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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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...)
[+] [-] plusbryan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kls|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabrielroth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdp23|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sown|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cracki|15 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] aneth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdfh42|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loewenskind|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mothaiba|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memetichazard|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] klbarry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piguy314|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] loewenskind|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vivtek|15 years ago|reply
He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client - except this time, maybe the causality runs the other way.
[+] [-] joshu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstokes|15 years ago|reply
This seems to be more an example of "How to destroy your business by being (at least perceived as) consistently fraudulent".
[+] [-] fname|15 years ago|reply
If you scroll down further, there's the same email in the comment that was posted on 12/8/2009
[+] [-] swombat|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loewenskind|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tedunangst|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wladimir|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZachPruckowski|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duck|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desigooner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JshWright|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaksel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mambodog|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] antidaily|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzeek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomaz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkramlich|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dnsworks|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kurtz79|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sokoloff|15 years ago|reply