherwise grant me consideration) I won't run this column," then that would turn it into extortion.
As I think about it further, another thing that makes it not-extortion is that with WYP the company that did someone wrong is given a chance to make it right, even before the deed is revealed. That's not typically a feature of extortion.
Whether yelp's business model meets the definition of extortion is debatable ( either way, i find it distasteful ). However, there is nothing extortionist about this.
If you consider consumer advocacy columns to be a form of extortion... consider that the newspaper doesn't request money from the subject to "fix" the column.
The people that ask this Tribune reporter for help are people that can't get a problem solved by another means because the company is uncooperative or in denial about the problem.
So when someone calls the business and says "Hi, I'm calling from the Chicago Tribune, where I'm going to write a story about you that will be read by half a million readers", do you think that will get a better outcome to the problem than the individual calling again for the 25th time?
Sure it will. But if the business had done nothing wrong, journalistic ethics (which play no role in the "moderating" position taken by Yelp between "customer reviews") would stipulate that the newspaper could not report anything other than verifiable fact.
But the business owner (or government agency in most cases with Trib/WYP) see it as "if I don't fix this issue, it's going to be in the newspaper where my boss will see it".
The reporter doesn't have to be unethical in the slightest. The message is implied and, in most cases from what I've read in the Tribune over the years, very effective.
>This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up.
So why hasn't that happened? Because of libel laws, for one thing. RICO for another. Best answer would be a class action to subpoena Yelp for the IP & personal info of the posters of questionable negative reviews that had survived the removal of legitimate positive reviews, and file a lawsuit against the authors and Yelp for libel. A few thousand of those and they'll be pushed back into their corner.
2+2 Poker Forum has been doing this in the online casino industry for awhile... but they're real criminals anyway: http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/poker-complaints/45662-2...