But now we know that the more customers who post complaints (with links to your web site) the better - it boosts your Google ranking and that drags in new punters.
Bad customer service (in fact preferably rude and near insane) is good for your business growth - plus you get to keep the excess profits every time you rip someone off.
Google has inadvertently created a new business model.
He claimed this, but as a SEO, there was no actual evidence that this was helping him rank - it was far more likely the anchor text on his 10,000 plus pages that accounted for it, among other things.
Perhaps, but look at the date on those reviews. So this person's post made more people aware of yelp and they used it to air their frustration, a bunch of people on reddit got mad and made up claims to make this company look like nothing more than a scam (one poster actually called for reddit to do exactly that) or some combination of those two.
I just posted this as a great example of about the worst way to deal with customers I've ever seen. If the company isn't a scam they could have asked the customer what they could do to get rid of the rating. If it is a scam he could have just shut up, maybe posted a few fake positive reviews and left it at that. Instead he wrote an amateurish fake-lawyer letter threatening the customer angering a portion of the Internet against him.
To be fair, we can't verify that either way. If a company treated me as the reviewers claim, I wouldn't give them more than one star either. As was mentioned in other comments, there needs to be some validation of reviewers built into yelp.
Normally that would get down-voted to oblivion here, but since the name of the company in question is Epic Data Recovery Labs, I gave you an upvote. (It only took you back to 0 though...)
Ironically, it's also an interesting commentary on how quickly groupthink and follow-the-leader actions take over on social news sites.
Did everyone who originally downvoted the "epic fail" post realise the context and just not like jokes on HN, or did a couple of people choose to downvote, and then more people see what looked like a Reddit-esque joke that was being downvoted and just join in without understanding the point of the post?
As others pointed out, a similar mentality could explain the results on the Yelp page we are discussing, even if the entire thing was actually orchestrated by a competitor and/or triggered by a single unhappy customer where we don't know the full story.
Right, it is not the site for it. It is nothing personal but the mantra for HN is serious discussion, allowing it contributes to the deterioration of the site away from it's stated goal and makes HN = !HN. That being said, I knocked it to 0, nothing personal, it just does not belong here.
What proportion of his customers go check Yelp before using him? I'm guessing it's only a small number... I can't see this killing his business. Seems more like a minor nuisance to me...
A lot of customers these days will do a Google on a company or product name before doing any business. They look for reviews as well as other opinions. If the search turns up a thread like this, I'm sure they'll run away.
I think some customers do this, but they're in a minority. I don't have any figures to back this up, it's just my general observation of peoples behaviour...
Seems like the only "people" posting 5 * reviews are the owner himself via different IDs .. does Yelp ban accounts for fraudulent reviews? this surely makes up such a case...
Seems like the vast majority of "people" posting negative reviews are random redditors who read an e-mail allegedly sent by the owner of this company. Since they've never used the company's services, are those postings any less fraudulent?
Yes they are. It's just a form of internet vigilantism. Ideally, all the false reviews (positive or negative) should be taken down by yelp .. else, there's not much to trust on yelp if this expands to a bigger scale.
Interesting, but I think the submission title is misleading (particularly now the page is so full of bad reviews that it's not obvious which review the submitter was referring to).
This seems to be more an example of "How to destroy your business by being (at least perceived as) consistently fraudulent".
It it just me, or does the mob mentality of this scare anyone else just a little? With no real evidence and certainly no trial, a one-sided tale told on reddit led to the destruction of a small business.
The evidence of this being a scam is that someone posted an e-mail the owner allegedly sent. That e-mail could be a total sham, or it could be exaggerated, or there could be a huge other side of the story.
There are absolutely scammers out there, and this business might be one of them. There's no hard evidence either way, though.
- "Anyone who is defending this child molester was never molested as a child."
- "Anyone who is defending this racist has never been the victim of prejudice."
Some events overtrain our minds, such that we can never emotionally react to them in a genuinely rational way again. However, we can stop ourselves from doing this, by holding fast to the one principle that has always, always worked: Innocent until proven guilty, please.
You'd have to accept the inverse, then - "no one attacking this business without concrete evidence has ever been falsely accused by an asshole customer."
My experience would tell me either you don't own a small business or you haven't had a bad customer. We could argue how rare bad customers are and it varies drastically across business types, but it just takes one. I have no clue on this particular case and that is the exact point - neither does anyone else on here unless you have actually used them.
So, because you got scammed by party A, then any unproven accusation against party B must be true and all those who still respect "innocent until proven guilty" are just ignorant?
I think you really need to reexamine your perspective as it will seriously make working with other people on projects quite difficult.
I'm fascinated that the votes here reflect rational, rather than kneejerk, responses to your posts. Do you think it is because HN users are specifically empathetic to small businesses, or do you think we are actually avoiding the cognitive bias responsible for holding up the minority that strikes against the hated outsider?
To put that another way, in an isomorphic situation with forged evidence of, say, spousal abuse (pretending that that has some relevance to HN for some reason, and wouldn't get flagged), do you think the votes here would go the same way on your, the parent's, and the grandparent's comments, even if there were many people here who had been victims of spousal abuse (like I am assuming that there are many people here who have been conned by a business at some point)?
Not long ago, there was an alleged sexual assault at a tech conference. Rather than going to the police, the alleged victim blogged about it, including the alleged perpetrator's name in the post, which hit the top of HN before being removed. The same pattern was visible there -- most of the highest-point comments were along the lines of "this is serious if true, so go to the police, not the internet" and "let's wait for an investigation before destroying the guy's reputation".
On the other hand, when a magazine was shown to have lifted content and then told the original author she should be grateful for the portfolio assist, HN did pile on. In that case, the evidence of wrongdoing was clear and widespread: an admission by the publisher that she'd lifted content, links to the original which was clearly older, and links to content lifted from other publications. This led to the opposite pattern in comments, with evidence being highly upvoted and "let's not jump to conclusions" sitting at only a few points.
I don't think "sympathy for small business" is the driving force. I think it's a focus on evidence rather than narrative (which happens to help us avoid that particular cognitive bias.) We are, after all, Hacker News, and the hacker ethos is one of making stuff that works, A/B testing, and following the evidence.
Even though you jest, I have to agree. I really wish Google would buy out Yelp or would enter into direct competition. They would bring a level of credibility to an even playing fields for all parties involved. There are no many companies that carry around the kind of credibility needed to asway all concerns that people are not buying there way out of reviews.
Don't know why I got down-voted on this one, it is a serious concern. Yelp credibility in providing a level playing field has come into question on more than one occasion. Like it or not, Google brings a level of credibility to the table. When disagreeing with someones position please refrain from using the down-vote button for "I disagree" when a simple rebuttal would suffice.
At some stores I've been given a receipt with a code on it that I can use for giving customer feedback. Plus, there's an incentive of entering a contest if you give them feedback.
True, but if the corporate office notices that one store almost never has any reviews posted, or notices that their sponsored site (with the receipt codes) has a store getting 5-star reviews (indicating that the receipts are only being given out to people likely to be positive), while a non-sponsored site has markedly lower scores, then you'd probably look into what's going on there. And the best way to figure out how a store is actually doing is still to go there and see for yourself.
Exactly. And if Yelp can't guarantee that a poster truly has been a customer of said business they are reviewing, then perhaps they should not be allowed to post it. Otherwise it opens the gates to what is effectively blackmail and lynch mobbing.
It's not just the one e-mail, there appear to be other bad reviews from people who have actually used them, although it's impossible to tell whether or not they're real.
"They quoted me $155 and ended up charging me over $500 and STILL wanted me to pay for some dumb protection service at $85 per year. AND THEY DID NOT EVEN FULLY RECOVER THE FULL DATA!"
"John retrieved the images as promised, but once he did he held them hostage demanding more money!"
"This place is extremely unprofessional. They charged WAY more than the original quote, and then demanded payment before returning my item. Also, they accused me of "harassing" them when I called to discuss the difference in price from the quoted cost."
"Wish I'd skipped them. My laptop hard drive crashed and I needed to recover some Word & Excel docs. A month later they haven't recovered all of my data and are completely unresponsive to calls/emails. Now I'm out $460, I don't have the data that I paid to get back, and John still has my hard drive, so I'm stuck."
"The data recovery was more expensive than quoted by Tekserve (by $200). Actual price was way over estimate (by $400). Communications were unclear. Terms were nebulous. Service was always late."
why is it a scam? the original review, while generally giving poor marks, wrote "All the said, he recovered every single file from my external hard drive."
I had a similar feeling about the recent Cook's Source episode. It's very likely that, in both cases, the charges against the business owner are accurate, and if so I feel fine about them losing their businesses, if that's the outcome. But how long will it be until some savvy internet user successfully riles people up against an innocent competitor or a personal enemy?
> J-Ro is a professional political activist; he's paid to influence online opinion (or has been, on some past issues; no idea whether he's specifically paid on this one), and he's primarily concerned with getting people outraged, not with accuracy in discussion; hence his entirely false claims here.
This seems different on a couple of levels to me. J-Ro's headline was a pretty accurate summary of what the NY Times reported in the context of the overall Net Neutrality debate. And the top-ranked response on Reddit pointed out his agenda and dissented, while on Yelp the two "Elite" posters both criticized the business.
I think there's a slight difference between an intrinsically public matter, like the Comcast issue, and a relationship between, say, a business owner and a customer. In political fights, people on all sides make their best case to the public. Sometimes that best case is deceptive or manipulative and that's a problem, but the fact of activists trying to shift public opinion just goes with the territory and long predates the Internet. We're used to it; we have filters for it.
The other thing is more complicated. If a business owner rips me off, that's bad. In the past, my only redress was the courts, which is a slow, cumbersome, expensive process. Now there's this new avenue where I can try to make the Internet hate the business owner. This can be a useful corrective, but it's very vulnerable to abuse.
In the Cook's Source episode, though, there was corroborating evidence. The plagiarized article was available in its original form, and other articles in the magazine were shown to be from a variety of media sources.
a lot of corroborating evidence. there were numerous plagiarized articles. i even personally checked out an issue and googled some lines to see where they were taken from.
the email in this instance could've been completely faked.
This already happens all the time in politics. All you have to do is plant a lie in people's heads and some people will believe it forever, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary.
Playing along with this idea a bit, everybody says that Facebook is bad because the stupid things you do when you're a kid can haunt you forever.
Well this just takes it up another level, doesn't it? Ever have a bad day, get pissed at somebody? Maybe say some things you probably shouldn't?
Of course you have. Everybody has.
But now, through the marvels of modern technology, your words stay with you forever.
That means -- and I don't advocate doing this at all -- that if I'm running a business that's in competition with you, I don't have to perhaps develop the best product or service. Nope. Instead I can develop a just-average product, and then do a little digging to find out what sorts of shitty things you've done or said on the internet. Wait for the right moment, use a social network and a trusted poster as a conduit, and voila! I just helped you trash your own business. And my fingerprints are nowhere on it.
I'm not saying that this is what happened. For all I know, the guy might be a jerk. What I'm saying, along with plusbryan, is that there is no way to know from the information available if you are being purposely manipulated for a response or just being honestly told a story
Well this just takes it up another level, doesn't it? Ever have a bad day, get pissed at somebody? Maybe say some things you probably shouldn't?
Of course you have. Everybody has.
But now, through the marvels of modern technology, your words stay with you forever.
I just hope that one day this becomes a universal revelation, and we as a society become much more forgiving. The combination of harsh judgement, poor decisions being easy to make, and a public permanent record of anything you say on the internet can have potentially life ruining consequences, and it's easy to find plenty of examples today. In the past, only people who were in positions that would be in public scrutiny (politicians, CEOs, PR people, etc) really had to watch what they said all the time. Now that we have the internet, which doesn't really forget, it's easy for past mistakes to come back to haunt you. I just hope society becomes more lenient about foolish mistakes...
I hope that the Wikileaks dumps have a similar effect of making people more forgiving and less likely to be offended. Diplomatic relationships shouldn't hinge on the use of a single wrong adjective in a thousand word conversation.
Not to condone anything, but I see another part of the cycle: the "we fucked up" post that makes everything all better. It seems the mob responds very well to these kinds of admissions of guilt. The problem with some companies is that they don't have to say sorry because they have monopolies and don't give a shit about you as a customer.
I think in some ways the Mob just wants to see a more friendly business atmosphere that respects them as customers, and they use the power they have to try to achieve those ends.
Even if the email is real, and the guy is a bit of a head case, I don't see how that justifies people who have never done business with him posting reviews based on what are essentially rumors. Although I accidentally downvoted you because HN sucks on an iPhone, I completely agree that this is a scary mob mentality.
Some of the posted the story as a proxy the the customer because the customer signed a document saying that they could be sued for a bad review. The fact that that is in a contract is a huge red flag. It would be interesting to see if that is remotely enforceable in court.
I don't see a mob mentality when I look at the Yelp thread. I see a couple of "Elite" posters, one of who talks about reviews elsewhere on the internet. I see a bunch of people who don't seem like they have a lot of posting history saying very similar things. It might be orchestrated, or it might be a bunch of people annoyed about a bad actor but I think "mob" is an overreaction.
Well in this case, it is in his contract in black and white and there are no shortage of people reporting the same issue. Quoted low price that gets reprojected to nearly triple the price, personal property held for ransom, Threats of lawsuits and actual lawsuits being files against customers that post reviews. I think this is a bad case to highlight mob mentality as this is beyond an owner being rude because his dog died that day. This guy is engaging in serial fraud against consumers and trying to legally bind them from discovering the serial nature of his actions. I don't see what the big deal is, if you are reputable it comes out, others will post that it was not there experience if you get a bad review. The only way that I see it potentially being damaging is if you are new and get a series of bad reviews right of the bat. That being said, I thing entities like yelp need to provide a mechanism to owners to air there side of the story. Sure there are bad consumers looking to get something for free. But there is a critical threshold where it is not just bad consumers, it's a pattern of behavior by business owners. The balance of power has shifted and in certain ways that is a good thing.
maybe its just me but that looks a whole lot like one guy making lots of Yelp accounts. In particular that two entirely different "accounts" posted the same letter from the guy word for word. I think the letter itself is likely real though.
I like the how he's "doing this pro se" and if the customer doesn't knuckle under he will take this case right to the Supreme Court. It's hard to get spittle flecks on electronic communication, but this guy seems to have managed it.
He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client - except this time, maybe the causality runs the other way.
What's really interesting is that most of these reviews happened yesterday, and it appears mots of the reviewers have never actually engaged in business with the scammy vendor, or attempted to engage in business, or well ever heard of the business before this. Being the voice of reason, isn't that a violation of Yelp's terms of services? Yelp itself is known to be somewhat of a bully.
I can't speak to whether the business in question is real or not, or whether it's bad or good, etc. What I can speak to is that I think there's a fundamental flaw with Yelp and similar sites, and indeed even with Amazon reviews: you don't know who to trust. "On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog!"
Any given post could be made by a shill or astroturfer, it could be made by a competitor, it could be made by a child or teenager with no perspective, it could be made by a prankster, an idiot, a mentally disturbed person, by a spidering script/bot, or could even be fake data planted by the site's owner in order to make the site look like it has a bigger base of real users. You just don't know, in most cases, on most sites.
Therefore, it's mostly noise. You can't trust it! Crap. Some of it is not, of course. There is some signal out there. But this fundamental problem of having trusted signal buried by untrustable noise is the weakness to all these web-based systems. Even a stars-based system is useless. It's irrelevant if a particular app or entity has a lot of five-star reviews or one-star reviews if it's crowd-sourced, because you can't trust the crowd. ("I gave it five stars because I'm shagging the creator." "I found a button that had a color blue that displeased me: ZERO STARS!") At least not when commercial interests are at stake.
I trust crowd-sourcing a little more when the entities being reviewed are (a) for hobbyists, and (b) niche, and (c) with a highly filtered review demographic (not just anybody and their sister can fire off a review -- there has to be some filtering process or bias that weeds out most folks.) Even then, it's hit or miss. At the end of the day, reviews have signal only if the reader already has some explicit trust relationship with the reviewer, based on past performance. If the reviewer is some faceless random stranger, it's noise and cannot be trusted in general.
Someone else in this thread made a comment about mob mentality. I agree. I think that's another flaw to these crowd-sourced systems. Humans are prone to mob thinking. They take things out of context and blow something all out of perspective, often in proportion to how ignorant they are.
95 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadBad customer service (in fact preferably rude and near insane) is good for your business growth - plus you get to keep the excess profits every time you rip someone off.
Google has inadvertently created a new business model.
However, tweets and certain blogs (the ones with nofollow diabled) may be contributing to pagerank.
So, the lesson is, if you complain, complain on a site dedicated for that purpose.
I just posted this as a great example of about the worst way to deal with customers I've ever seen. If the company isn't a scam they could have asked the customer what they could do to get rid of the rating. If it is a scam he could have just shut up, maybe posted a few fake positive reviews and left it at that. Instead he wrote an amateurish fake-lawyer letter threatening the customer angering a portion of the Internet against him.
That was sort of the point of the comment. :)
People should be less edgy...
Might be wrong and misinterpreting.
Did everyone who originally downvoted the "epic fail" post realise the context and just not like jokes on HN, or did a couple of people choose to downvote, and then more people see what looked like a Reddit-esque joke that was being downvoted and just join in without understanding the point of the post?
As others pointed out, a similar mentality could explain the results on the Yelp page we are discussing, even if the entire thing was actually orchestrated by a competitor and/or triggered by a single unhappy customer where we don't know the full story.
On HN, I downvote that comment.
On Reddit, I leave it alone or perhaps upvote it.
On Slashdot, I probably make the joke myself if I'm the first one to get to it.
I appreciate HN's "no class clowns" tone, as I can (and do) easily get my fill of that elsewhere.
This seems to be more an example of "How to destroy your business by being (at least perceived as) consistently fraudulent".
If you scroll down further, there's the same email in the comment that was posted on 12/8/2009
this is a scam. threats of litigation. withholding of property. unlawful contracts.
you used "mob mentality". that's a big red flag to me. are you perhaps the owner of that small business?
The evidence of this being a scam is that someone posted an e-mail the owner allegedly sent. That e-mail could be a total sham, or it could be exaggerated, or there could be a huge other side of the story.
There are absolutely scammers out there, and this business might be one of them. There's no hard evidence either way, though.
- "Anyone who is defending this child molester was never molested as a child."
- "Anyone who is defending this racist has never been the victim of prejudice."
Some events overtrain our minds, such that we can never emotionally react to them in a genuinely rational way again. However, we can stop ourselves from doing this, by holding fast to the one principle that has always, always worked: Innocent until proven guilty, please.
I think you really need to reexamine your perspective as it will seriously make working with other people on projects quite difficult.
To put that another way, in an isomorphic situation with forged evidence of, say, spousal abuse (pretending that that has some relevance to HN for some reason, and wouldn't get flagged), do you think the votes here would go the same way on your, the parent's, and the grandparent's comments, even if there were many people here who had been victims of spousal abuse (like I am assuming that there are many people here who have been conned by a business at some point)?
On the other hand, when a magazine was shown to have lifted content and then told the original author she should be grateful for the portfolio assist, HN did pile on. In that case, the evidence of wrongdoing was clear and widespread: an admission by the publisher that she'd lifted content, links to the original which was clearly older, and links to content lifted from other publications. This led to the opposite pattern in comments, with evidence being highly upvoted and "let's not jump to conclusions" sitting at only a few points.
I don't think "sympathy for small business" is the driving force. I think it's a focus on evidence rather than narrative (which happens to help us avoid that particular cognitive bias.) We are, after all, Hacker News, and the hacker ethos is one of making stuff that works, A/B testing, and following the evidence.
Seems like the right sort of solution to me.
Random example: http://mfisurvey.marketforce.com/raisingcanes/
"They quoted me $155 and ended up charging me over $500 and STILL wanted me to pay for some dumb protection service at $85 per year. AND THEY DID NOT EVEN FULLY RECOVER THE FULL DATA!"
"John retrieved the images as promised, but once he did he held them hostage demanding more money!"
"This place is extremely unprofessional. They charged WAY more than the original quote, and then demanded payment before returning my item. Also, they accused me of "harassing" them when I called to discuss the difference in price from the quoted cost."
"Wish I'd skipped them. My laptop hard drive crashed and I needed to recover some Word & Excel docs. A month later they haven't recovered all of my data and are completely unresponsive to calls/emails. Now I'm out $460, I don't have the data that I paid to get back, and John still has my hard drive, so I'm stuck."
"The data recovery was more expensive than quoted by Tekserve (by $200). Actual price was way over estimate (by $400). Communications were unclear. Terms were nebulous. Service was always late."
And where was the withholding of property?
> As of this time, I still haven't gotten my circuit board back.
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the...
> J-Ro is a professional political activist; he's paid to influence online opinion (or has been, on some past issues; no idea whether he's specifically paid on this one), and he's primarily concerned with getting people outraged, not with accuracy in discussion; hence his entirely false claims here.
The other thing is more complicated. If a business owner rips me off, that's bad. In the past, my only redress was the courts, which is a slow, cumbersome, expensive process. Now there's this new avenue where I can try to make the Internet hate the business owner. This can be a useful corrective, but it's very vulnerable to abuse.
Remember John Engle vs Stockart?
http://blog.iso50.com/5778/save-jon-engle/
In this case, nothing is verifiable.
the email in this instance could've been completely faked.
Is there a meta-business that keeps track of customer perception on the internet for you?
Playing along with this idea a bit, everybody says that Facebook is bad because the stupid things you do when you're a kid can haunt you forever.
Well this just takes it up another level, doesn't it? Ever have a bad day, get pissed at somebody? Maybe say some things you probably shouldn't?
Of course you have. Everybody has.
But now, through the marvels of modern technology, your words stay with you forever.
That means -- and I don't advocate doing this at all -- that if I'm running a business that's in competition with you, I don't have to perhaps develop the best product or service. Nope. Instead I can develop a just-average product, and then do a little digging to find out what sorts of shitty things you've done or said on the internet. Wait for the right moment, use a social network and a trusted poster as a conduit, and voila! I just helped you trash your own business. And my fingerprints are nowhere on it.
I'm not saying that this is what happened. For all I know, the guy might be a jerk. What I'm saying, along with plusbryan, is that there is no way to know from the information available if you are being purposely manipulated for a response or just being honestly told a story
That's kinda scary.
Of course you have. Everybody has.
But now, through the marvels of modern technology, your words stay with you forever.
I just hope that one day this becomes a universal revelation, and we as a society become much more forgiving. The combination of harsh judgement, poor decisions being easy to make, and a public permanent record of anything you say on the internet can have potentially life ruining consequences, and it's easy to find plenty of examples today. In the past, only people who were in positions that would be in public scrutiny (politicians, CEOs, PR people, etc) really had to watch what they said all the time. Now that we have the internet, which doesn't really forget, it's easy for past mistakes to come back to haunt you. I just hope society becomes more lenient about foolish mistakes...
I think in some ways the Mob just wants to see a more friendly business atmosphere that respects them as customers, and they use the power they have to try to achieve those ends.
He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client - except this time, maybe the causality runs the other way.
To be fair, Cooper Laurence did a little more to enrage the Internet Justice Machine, but on the other hand she didn't threaten to sue anybody.
Any given post could be made by a shill or astroturfer, it could be made by a competitor, it could be made by a child or teenager with no perspective, it could be made by a prankster, an idiot, a mentally disturbed person, by a spidering script/bot, or could even be fake data planted by the site's owner in order to make the site look like it has a bigger base of real users. You just don't know, in most cases, on most sites.
Therefore, it's mostly noise. You can't trust it! Crap. Some of it is not, of course. There is some signal out there. But this fundamental problem of having trusted signal buried by untrustable noise is the weakness to all these web-based systems. Even a stars-based system is useless. It's irrelevant if a particular app or entity has a lot of five-star reviews or one-star reviews if it's crowd-sourced, because you can't trust the crowd. ("I gave it five stars because I'm shagging the creator." "I found a button that had a color blue that displeased me: ZERO STARS!") At least not when commercial interests are at stake.
I trust crowd-sourcing a little more when the entities being reviewed are (a) for hobbyists, and (b) niche, and (c) with a highly filtered review demographic (not just anybody and their sister can fire off a review -- there has to be some filtering process or bias that weeds out most folks.) Even then, it's hit or miss. At the end of the day, reviews have signal only if the reader already has some explicit trust relationship with the reviewer, based on past performance. If the reviewer is some faceless random stranger, it's noise and cannot be trusted in general.
Someone else in this thread made a comment about mob mentality. I agree. I think that's another flaw to these crowd-sourced systems. Humans are prone to mob thinking. They take things out of context and blow something all out of perspective, often in proportion to how ignorant they are.