"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it's really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.”
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
> The Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me.
At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews.
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
"$10 off your next service if you give us a review on Yelp" is just the tip of an iceberg of complaints people have about online review systems, including Yelp.
I was once traveling and some friends found a highly reviewed place on Yelp. When we got there it turned out the glowing reviews were all written by the owner's son. At least he felt bad enough about it to give us free dessert.
I typically search for things "-yelp". They're an annoying and mostly useless.
I haven't bothered to look in a long time, but the reviews I've seen are obviously bad. I can find menus on the restaurant's real page. The locality views are worse than, say, Apple maps. There's just no reason to use them.
Add in that they harm the livelihood of restaurants owned by people I like, and yeah, they're another crap site that continues to be annoying by trying to get in between me and someone who wants to feed me.
Completely disagree. Reviews generated by "give a good review and we'll give you a prize" and "I'd hate to see you hit with a bunch of bad reviews because you didn't pay us more money" are completely worthless and are the core of Yelps business model. It's the definition of easy-to-game and untrustworthy.
Hardest to game is like lesser evils. Lesser evils remain evil, as hard games remain played.
I personally value direct interactions with people I do business with more than ever in my life. Too many middle companies all working some angle to make more than the value they may actually deliver.
Well, a few things:
Trust in all this kind of service is reaching a low ebb. We keep finding incidents where the behavior is not as represented.
Frankly, the money might be too good.
And that's fine. Is what it is, people do what they do
I am stepping back, reevaluating these kinds of value propositions, and recommending peers do the same.
> Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game
I assume you mean it's among the hardest to game except by paying Yelp to remove negative reviews - that's a pretty important caveat when it comes to trustworthiness.
I'm almost entirely de-Googled at this point, but I make an exception specifically to avoid Yelp, which somehow manages to be even worse than Google within its niche.
As far as I recall, Yelp predates Google having any of those features at all.
So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
>Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else.
All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over.
Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic business models are the future" and leant in. I'd have done the same.
Where parasitic business models thrive the economy itself will suffer. This is a problem that only gets solved by bringing the regulatory hammer down on big tech.
If users would hit yelp.com and searched for a restaurant and somehow google intercepted that then they'd be a parasite. The way I see it it is a symbiotic somewhat relationship, at least in theory. Yelp is a parasite on businesses though, they attempt to extort money and give no value in exchange, often times unsuccessfully. Here's an older anecdote I posted about yelp [0]
While there are definitely anecdotes about this kind of behavior, I have yet to see evidence of systemic or corporate-sponsored effort to do this. I believe this is more a question of possibly poorly-incentivized sales people rather than an intentional strategy on behalf of Yelp. I think this is backed up by a number of lawsuits that haven't gone anywhere. I might be mistaken; if there is a source showing this is really systemic, I'd be very interested.
Either way, Google now does many of the same things that Yelp does (reviews, photos, metadata management) - but it doesn't really care about the space, apart from being good enough to beat its competition. While today maybe they're motivated to build better products to compete with Yelp for eyeballs, overtime I think this means the reviews space will stagnate. That's unfortunate.
I think this is the core Google problem: They have so much top-of-funnel traffic that they just have to do things "good enough" to crush entire industries of competition. The bar to be sufficiently better enough than "good enough" to build a meaningful competitor to G in any vertical is so high it stops many potential competitors from even trying. The only companies that manage it are ones that have entirely different & massive profitable business models like Apple.
Everywhere Google is, the sector stagnates: Search! RSS readers (with a bit of a renaissance since Google Reader died). Email. Calendars. News lists. Increasingly, reviews. Fortunately MSFT pushes them in docs and hopefully Apple continues to do so in Maps and browsers.
I'm in no way defending anything google here, I was just stating that Yelp if as bad is not worse than google (as they are more desperate for revenue). And I have no incentive to lie, the anecdote was something that happened to a close friend of mine and know what kind of distress it caused. I have no idea if their corporate strategy is to " extort ", but from noticing other incidents they're not too far off. Their actions like the actions of other big corps are absolutely abusive.
Out of principle I trust Google more than Yelp as they're less incentivized to extort small businesses. Also companies that cripple their mobile site (while having a functional desktop site) to force an app download deserve everything bad that happens to them
I will have to do some searching to grab a screen cap, but I can tell you that Yelp explicitly advertised a paid "feature" to small businesses like mine to hide competitors from top search results in exchange for a fee. I don't know that empirical proof of systemic abusive behavior and antitrust violations would necessarily be useful here. They are clearly employing tactics that actively damage open competition and informed consumer choice, and even anecdotal evidence of that is justification for regulatory movement to stop it.
Yelp can easily expose businesses to people who are more likely to give bad reviews too.
I mean they collect this data on every profile - some reviewers have a TON of 1 star reviews. Hide the restaurants that pay and increase exposure of those that don’t to these reviewers to get them to give poor ratings.
Obviously there is no way to prove this, but it would be a great way to get people to pay while still maintaining plausible deniability. After all, the one star reviewers still have to go to the establishment and have their bad experience.
This is something important that a lot of people miss when discussing unethical actions by corporations. It would be foolish from the perspective of Yelp or Google to not exploit the massive power differential here, so of course they will. It isn't a matter of morals, morals don't talk. Money does.
Competition, fairness, and freedom are not free, they have to be defended adaptively against stuff like this.
We drove up the Oregon coast and my GF used Yelp to find good places for us to stop and eat. I was frankly astonished as, like you, I've found Yelp pretty useless at best.
There was an xkcd about this, but i've found anything below 4.5 stars is mediocre. Above that you find a better probability of a good meal, but it's still just a probability.
I find it servers as a good filter for the awful stuff, which is what I really care about when travelling.
I have a friend who has run a restaurant for decades with a customer base that is almost entirely regulars. She has encouraged us to leave bad yelp reviews as she has found "yelpers" (different from people who simply consult yelp) to be a pain in the neck...plus wants space to be available for the regulars.
Yelp as a social network is actually pretty cool, if you get their elite status for the year you get invited to some pretty fun free events, and I know they've done socially distanced ones since the pandemic, I heard about a murder mystery somewhere. Now that I don't participate in that I don't really use the platform often.
"NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here."
Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
i would bet 99%+ of all calls to restaurants from grubhub end in a sale, thus making this law meaningless.
edit: why did i get downvoted for this? it adds to the discussion and it doesn't break any of HN's rule. are people just not happy about it or something? wtf.
It seems unlikely that there is a large contingent of people who Google a restaurant (which they must be doing in order to get Yelp's number), ignore the listing of hours right next to the number and call the restaurant to get the hours. I believe it happens, but I have a hard time believing that particular sequence of events accounts for even one call in 50.
To clarify: You're saying you do this more often than you order takeout? Especially during Covid? Because I explicitly said I believe it happens, just that it's a minority of calls.
I can give you a case in point: we just tried to order Thai on Saturday from one of our favorite restaurants. They were short staffed in the kitchen and the wait time was over an hour... so we didn't order. I'm willing to bet a ton of other people did the same thing. Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?
> Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?
They don’t, unless they agreed to those terms with the entity charging them. For example, if the agreement was to pay Yelp for all phone calls coming from Yelp’s website.
That's a little disingenuous. They don't HAVE to pay for those calls, but if Yelp's system decides an order took place then they get charged for the call. Based on some experimenting done recently by a podcast I listen to (can't remember which one right now), that decision boils down to "if the call was longer than 45 seconds and food was discussed, then an order took place". It's then up to the restaurant owner to reconcile and dispute any charged calls that didn't end in a sale. That means listening to the recording of every call that was charged and requesting a refund for each one that didn't end in an order.
Yeah, but if they're lying they'd lie on the high end, not the low end. If it's actually 99%, they'd say 99.999%. If it's actually 10%, they'd say 35%.
The bill would make more sense if it was against companies like Yelp misleading both customers and restaurants that they are calling eachother directly.
They - Grubhub not Yelp - record every phone call, as the article points out, and even make it available to the restaurants, with personal details censored (unless of course their algorithms fuck up, and it does fuck up).
So chances are if you ever called via Yelp into one of such Grubhub numbers, they got at least your voice and your food preferences (which might include medical/dietary needs) on record, maybe even your full details and CC number etc (depending on the quality of their automated censoring algorithms and on whether or not they store the original unredacted calls as well).
“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”, as their phone robot tells you :P
The problem is yelp has more money for lawyers than a low-margin local restaurant. That's why this should be treated as a criminal matter, with state prosecutors taking down Yelp.
Ob Lebowski: “Leads, yeah sure. I'll uh, just check with the boys down at the Crime Lab. They uh, got uh, four more detectives working on the case. They've got us working in shifts.”
specifically, I don't see how this can be bribery. Who is the person or official that Yelp is bribing?
It's not Grubhub, since Grubhub doesn't really have any authority to guide purchases through their systems.
In fact, if anything, it's yelp which surreptitiously can guide purchases through more expensive (for the restaurant) services. But I don't think this is extortion either: Yelp is not forcing the customers to use them, nor the restaurant to use them. If one really pushes, I think that Yelp might yield and delist your business (which would be bad, but in a different way), and they anyhow aren't asking you for money for an extortion. They're (together with grubhub) "simply" asking the business money for an (unwelcome) service they provide.
(also, you'd probably have to sue Jeremy Stoppelman, and not Yelp if you really want to make a RICO claim)
Yelp is surely scummy, but I think that if people want to press charges, they should be for more run-of-the-mill fraud claims.
> Whatever the term that means “If you don’t pay us, bad things will happen.”
That would be extortion.
To shorten Popehat's explanation of RICO more fundamentally, RICO requires several elements to all apply to kick in. It is not mere extortion (plus other racketeering crimes). It is also not extortion repeated over several times. Instead, it is the repeated extortion by the defendant in the service of the distinct enterprise.
Stepping back out again, if you're arguing that a company's actions mean it violates RICO, you're almost certainly screwed because the defendant you're suing is the company, and the relevant enterprise is, uh, the company again, which causes the suit to fail.
So, no, it's not RICO because the defendant is Yelp and the enterprise is Yelp, and the defendant cannot be the enterprise.
What if they fail? Would yelp retaliate against businesses that participated in the class action lawsuit? This possibility, even if unlikely, may dissuade many from even trying.
'If you come at the king, you best not miss.' - Omar
Mandatory arbitration was designed to get around class-action suits, arbitration does not create binding precedent. Constitutional originalism was invented to enshrine mandatory arbitration - if the framers of the Constitution didn't have it in mind it wasn't important or can be punted to a pernennial gridlocked legislature.
Class-Action lawsuits were created by lawyers who changed careers into politics and got funding for their campaign from the trial lawyers association in order to increase the amount of money trial lawyers can make
Maybe, but the yelp competitors seem dirty too. There's a pizza shop down the street from me that seems to have three or four websites masquerading as them, each with different phone numbers.
Yelp executives being sent to prison would, I hope, sent a strong message to the others.
A local pizza chain has one telephone number which they advertise as a catchy jingle. Even after 15+ years of never eating there, it's one of maybe four phone numbers that I can recite from memory.
Yelp, to restaurants: we get a commission on Grubhub orders.
Restaurants, begrudgingly: fine
———
Yelp, to users: click here to order through Grubhub
Yelp, to customers: or just use the restaurant’s phone number to order yourself. [shows you a number that isn’t the restaurant’s]
——
Yelp is effectively telling users that a number belongs to the restaurant when it doesn’t. I’m sure yelp’s lawyers would say they aren’t actually telling any users that the restaurant’s number belongs to the restaurant, but come on. It’s clear that the intent is to mislead.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's pretty obvious that Yelp wouldn't do this if their contracts didn't cover it. The question is whether the contracts and sales language being used are worded to mislead the restaurant owner. I see no reference to contract language or sales language anywhere in the article or this thread.
> It's obvious to you that corporations don't break laws because doing so is illegal?
No, you're over-generalizing my claim. My claim is that it's rare for large companies (with established legal counsel) to approve of illegal policy changes when those changes are very public and likely to be noticed.
Given yelp's reputation for having a toxic extortionist corporate culture, I think it's naive to assume anything is beyond them. If you told me yelp flat out had somebody murdered, I wouldn't dismiss even that out of hand. Not after what I've heard about their corporate culture, and not after hearing what eBay executives thought they could get away with.
In many cases they can and will if they either feel that the risks are worthwhile (in particular cases where the penalties are far exceeded the potential boon), or if they think they have some sort of edge case loophole that they can throw money at to get through. These are carefully calculated risks planned out by experienced teams of lawyers though.
Something like this though was almost certainly not one of those gambles.
This is so annoying. You never know when they're doing this, so if you're looking at a restaurant in Yelp, you have to switch to maps or the browser to look up the phone number.
Typical Yelp.
My business has been blackmailed multiple times on Yelp - - "pay us $500 by bitcoin and we won't trash you with a false complaint".. Now I have 2 complaints because I refuse to cave in to crooks. Yelp is an accomplice.
The problem with these fast moving situations is who would actually initiate that expensive legal endeavor. Yelp has a history of preying on small businesses with what is effectively extortion to remove promoted negative online reviews in what are essentially digital protection rackets. You could argue this is RICO territory.
This new pernicious hijacking of contact details is likely to be deployed by other future 'startups' to siphon off profits, so it's important that Yelp gets sanctioned.
Restaurants are terrified to sue Yelp because of the severe power differential between the "phone book" directory and themselves, especially given the long-standing rumors (whether true or not, the perception exists) that Yelp punishes anyone that complains by promoting bad reviews to their page.
I am not a big fan of regulations unless it is to provide more transparency so people can make informed decisions. There should be regulations that require when listing a number for a business that there is a large disclaimer when the number isn’t actually owned by the business. I am sure that will kill this practice.
Right, which I absolutely refuse to do. I'm actually pretty surprised that Apple enables this and depends on Yelp so heavily. Like the other commenter said, I look forward to Apple creating their own service for this.
I'd guess (and it is a guess) that it wouldn't fall under this because Yelp would only show this "inauthentic" number for businesses that have signed an agreement with Yelp.
Yelp is going to be a mix of businesses that are just listed and have no relationship with Yelp and then things like a restaurant that has signed an agreement for GrubHub to handle some ordering for them. That agreement could include something like, "you agree that orders received via GrubHub will have this fee structure that you have to pay us and orders that come in via phone from our website are also considered an order generated by us and will have this fee structure".
At that point, the business is "agreeing" to that phone number. I put "agreeing" in quotes because restaurants might feel like they're compelled to agree or lose out on significant business given Yelp's market position.
I think it's harder to allege impersonation or fraud if the business has agreed to it. I think it's easier to allege that the business didn't really have a choice in the matter given the company's dominance in the market.
I grab the u/mdasen profile on misc medium. eg DNS, Facebook, Yelp, Tinder, Gmail, telco, USPS. I then pretend I'm u/mdasen. You (the IRL u/mdasen) eventually hear about my faux profiles and get grumpy.
What then are your options?
Are you claiming that Facebook (or whomever) has no ability or obligation to bounce me and transfer these u/mdasen profiles to you?
I understand charging a fee to the customer who is making the choice to call, but if a restaurant simply answers the phone - how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee?
> how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee?
In America, only the government is allowed to come up to you and say pay me this without you consenting. In all the businesses I’ve been involved with for over 2 decades, there are plenty of times someone sends an invoice for something you didn’t agree to, and you can always just ignore it.
It's not Yelp who is charging them. They have a pre-existing business relation with Grubhub that generates leads for them for a fee, and, according to Yelp, allows Grubhub to charge them for any lead generated on any partner platform, which Yelp became in 2018.
So now what used to be a free stream of customers is hijacked by Grubhub. I'm sure it hasn't crossed their minds when they signed up with Grubhub that in addition to new sales generated with them, they will also start paying commission on their existing clientele.
A business owner trapped in a market where the Grubhub-Yelp duopoly is proeminent is basically fucked, and they will use their rent seeking revenues to further entrench their dominance by offering consumer discounts, fidelity options etc.
For the record, I dislike this practice...but to play devil's advocate (pls don't downvote for playing devil's advocate LOL)
If I go to Google and I type in {name of my favorite restaurant}...and the first link on top is an ad placed by that restaurant, and below it is the actual restaurant's website...If I click on that ad, Google will charge that restaurant money, when it just redirects me to the website.
In this case, GrubHub is claiming that they placed the phone number on Yelp, so they get money.
I mean I think paying $8 (or whatever percentage of an order is) for that redirect is highway robbery given thin margins for a restaurant...
Most people would agree that what Google is doing is also immoral.
But ignoring that, I don't see the equivalency - you are paying Google to prevent someone else from paying them more and showing up above you; in the Yelp case, your phone number already existed on Yelp, and someone is already on the page, yet GrubHub still adds their number.
Just pointing out that it's typical for tech companies to employ dark pattern for monetization in instances where they are providing no value. Playing wack-a-mole won't help and we probably need some sort of legislation to prove value is being provided before being charged.
(BTW I don't believe paying Google to prevent being above me is value ad. The intention of the searcher is known)
Another example is how Google charges an app creator 30% if someone purchases a subscription. A charge that occurs every, single, month despite Google providing no value after the first month. What's an app owner to do? Push for Apple store...where also take 30% cut?
1: There is no way for the customer to tell that the phone number is not 100% organic. On Google, you can tell it's an ad (even if this is getting harder as Google disguises ads more and more).
2: Grubhub didn't place phone numbers on Yelp. Yelp has had phone numbers since day 1.
If Grubhub puts menus or something on Yelp and someone uses that to place an order more efficiently, then they would be adding some value. That still wouldn't justify charging a premium without telling/asking either party, but I would at least agree there is some value-add there (but only for customers who actually look at the GrubHub-provided menu before calling in).
I see a lot of people saying this must be illegal, and the reason Yelp hasn't been sued is because restaurant owners can't afford legal fees.
Isn't this the purpose of class action lawsuits? If Yelp is actually doing something illegal here, certainly, there's enough money to hire great counsel to represent all restaurant owners who are affected by this policy change.
Still, if this is as obviously illegal as most people here are claiming it is, wouldn't a law firm take the case for free in exchange for a percentage of the fee Yelp will need to pay?
In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator).
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
I would say there's no moral difference between a human operator and a mechanical operator whose behavior is controlled by a human. Configuring the operator to drop calls from a particular area code would be an example in the case you provided.
Sure. It just used to be harder to build in, and to do so precisely. In your example, dropping calls from an area code, that's a relatively coarse filter.
There's a whole strand of academic research [1] arguing about whether people can build prejudice into technological artifacts, eg one disputed example was an underpass with low clearance, supposedly so that white middle class people in cars could pass, but black poor people in buses could not [1, p123].
These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
>These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.
This is clearly an issue that needs to be dealth with but the problem is that it's not a problem we can engineer our way of, we need to confront the biases that we have and try and build ways to expose biases we don't even realize we have.
This is obviously quite hard and if I had a solution to it I'd probably be implementing it instead of waxing poetic on HN.
> And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.
It's even worse than that, because it's so hard to tell if this is even happening.
Suppose guidance counselors in predominantly black schools are telling kids to focus on athletics and the ones in predominantly white schools tell them to focus on intellectual extracurriculars. Then a resume parser sorts people with athletics listed into physical jobs and people with intellectual pursuits listed into intellectual jobs, which of course results in the black applicants getting callbacks for the lower paying jobs.
This is pretty clearly the guidance counselors causing the disparity rather than the algorithm, but we only know that because it was stipulated in the hypothetical. In real life you may not have enough data to be able to discern the underlying cause. In other words, you don't know what the baseline racial disparity is based on all of the non-racial factors that correlate with race, so you don't know if the problem is in the algorithm or was caused somewhere upstream and the algorithm is only producing the accurate outputs for its inputs.
In theory you can evaluate this by checking up on how the candidates hired do compared to how the algorithm predicted they would do, but that's a noisy signal (what does "doing well" mean?), you might not have a large enough sample size to get meaningful results, and it has a lag time of potentially several years, by which point you may already be using a different algorithm. It's a hard problem.
you bring up a really good point. There's correlation and causation. Root cause analysis is really hard and rarely do the results align with simple politics because humans are complex beings in complex relationships.
SSL certificates, which require you to trust someone you’ve never met with the entirety of your digital life. From your social connections to your bank account and everything in between, you’re putting your faith not only in their honesty, but in their ability to limit mistakes.
Not that there’s a better solution yet, but technical solutions like SSL certificates still boil down to trust, and in whom you place your.
This is also true for your computer hardware, the software you run, the medicines you take, the food you eat, the water you drink...
I guess my point is that that human trust is so pervasive and fundamental that there are diminishing returns to eliminating it.
What will always remain in style I think is accountability. So trust, but have supply chain integrity such that you know who it is that you're trusting and who is responsible when things go wrong.
Can you elaborate more on (or give an example of) "mechanical honesty"? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem unfeasible to implement biases in mechanical systems (especially government departments!), but I haven't given it a lot of thought.
It's a public mapping of people and businesses with how to contact them. Any dishonesty would be noticed, because everyone has the same phone book.
Contrast with getting a phone number from $large-company, be it Yelp, Google or otherwise. The only thing stopping them from selling this privilege to an intermediary is their reputation, and clearly where Yelp is concerned, this isn't enough.
One could argue that Google has been exploiting this since the creation of AdWords: they will happily sell the right to advertise on a search for your exact company name to a competitor, a nice income stream which verges on extortion.
It's even possible to deliver personalized dishonest results; applications including search engines know who you are, and can lie to you and only you.
It's certainly possible to be 'mechanically dishonest', but no question that contemporary technology makes it easier and more lucrative.
Another example is targeting job ads to particular demographics. You can put out an ad that only white men between the ages of 22 and 30 who come from an upper class background will see. And women, minorities and people from poor backgrounds, not only won't see them, they won't know they exist.
I don't think Yelp has done anything other than "lie in the phone book" so far, so it's a bad example.
A better example might be where Uber made their app turn off a bunch of shady privacy a violating settings, but only if the phone was geographically located at Apple HQ.
A few people seemed to have missed an important step in the argument:
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
"Mechanical honesty" worked because it was much harder to have automated "if statement" mechanisms with non-electronic machinery. And then electronic computers made it much, much easier.
"The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark."
Is this statement suggesting that the "work" of the businesses exploiting these unrealistic expectations is "easy".
When a country's most successful companies are "middlemen" built upon a foundation of easily exploiting misplaced trust (misplaced belief in mechanical honesty) and governments actively seek to encourage more such "entrepreneurship", what does that mean for the future.
I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on.
(The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created" goes into a lot of detail on this.)
> They care if a receipt was generated by the machine, and are a check on the employee.
Aren't receipts used to track the store's revenue, as in the numbers reported to your local tax agency?
As far as I know, it's common for cashiers to have a daily/weekly/monthly slack value that they are allowed to report as a difference between the number reported by cash registers and the amount of cash delivered, because SNAFUs do happen during a day's work.
This could be stored on a computer now, though. But numbers can be fudged.
Taiwan had an interesting way around this with a receipt lottery. Ask for a receipt, it has a number on it that enters you in a lottery. Presumably the generation of this number means the sale was reported.
It is pretty important to do mid-shift counts randomly as well. A common scam is for the cashier to ring no sale if the total is an easy price, say $2 for a coffee. Then mid shift the register will have extra money which would have been pocketed at the end of the shift. If there is too much money in the register, the employee is skimming.
In the US, the govt outlawed the software contracting industry in the 80s because they suspected people weren't reporting their earnings when they filed their taxes. forcing everyone to become employees of companies that were better monitored. I suspect the same motivation is partly behind the attempts to eliminate other kinds of gig work now.
I find it fascinating when someone finds a historical parallel to a situation that we think is novel and unprecedented, reminding us that nothing is truly new, and it's not as bad as we think.
Then takes a hard left turn into "but this time it's different because reasons" and gets us back on the expected "sky is falling" path.
> exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty"
This is only the early stage. With more parties and money involved "mechanical honesty" turns into betting race and the "machanical exchange" redirects to where the highest bidders desires.
This article really buries the lede, that all of these restaurants agreed to pay GrubHub for any leads that GrubHub generated. Sounds like the restaurants should simply stop buying GrubHub’s marketing service, if it isn’t worthwhile for them.
The "marketing service" just means being listed at all on GrubHub itself. So restaurant owners are agreeing to a big fee to get customers from the GrubHub website and app.
But it sounds like they often don't know that they are also being made to pay a fee for their own customers who are simply looking up the phone number.
GrubHub isn't obviously adding any value there, these customers could just as well have pulled the phone number from Google Maps of the restaurant's own website.
I think GrubHub could be acting incorrectly in few ways:
1. Restaurants don't appear to be well informed of the cost. Deceiving your customer (eg by sneaking clauses into the contract) doesn't feel right.
2. GrubHub could be deceiving the restaurant's customers, who may be making a sincere effort to order from the restaurant directly.
3. In some local markets; GrubHub might have a kind of monopoly power. I think are a lot more constraints on how these kinds of businesses can dictate terms to other business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_restraints
It's a prisoner's dilemma. If a company like GrubHub decides they're going to build a demand aggregation platform for a certain market segment, part of that is going to include significant advertising to acquire users (demand). They'll also offer a good (or great) looking deal to vendors (supply).
So, if you're a vendor, the appeal of early adoption is huge. You get access to a platform with a bunch of free advertising and a built in set of potential customers. The platform might let you reduce costs (shut down your website) and, as an early adopter, a lot of those potential customers become your customers in the short term.
Then, as vendors keep joining the platform, it becomes de facto market for those goods. That's the point where the demand aggregation has succeeded and the vendors get converted into a commodity. Customers want a class of product, not a specific product.
So now, you _must_ be on the platform to succeed even if you hate it and you're just another cog in supply side of the system, The company (like GrubHub) that successfully aggregated demand can rent seek for as long as they maintain the demand monopoly and there's nothing a single vendor can do about it.
Get used to it because every industry susceptible to demand aggregation is going to look like the food industry soon IMO.
Those businesses agreed to Grubhubs marketing services in hopes of expanding business. All Grubhub did was just painting over that businesses' existing signs and marketing, and demanding a fee.
I never use Yelp because they have very sketchy/bullying business practices. I much prefer word of mouth and Google, combined those two are more than enough for my needs.
When 2 extortionists (Yelp and Grubhub) meet, what you get is extortion 2.0.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Does anyone have an alternative to Yelp. What I care about:
- Open Now (Optional)
- Sort by Rating
- Search by food category, not name of restaurant.
Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost always better tasting (eg, they make their own bread from scratch at a sandwich shop), so if I sort by rating I can find restaurants I'm not allergic to. I still have to ask 20 questions when I call in. Flavor is not enough alone, but it's a surprisingly accurate indicator. I use Yelp for this reason and feel disgusted when doing so.
Thank you! (And thanks for the info of a mobile map!)
One more question: Does it have a sort by ranking? I can't seem to find it on the desktop site. I may need to run it in Chrome. On Firefox it may not be displaying properly.
I know it sounds silly, but I really do need a sort by rating. This is still far better than nothing. Thank you. ^_^
I decided to test it and started with pupusaria (there are tons of them walking distance to here) and sadly it found none.
I then decided to try mexican food, the next most common restaurant out here, and I got Sonic's Drive in, McDonald's, and Subway. ... And I'm in the SF/Bay Area, so it should be easy. ... D:
One day Yelp will die, but for now it's a necessary evil. :(
It doesn't give you an answer to your food allergy, but it is more about the food and rating/ranking than Yelp.
It's also sorted by dishes/food category. It aims to answer: "Where is the best place to get X dish in Y city?". Service, ambience, etc don't matter. It's only about where to get the best food.
This is awesome and I wish you the best of luck! Someone needs to take over this business.
I don't live in the heart of a big city. I live about an hour away from SF. Furthermore where I live is not at the heart of the city my address is at, due to unusual city boundaries, so services like grubhub and other delivery services do not work to my address, but if I put in my neighbors address they get a bunch of options I do not that are walking distance to me. My point is, it helps to center restaurants by gps or similar, not to address, not to city. Good luck! :D
My reaction was the same. Maybe Google Maps? Not that I want to send more of my data to Google, but this is totally unacceptable.
Especially during COVID, I'm trying to make sure that as much of my money goes to the restaurant as possible when I call in a takeout order. It would be one thing if Yelp showed me an advertisement and I clicked through and placed an order. But when I'm using Yelp just to look up a phone number, there's absolutely no reason for a commission.
Currently what I do is I look resturants up on Yelp, due to my food allergy mentioned above, then I go to google for the phone number. Problem is, Yelp delists companies that do not pay them.
I'd second Google Maps, unless you need to get realllllly granular with food category. My primary search for restaurants on Google Maps is "chinese food" or "hamburger" or the like and I always get appropriate results without being limited by business name.
Thanks for the reply. Any idea how to sort by rating? It's not giving me the option and is recommending food I'm allergic to. I searched for Mexican and got, Chili's, Chipotle, and Taco Bell, instead of listing hole in the wall places near by me, which are the restaurants I can eat at.
Sorry. I see it doesn't go to that detail. I usually use TripAdvisor when traveling, and appreciate the reviews - which don't have a vested interest as far as I can see. Possibly it isn't detailed enough for big cities with lots of great hole in the walls. Maybe we should suggest it to them? They used to have a great section where you could ask locals for advice and suggestions - which led to great ideas when traveling. I just checked, and it's called the travel forum. That would be interesting, to post there, with a specific question, and see who answers? I just checked locally, and people are still monitoring, so it may work. Good luck.
While the solution from NYC seems good to start, why don't customers get charged for fees if they are the ones calling? I feel like in the US splitting fees between the caller and receiver causes a lot of problems (see: spam calls which can become prohibitively expensive if the caller has to eat all the fees)
Customers balk at fees in many cases. Free shipping doesn't really make sense as it is baked into the item price, but it gets a lot more people to buy.
Yelp is one those companies. I use the product regularly, but I hate doing so -- the experience is awful and the core information is rarely particularly helpful. But they still get me to come in because they have the most information about some places.
What really sets me off is how much "moral" crusading they do (eg- vs. Google) compared to how much shady stuff they do. This is just latest in a long line of crummy behavior that keeps coming up over and over again.
Nothing moral about their crusade - they got booted from the top of the search results along with other doorway-style crap like about.com and their conversion probably fell off the cliff. Had to explain that to investors somehow I suppose...
Sure but it was framed, in the consumer-facing messaging, as such.
They also didn't get booted from search -- they're still always capturing/clogging the top results. Google added all their own cruft at the top, but the search results haven't changed.
I personally haven’t worked on search anything so don’t know the details. From purely user perspective (and very anecdotal) some search results were almost entirely seo spam from about.com, yelp, etc but it’s no longer the case.
I've never needed it because every restaurant that I go to is on Google or maintains their own website. It's been known for years now that the reviews on Yelp are largely fake and they hide legit ones, so it's nearly useless for that as well. At least with Google Maps reviews, I can click on the reviewer and see the other places they've been.
Often the primary answer is photos. My experience with Google reviews having enough photos to find the dishes I'm considering is much more hit or miss.
But your question is fair. I often ask it myself as I'm exiting the site.
There are a mountain of lawsuits with Yelp over fake reviews.
This is a decent post, as it lists the outcome of a long-standing lawsuit (Yelp won) but also links out to several other lawsuits filed over the years about fake reviews on the site.
It's like watching a victim of a scam artist complain to the police, get brushed off and then deciding "fuck it I guess I'll become a scam artist too then".
It's hypocritical and wrong but pretty understandable at the same time.
This seems like a clear false / deceptive advertising issue, not protected as a Section 230 safe harbor act, that should easily be addressable by the FTC.
Wait I don’t get the hate over this. This isn’t Grubhub pretending to be the restaurant or anything. This is Grubhub doing the equivalent of Google Search’s link tracking but for phone numbers so that they can attribute the sale to Yelp.
Is it weird that Yelp has made referral codes for phone calls?
In many cases, neither Yelp nor Grubhub are adding value here. They are inserting themselves as rentiers because they are better at SEO (i.e. have more money) than the restaurants themselves. It amounts to a shakedown similar to domain squatting.
That's not to mention the surveillance capitalism angle of phone calls that would previously be private now being recorded by Grubhub.
> When a user clicks on the “Call” button labeled “Delivery or Takeout,” they are taken to a different number, (646) 394-9837, which is owned by Grubhub.
> Yelp has historically functioned like an enhanced Yellow Pages, listing direct phone numbers for restaurants along with photos, information about the space, menus, and user reviews. But Yelp began prompting customers to call Grubhub phone numbers in October 2018 after the two companies announced a “long-term partnership.”
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub.
I don't think Grubhub has any defense for creating websites for restaurants without asking. But this is something they've also stopped doing and this is a completely separate issue.
Near as I can tell people have been told to be angry at "big tech" often enough by vested interests that they believe it. Now "big tech" is a bogeyman and every action interpretted as a crime agaist humanity for not meeting their lofty standards which they apply only to foes.
That and a whole bunch of other stupid memes like "If it is something I cannot understand it must be bad!" and tribal provincialism.
as much as i like apple, one thing i absolutely hate is that searching for anything in apple maps brings up yelp suggestions for restaurant:
1) not only are you faced with downloadin the yelp app to look at more pictures which are present on the first page but
2) after reading articles like these i'm in concern that instead of supporting my local mom and pop restaurants i'm now being routed intentionally through god knows who.
i know this is yelp article, but apple and other companies relie on yelp, and if they choke off this behavior it would be a good step to correcting it.
As a user, their “sponsored” section showing me Subway ads when searching for something in an entirely different class is starting to annoy me. If I missed their “Sponsored” title, I would assume there were no results matching what I am looking for.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232
- Yelp's founder on why Google is a problem.
Google absolutely tries to keep me on Google, but at least they have a "Website" button that takes me to a different domain that was set up by the restaurant itself.
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
I was once traveling and some friends found a highly reviewed place on Yelp. When we got there it turned out the glowing reviews were all written by the owner's son. At least he felt bad enough about it to give us free dessert.
How/why was this revealed to you?
I haven't bothered to look in a long time, but the reviews I've seen are obviously bad. I can find menus on the restaurant's real page. The locality views are worse than, say, Apple maps. There's just no reason to use them.
Add in that they harm the livelihood of restaurants owned by people I like, and yeah, they're another crap site that continues to be annoying by trying to get in between me and someone who wants to feed me.
Hardest to game is like lesser evils. Lesser evils remain evil, as hard games remain played.
I personally value direct interactions with people I do business with more than ever in my life. Too many middle companies all working some angle to make more than the value they may actually deliver.
Well, a few things:
Trust in all this kind of service is reaching a low ebb. We keep finding incidents where the behavior is not as represented.
Frankly, the money might be too good.
And that's fine. Is what it is, people do what they do
I am stepping back, reevaluating these kinds of value propositions, and recommending peers do the same.
I assume you mean it's among the hardest to game except by paying Yelp to remove negative reviews - that's a pretty important caveat when it comes to trustworthiness.
I'm almost entirely de-Googled at this point, but I make an exception specifically to avoid Yelp, which somehow manages to be even worse than Google within its niche.
So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
Value propositions without a moat (durable competitive advantage) will be swallowed by vertical integration of their feature set.
All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over.
Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic business models are the future" and leant in. I'd have done the same.
Where parasitic business models thrive the economy itself will suffer. This is a problem that only gets solved by bringing the regulatory hammer down on big tech.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790918
Either way, Google now does many of the same things that Yelp does (reviews, photos, metadata management) - but it doesn't really care about the space, apart from being good enough to beat its competition. While today maybe they're motivated to build better products to compete with Yelp for eyeballs, overtime I think this means the reviews space will stagnate. That's unfortunate.
I think this is the core Google problem: They have so much top-of-funnel traffic that they just have to do things "good enough" to crush entire industries of competition. The bar to be sufficiently better enough than "good enough" to build a meaningful competitor to G in any vertical is so high it stops many potential competitors from even trying. The only companies that manage it are ones that have entirely different & massive profitable business models like Apple.
Everywhere Google is, the sector stagnates: Search! RSS readers (with a bit of a renaissance since Google Reader died). Email. Calendars. News lists. Increasingly, reviews. Fortunately MSFT pushes them in docs and hopefully Apple continues to do so in Maps and browsers.
I mean they collect this data on every profile - some reviewers have a TON of 1 star reviews. Hide the restaurants that pay and increase exposure of those that don’t to these reviewers to get them to give poor ratings.
Obviously there is no way to prove this, but it would be a great way to get people to pay while still maintaining plausible deniability. After all, the one star reviewers still have to go to the establishment and have their bad experience.
Competition, fairness, and freedom are not free, they have to be defended adaptively against stuff like this.
I find it servers as a good filter for the awful stuff, which is what I really care about when travelling.
"NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here."
Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
i would bet 99%+ of all calls to restaurants from grubhub end in a sale, thus making this law meaningless.
edit: why did i get downvoted for this? it adds to the discussion and it doesn't break any of HN's rule. are people just not happy about it or something? wtf.
I can give you a case in point: we just tried to order Thai on Saturday from one of our favorite restaurants. They were short staffed in the kitchen and the wait time was over an hour... so we didn't order. I'm willing to bet a ton of other people did the same thing. Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?
They don’t, unless they agreed to those terms with the entity charging them. For example, if the agreement was to pay Yelp for all phone calls coming from Yelp’s website.
Yelp is not exactly known for fair negotiation.
How do you prove it ended in a sale though?
I'm looking for model legislation. Basis for our own bill(s).
I've scheduled a meeting with two of my representatives. One especially expects you to know what you're asking for (like homework assignment).
I'll probably call my state's attorney general, fishing for ideas.
So chances are if you ever called via Yelp into one of such Grubhub numbers, they got at least your voice and your food preferences (which might include medical/dietary needs) on record, maybe even your full details and CC number etc (depending on the quality of their automated censoring algorithms and on whether or not they store the original unredacted calls as well).
“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”, as their phone robot tells you :P
Is this not bribery?
Ob Lebowski: “Leads, yeah sure. I'll uh, just check with the boys down at the Crime Lab. They uh, got uh, four more detectives working on the case. They've got us working in shifts.”
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...
specifically, I don't see how this can be bribery. Who is the person or official that Yelp is bribing?
It's not Grubhub, since Grubhub doesn't really have any authority to guide purchases through their systems.
In fact, if anything, it's yelp which surreptitiously can guide purchases through more expensive (for the restaurant) services. But I don't think this is extortion either: Yelp is not forcing the customers to use them, nor the restaurant to use them. If one really pushes, I think that Yelp might yield and delist your business (which would be bad, but in a different way), and they anyhow aren't asking you for money for an extortion. They're (together with grubhub) "simply" asking the business money for an (unwelcome) service they provide.
(also, you'd probably have to sue Jeremy Stoppelman, and not Yelp if you really want to make a RICO claim)
Yelp is surely scummy, but I think that if people want to press charges, they should be for more run-of-the-mill fraud claims.
Bribery, I am not using the correct term.
Whatever the term that means “If you don’t pay us, bad things will happen.”
That would be extortion.
To shorten Popehat's explanation of RICO more fundamentally, RICO requires several elements to all apply to kick in. It is not mere extortion (plus other racketeering crimes). It is also not extortion repeated over several times. Instead, it is the repeated extortion by the defendant in the service of the distinct enterprise.
Stepping back out again, if you're arguing that a company's actions mean it violates RICO, you're almost certainly screwed because the defendant you're suing is the company, and the relevant enterprise is, uh, the company again, which causes the suit to fail.
So, no, it's not RICO because the defendant is Yelp and the enterprise is Yelp, and the defendant cannot be the enterprise.
Class-action lawsuits were created to solve this exact problem?
'If you come at the king, you best not miss.' - Omar
Plaintiffs can remain anonymous in class-actions for this reason.
Yelp executives being sent to prison would, I hope, sent a strong message to the others.
Restaurants, begrudgingly: fine
———
Yelp, to users: click here to order through Grubhub
Yelp, to customers: or just use the restaurant’s phone number to order yourself. [shows you a number that isn’t the restaurant’s]
——
Yelp is effectively telling users that a number belongs to the restaurant when it doesn’t. I’m sure yelp’s lawyers would say they aren’t actually telling any users that the restaurant’s number belongs to the restaurant, but come on. It’s clear that the intent is to mislead.
Is this true? Or is the agreement to pay commission or a fee for any calls coming from Yelp’s website or app?
I’m just saying people are throwing out terms like prison and fraud, and in the legal world, those words have specifics meanings.
No, you're over-generalizing my claim. My claim is that it's rare for large companies (with established legal counsel) to approve of illegal policy changes when those changes are very public and likely to be noticed.
Something like this though was almost certainly not one of those gambles.
‘Publishing’ knowingly ‘wrong’ phone numbers associated with a business, would that cause damages?
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unfair-trade-practice.a...
I honestly don't understand why various state attorneys haven't taken this on. Not enough complaints?
I'm now looking for model legislation, ideas on how to fix this. As said upthread, I'm meeting with two of my reps.
Please share any ideas.
Yelp is going to be a mix of businesses that are just listed and have no relationship with Yelp and then things like a restaurant that has signed an agreement for GrubHub to handle some ordering for them. That agreement could include something like, "you agree that orders received via GrubHub will have this fee structure that you have to pay us and orders that come in via phone from our website are also considered an order generated by us and will have this fee structure".
At that point, the business is "agreeing" to that phone number. I put "agreeing" in quotes because restaurants might feel like they're compelled to agree or lose out on significant business given Yelp's market position.
I think it's harder to allege impersonation or fraud if the business has agreed to it. I think it's easier to allege that the business didn't really have a choice in the matter given the company's dominance in the market.
I grab the u/mdasen profile on misc medium. eg DNS, Facebook, Yelp, Tinder, Gmail, telco, USPS. I then pretend I'm u/mdasen. You (the IRL u/mdasen) eventually hear about my faux profiles and get grumpy.
What then are your options?
Are you claiming that Facebook (or whomever) has no ability or obligation to bounce me and transfer these u/mdasen profiles to you?
In America, only the government is allowed to come up to you and say pay me this without you consenting. In all the businesses I’ve been involved with for over 2 decades, there are plenty of times someone sends an invoice for something you didn’t agree to, and you can always just ignore it.
So now what used to be a free stream of customers is hijacked by Grubhub. I'm sure it hasn't crossed their minds when they signed up with Grubhub that in addition to new sales generated with them, they will also start paying commission on their existing clientele.
A business owner trapped in a market where the Grubhub-Yelp duopoly is proeminent is basically fucked, and they will use their rent seeking revenues to further entrench their dominance by offering consumer discounts, fidelity options etc.
If I go to Google and I type in {name of my favorite restaurant}...and the first link on top is an ad placed by that restaurant, and below it is the actual restaurant's website...If I click on that ad, Google will charge that restaurant money, when it just redirects me to the website.
In this case, GrubHub is claiming that they placed the phone number on Yelp, so they get money.
I mean I think paying $8 (or whatever percentage of an order is) for that redirect is highway robbery given thin margins for a restaurant...
Most people would agree that what Google is doing is also immoral.
But ignoring that, I don't see the equivalency - you are paying Google to prevent someone else from paying them more and showing up above you; in the Yelp case, your phone number already existed on Yelp, and someone is already on the page, yet GrubHub still adds their number.
(BTW I don't believe paying Google to prevent being above me is value ad. The intention of the searcher is known)
Another example is how Google charges an app creator 30% if someone purchases a subscription. A charge that occurs every, single, month despite Google providing no value after the first month. What's an app owner to do? Push for Apple store...where also take 30% cut?
1: There is no way for the customer to tell that the phone number is not 100% organic. On Google, you can tell it's an ad (even if this is getting harder as Google disguises ads more and more).
2: Grubhub didn't place phone numbers on Yelp. Yelp has had phone numbers since day 1.
If Grubhub puts menus or something on Yelp and someone uses that to place an order more efficiently, then they would be adding some value. That still wouldn't justify charging a premium without telling/asking either party, but I would at least agree there is some value-add there (but only for customers who actually look at the GrubHub-provided menu before calling in).
Isn't this the purpose of class action lawsuits? If Yelp is actually doing something illegal here, certainly, there's enough money to hire great counsel to represent all restaurant owners who are affected by this policy change.
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
[edited for punctuation]
There's a whole strand of academic research [1] arguing about whether people can build prejudice into technological artifacts, eg one disputed example was an underpass with low clearance, supposedly so that white middle class people in cars could pass, but black poor people in buses could not [1, p123].
These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
[1] "Do Artifacts have politics" https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.
This is clearly an issue that needs to be dealth with but the problem is that it's not a problem we can engineer our way of, we need to confront the biases that we have and try and build ways to expose biases we don't even realize we have.
This is obviously quite hard and if I had a solution to it I'd probably be implementing it instead of waxing poetic on HN.
It's even worse than that, because it's so hard to tell if this is even happening.
Suppose guidance counselors in predominantly black schools are telling kids to focus on athletics and the ones in predominantly white schools tell them to focus on intellectual extracurriculars. Then a resume parser sorts people with athletics listed into physical jobs and people with intellectual pursuits listed into intellectual jobs, which of course results in the black applicants getting callbacks for the lower paying jobs.
This is pretty clearly the guidance counselors causing the disparity rather than the algorithm, but we only know that because it was stipulated in the hypothetical. In real life you may not have enough data to be able to discern the underlying cause. In other words, you don't know what the baseline racial disparity is based on all of the non-racial factors that correlate with race, so you don't know if the problem is in the algorithm or was caused somewhere upstream and the algorithm is only producing the accurate outputs for its inputs.
In theory you can evaluate this by checking up on how the candidates hired do compared to how the algorithm predicted they would do, but that's a noisy signal (what does "doing well" mean?), you might not have a large enough sample size to get meaningful results, and it has a lag time of potentially several years, by which point you may already be using a different algorithm. It's a hard problem.
Where I grew up, when I was in grade school, the (mostly white) 810 area code split off from the (remaining mostly black) 313 area code.
Afterward, the first three digits on the caller ID were a decent coarse proxy for the caller's race.
Perhaps there is a business model for bespoke extended validation ssl certs where, for example, they are tied to a physical address.
Not that there’s a better solution yet, but technical solutions like SSL certificates still boil down to trust, and in whom you place your.
I guess my point is that that human trust is so pervasive and fundamental that there are diminishing returns to eliminating it.
What will always remain in style I think is accountability. So trust, but have supply chain integrity such that you know who it is that you're trusting and who is responsible when things go wrong.
It's a public mapping of people and businesses with how to contact them. Any dishonesty would be noticed, because everyone has the same phone book.
Contrast with getting a phone number from $large-company, be it Yelp, Google or otherwise. The only thing stopping them from selling this privilege to an intermediary is their reputation, and clearly where Yelp is concerned, this isn't enough.
One could argue that Google has been exploiting this since the creation of AdWords: they will happily sell the right to advertise on a search for your exact company name to a competitor, a nice income stream which verges on extortion.
It's even possible to deliver personalized dishonest results; applications including search engines know who you are, and can lie to you and only you.
It's certainly possible to be 'mechanically dishonest', but no question that contemporary technology makes it easier and more lucrative.
A better example might be where Uber made their app turn off a bunch of shady privacy a violating settings, but only if the phone was geographically located at Apple HQ.
Mechanical systems used to be simple enough to be (mostly) auditable.
For instance, if you have a wind up clock on the wall and a chalkboard schedule in an office, you can be sure it tells the same time and the same schedule, regardless of who looks at it.
Like an evil secretary, meeting room scheduling tablets could be configured to gaslight particular employee by telling them they have a room reservation when they don’t, making them late/early, steering them to embarrassing interactions with upper management, etc. until they’re fired.
It's the result of hiding the process from users under the name of convenience.
Is this statement suggesting that the "work" of the businesses exploiting these unrealistic expectations is "easy".
When a country's most successful companies are "middlemen" built upon a foundation of easily exploiting misplaced trust (misplaced belief in mechanical honesty) and governments actively seek to encourage more such "entrepreneurship", what does that mean for the future.
I'd like to mention the under-appreciated development of the cash register in the 1880s. Prior to the cash register, the owner had to trust cashiers not to pocket money. Cash registers became enormously popular and revolutionized sales since they kept everyone honest, as well as letting business owners know what was going on.
(The book "Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created" goes into a lot of detail on this.)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_register
In fact, it might cost them money because it facilitates returns.
Businesses don't care if they give you a receipt.
They care if a receipt was generated by the machine, and are a check on the employee.
those signs "if we didn't give you a receipt your meal is free" take on a different meaning in that light.
Aren't receipts used to track the store's revenue, as in the numbers reported to your local tax agency?
As far as I know, it's common for cashiers to have a daily/weekly/monthly slack value that they are allowed to report as a difference between the number reported by cash registers and the amount of cash delivered, because SNAFUs do happen during a day's work.
Taiwan had an interesting way around this with a receipt lottery. Ask for a receipt, it has a number on it that enters you in a lottery. Presumably the generation of this number means the sale was reported.
https://guidetotaipei.com/article/taiwan-receipt-lottery-%E7...
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/02/28/g...
In my country, the cash register of every company that makes over x amount of annual revenue is connected via the internet to the taxman.
So like Dominion voting machines diverting votes from Trump to Biden. How apt.
Then takes a hard left turn into "but this time it's different because reasons" and gets us back on the expected "sky is falling" path.
This is only the early stage. With more parties and money involved "mechanical honesty" turns into betting race and the "machanical exchange" redirects to where the highest bidders desires.
A paper trail keeps people honest to some degree, too.
As part of the public I more expect almost everything internet to be biased by commercial interests. Best you can do is seek out the less corrupted.
But it sounds like they often don't know that they are also being made to pay a fee for their own customers who are simply looking up the phone number.
GrubHub isn't obviously adding any value there, these customers could just as well have pulled the phone number from Google Maps of the restaurant's own website.
I think GrubHub could be acting incorrectly in few ways: 1. Restaurants don't appear to be well informed of the cost. Deceiving your customer (eg by sneaking clauses into the contract) doesn't feel right. 2. GrubHub could be deceiving the restaurant's customers, who may be making a sincere effort to order from the restaurant directly. 3. In some local markets; GrubHub might have a kind of monopoly power. I think are a lot more constraints on how these kinds of businesses can dictate terms to other business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_restraints
So, if you're a vendor, the appeal of early adoption is huge. You get access to a platform with a bunch of free advertising and a built in set of potential customers. The platform might let you reduce costs (shut down your website) and, as an early adopter, a lot of those potential customers become your customers in the short term.
Then, as vendors keep joining the platform, it becomes de facto market for those goods. That's the point where the demand aggregation has succeeded and the vendors get converted into a commodity. Customers want a class of product, not a specific product.
So now, you _must_ be on the platform to succeed even if you hate it and you're just another cog in supply side of the system, The company (like GrubHub) that successfully aggregated demand can rent seek for as long as they maintain the demand monopoly and there's nothing a single vendor can do about it.
Get used to it because every industry susceptible to demand aggregation is going to look like the food industry soon IMO.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” ― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
- Open Now (Optional)
- Sort by Rating
- Search by food category, not name of restaurant.
Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost always better tasting (eg, they make their own bread from scratch at a sandwich shop), so if I sort by rating I can find restaurants I'm not allergic to. I still have to ask 20 questions when I call in. Flavor is not enough alone, but it's a surprisingly accurate indicator. I use Yelp for this reason and feel disgusted when doing so.
EDIT: It's mostly a mobile app, and their web version is here: https://foursquare.com/city-guide
(I mostly use the app. It also keeps track of everywhere I've been, and I can see my history over the past decade.)
One more question: Does it have a sort by ranking? I can't seem to find it on the desktop site. I may need to run it in Chrome. On Firefox it may not be displaying properly.
I know it sounds silly, but I really do need a sort by rating. This is still far better than nothing. Thank you. ^_^
I decided to test it and started with pupusaria (there are tons of them walking distance to here) and sadly it found none.
I then decided to try mexican food, the next most common restaurant out here, and I got Sonic's Drive in, McDonald's, and Subway. ... And I'm in the SF/Bay Area, so it should be easy. ... D:
One day Yelp will die, but for now it's a necessary evil. :(
It doesn't give you an answer to your food allergy, but it is more about the food and rating/ranking than Yelp.
It's also sorted by dishes/food category. It aims to answer: "Where is the best place to get X dish in Y city?". Service, ambience, etc don't matter. It's only about where to get the best food.
https://tastejury.com
I don't live in the heart of a big city. I live about an hour away from SF. Furthermore where I live is not at the heart of the city my address is at, due to unusual city boundaries, so services like grubhub and other delivery services do not work to my address, but if I put in my neighbors address they get a bunch of options I do not that are walking distance to me. My point is, it helps to center restaurants by gps or similar, not to address, not to city. Good luck! :D
Especially during COVID, I'm trying to make sure that as much of my money goes to the restaurant as possible when I call in a takeout order. It would be one thing if Yelp showed me an advertisement and I clicked through and placed an order. But when I'm using Yelp just to look up a phone number, there's absolutely no reason for a commission.
What really sets me off is how much "moral" crusading they do (eg- vs. Google) compared to how much shady stuff they do. This is just latest in a long line of crummy behavior that keeps coming up over and over again.
They also didn't get booted from search -- they're still always capturing/clogging the top results. Google added all their own cruft at the top, but the search results haven't changed.
I've never needed it because every restaurant that I go to is on Google or maintains their own website. It's been known for years now that the reviews on Yelp are largely fake and they hide legit ones, so it's nearly useless for that as well. At least with Google Maps reviews, I can click on the reviewer and see the other places they've been.
But your question is fair. I often ask it myself as I'm exiting the site.
Do you have a source for this?
This is a decent post, as it lists the outcome of a long-standing lawsuit (Yelp won) but also links out to several other lawsuits filed over the years about fake reviews on the site.
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-finally-d...
It's hypocritical and wrong but pretty understandable at the same time.
This is a systemic issue.
Is it weird that Yelp has made referral codes for phone calls?
That's not to mention the surveillance capitalism angle of phone calls that would previously be private now being recorded by Grubhub.
> Yelp has historically functioned like an enhanced Yellow Pages, listing direct phone numbers for restaurants along with photos, information about the space, menus, and user reviews. But Yelp began prompting customers to call Grubhub phone numbers in October 2018 after the two companies announced a “long-term partnership.”
> In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub.
These feel like deceiving the customer.
I don't think Grubhub has any defense for creating websites for restaurants without asking. But this is something they've also stopped doing and this is a completely separate issue.
That and a whole bunch of other stupid memes like "If it is something I cannot understand it must be bad!" and tribal provincialism.
1) not only are you faced with downloadin the yelp app to look at more pictures which are present on the first page but
2) after reading articles like these i'm in concern that instead of supporting my local mom and pop restaurants i'm now being routed intentionally through god knows who.
i know this is yelp article, but apple and other companies relie on yelp, and if they choke off this behavior it would be a good step to correcting it.
As a user, their “sponsored” section showing me Subway ads when searching for something in an entirely different class is starting to annoy me. If I missed their “Sponsored” title, I would assume there were no results matching what I am looking for.