From Yelp to help
You may have heard that small businesses are banding together in class action lawsuits against the site Yelp, which allows users to rate businesses they have patronized. They claim that Yelp is essentially extorting them by offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for buying an advertising package (which Yelp denies). I’ve met one of the plaintiffs in one of the three lawsuits already in process. I don’t know much about Yelp, but he had my sympathy when I learned that somehow all the positive reviews of his business have slid away, but the awful ones, often posted by people who know each other, remained.
To learn more about the charges against Yelp, click here. Relevant excerpt:
In a complaint filed in San Francisco Superior Court March 12, the owner of a 17-year-old San Francisco business called Renaissance Furniture Restoration claimed Yelp deleted his business’s positive ratings after he declined to buy advertising.
In July, Restoration had 261 Yelp page views and an overall rating of 4.5 stars out of a possible five. The suit alleges that two days after he refused to pay “at least $300 a month” for advertising, six of seven 5-star reviews vanished from the site and his overall rating sank to 3.5 stars. (Read the 15-page lawsuit here.)
The ho-hum rating cost owner Boris Levitt big time. By August, the number of page views driven to Restoration’s website fell to 158 and his revenue dropped by 25 percent.
“People wouldn’t click on a business which only had a 3-star average rating, and I started to lose business,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
As of Thursday, the company had 4.5 stars again, but just three reviews: two five-star recommendations and a four-star review.
That seems bad enough. But coming your way next week: a Yelp for people. That’s right, a site that allows people to individually rate individuals the way Yelp allows them to rate businesses. Here’s the story on that. Do you have the dirt on any enemies? Here’s your chance to spread it around. Or — if the system functions anonymously, like Yelp — you can just make some up. No one will know it was you (until, I guess, the lawsuit).
Every once in a while I think back to the novel 1984 and ask myself, “How did Big Brother gain that power?” And the answer is clear: We gave it to him. Willingly. Eagerly. But why go to the bother of developing an all-powerful Big Brother when, instead, anonymous rating sites can turn us all into Little Brothers, spreading lies and innuendo with abandon?
March 30th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
The Yelp for people reminds me of a show on the History Channel about Florence Italy (I think) where in the 14 or 15 century a person could leave anonymous information with the city authorities and the authorities would then act on this. At times their actions included imprisonment and torture based on questionable information.
The imprisoned had no way of fighting the charges or even knowing why they were imprisoned.
Dick Cheney would have fit in perfectly.