A California lawsuit could lead to negative reviews being removed from the web.
Yelp.com is warning that a California lawsuit targeting critical posts about a law firm could lead to the removal of negative reviews and leave consumers with a skewed assessment of restaurants and other businesses.
Lawyer Dawn Hassell said the business review website is exaggerating the stakes of her legal effort, which aims only to remove from Yelp lies, not just negative statements, that damaged the reputation of her law firm.
Though its impact is in dispute, the case is getting attention from some of the biggest Internet companies in the world, which say a ruling against Yelp could stifle free speech online and effectively gut other websites whose main function is offering consumers reviews of services and businesses.
A San Francisco judge determined the posts were defamatory and ordered the company to remove them two years ago, which a second judge and a state appeals court upheld.
The case is now headed for the California Supreme Court.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2016, @11:36AM
This would be bad for Yelp considering their hard-sell (almost extortion) tactics when a business receives a bad review. Without fear how will they take advantage of as many small businesses as possible?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2016, @03:09PM
Almost extortion? They have had plenty of full-blown extortion tactics...
(Score: 2) by f4r on Sunday September 18 2016, @12:40PM
Of course, after that wise choice, valve dropped their games like a sack of hammers. It really does beggar belief that their response to people not liking their content is to sue, instead of trying to make something people want and/or like.
Do not use as directed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2016, @03:42PM
It really does beggar belief that their response to people not liking their content is to sue, instead of trying to make something people want and/or like.
Sometimes it seems to me that entire businesses are built around ripping off 1st time customers and limiting negative criticism.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 18 2016, @01:40PM
Free speech. People can say what they want, plain and simple. If you're a douchbag who only gets bad reviews, so be it. If you're the other kind of douchebag who only gets good reviews, people are likely to recognize astroturfing.
Lawyers and such should WANT a few negative reviews here and there. No one believes a list of reviews that are all positive.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Sunday September 18 2016, @02:30PM
Right. Fight speech with speech, not threats of violence.
The correct response to speech you do not like -- even false speech -- is to tell your side of the story. Not to suppress theirs!
I review products on Amazon frequently. Many of my reviews are positive, but I'm surprised when for example I buy a hard drive, it fails after two hours, and I put that in my review: someone will rate me "not helpful".
If I were the one shopping I would find it very helpful to know that some drives fail after two hours. Perhaps I'd pay $1.97 more for the other one.
But I guess some people think the only point of a review is to help the seller push their crap. Anything negative is "not helpful".
Well what do you expect from a world where every child gets a gold star whether they do their homework or bully weaklings all day?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2016, @04:04PM
"not helpful" to the person trying to sell you the trinket. THEY are the ones doing all the rating and reviewing.
If you still haven't caught on that the internet is just one big advertising machine built to sell you worthless crap, that is there to only portray the best side of you (in aid of selling said crap), then we've gotta talk.
The internet is a failed experiment. It failed when corporations became the gatekeepers to everything instead of actual people running things like BBS's.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 18 2016, @05:48PM
Ditto here. I am almost religious about posting reviews of products I've purchased. Often enough, I highlight some feature or function that wasn't even a main selling point. And, when I give a bad review, I'm very specific about what I found lacking in the product.
I kinda feel like it's a duty to evaluate stuff, so that other people don't waste their money on junk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2016, @08:50PM
Stop with the gold stars and participation awards. Those kids know its bullshit, the parents that pushed it are now using it as a bully club to insult their children's generation, and if that shit never happened there would just be some other excuse. Probably the cell phone gazing would grab more of the derision.
Most children grow up the same as they always have, and this online advertising bullshit has nothing to do with participation awards. Complain about participation awards, that is fine, but don't go using it as some catch-all to explain away complex situations.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday September 18 2016, @09:29PM
This is why I have been ignoring most of the review requests from Amazon and other places. It seems to have a lot less to do with the merchandise and more to do with the system that delivered it to me.
And when I want to know if that hard drive died, that is important to me, like how I just found out yesterday that a SAS drive I am responsible for kept failing... due to faulty firmware. (Seagate Constellation ES.3 firmware 0003 for those wondering). The drive itself was a replacement from a warranty return. It seemed that the port this drive (and the original drive) was in was flaky, or there wasn't enough power available to keep the drive spun up... it kept failing. Only after shifting a number of the cooling fans to another phase on the power supply did it keep a measure of stability, but it turns out that had nothing to do with it.
It was that the fans had enough power to more adequately cool the case, which in turn allowed the disk drive to be more stable... it was failing whenever it hit 40C, and the temperature range is supposed to allow for a max of 60C. The other disks in the enclosure never suffered this problem and surprise, have different firmwares. Seagate had confirmed this as an issue, but it's not something they have been advertising on their support pages.
Since the controller it is on is part of a RAID, the seagate tool for flashing firmware will not work in any OS unless I were to break the RAID and present whats left as individual disks, then try to re-assemble the RAID with no guarantee it will work again, so I've opted to buy some refurb drives simply to be able to swap out this guy and flash it and then put it back... (unless, of course, the replacement drives have the same firmware... then I will have to flash them all in turn).
Yet none of this is really suitable for a product review for my purchase on Amazon because it would take a gold star away from the seller, even though that seller had nothing to do with the confirmed problems on the drives. I can't use the system to accurately reflect the difficulties I have had with the product, because none of the players involved would be properly impacted by what is less of a disk drive issue and more of a customer service and problem resolution issue outside of the control of the seller. It's way too late to return the drive, but I could warranty RMA it -- I did that already. I got one back with a newer firmware than the original drives, which happens to be the flakey firmware. (Sometimes, I can't win.)
The best I could do is vent frustration (such as I am now doing here), but that isn't fair to Amazon or the seller, and is the fault of neither.
That said, if we pretend you and I are talking about the same disk drive, I'd consider paying $1.97 for the other drive as you mentioned... but only if I knew why in particular your drive failed and if it was the same make and model. It could be that I get the same drive type with the same firmware problem, just sold by some guy that has higher margins. Or that by luck, I get a drive that had an older or newer firmware without the max temp issue, and attribute it to the other seller for shipping drives that fail because of poor packaging or some excuse that belies my ignorance.
But you are under no obligation to state why the drive failed, and you may not know why it failed anyway. It could be some problem entirely unrelated to the drive or it was dropped during shipping or something, and not the fault of you, the vendor, or the marketplace seller at all.
All of which adds up to my not really trusting reviews too much when written by regular people like us. I don't discount them... but I don't buy products based on them (reaffirm my decisions maybe, but not as selection criteria).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19 2016, @04:10PM
The correct response to speech you do not like -- even false speech -- is to tell your side of the story. Not to suppress theirs!
This is true, but only up to a certain point. Imagine you are selling home-made lamps online (an interesting thing, but a low-thought purchase people won't research too much). Now imagine one of your competitors hires the Mechanical Turk to provide tons of negative reviews of your product. Do you honestly think that a couple of genuine positive reviews, or a press release no news source will bother to cover, will somehow rectify this?
There is a reason why slander and libel laws exist.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday September 18 2016, @03:09PM
The problem isn't necessarily bad reviews, but Yelp extortion [nypost.com]:
(There are other examples, I just wanted an article that spelled out the nature of the alleged extortion.)
Like all Silicon Valley algorithmic stuff, it could be hard to prove, and Yelp is big and able to bully small restaurants out of existence.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Sunday September 18 2016, @06:03PM
I am going to sue you for giving Silly Cone valley a bad review.
What could be better than a ponzi scheme that big?
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday September 18 2016, @04:08PM
I wish people would exercise restraint instead of always responding to emails asking to rate a purchase.
At least the badmouthing works the same way as the positive reviews; too many in either direction might indicate that something is wrong with the reviews... but if there was a lot less noise, the system would benefit as a whole.
Looking at other review systems, like at Newegg or Amazon... it makes you wonder if the youtube commentators got bored and decided to try their hand at reviewing. To review the common reviewer...Statler and Waldorf they are not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2016, @05:31PM
I usually respond when Amazon asks me to rate a third party vendor who shipped me a used textbook (which I order a lot of).
Most of the time, I give them stars if the condition of the item was what I expected and it arrived within the promised timeframe. I don't know if Amazon shares my identity with the vendor or not.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday September 18 2016, @08:26PM
I guess I am just not quite in the mindset to expect to get badgered to rate every transaction I make. Amazon really has turned up the spam lately in regards to that. I order a $10 box of rubber gaskets and get 5 emails asking me how I like them. I don't know guys, I bought it because I would need it later, so yeah I got what I ordered and it arrived within the free shipping timelines of whenever!
Maybe there is a setting to tone down the amount of spam. I may get 20 or 25 messages within 2 or 3 days if I make a purchase from 4 or 5 marketplace sellers, all of which invariably pester me to give a 5 star rating because its really important. The problem with this is that it means the review is no longer about the product if the rating in turn improves their marketplace standing. They do not deserve praise for the product, since all they did was stock and ship the item (unless it was unique to them, which is a special case).
There should be a seperate mechanism for rating sellers directly, in much the same way that on ebay no one would think to rate someone based on the actual product sold--it's all about if the person shipped the right thing as they said they would in the condition they stated it was in, and if the buyer actually paid on time.
You rate the buyers and sellers on ebay but these amazon marketplace emails are asking me to give a positive review for the company and how they handled the process, as opposed to the product, and the expectation is to read reviews on a store like Amazone specifically for about the products.
The great Amazon review for that network protocol book, "The Story About Ping" https://www.amazon.com/Story-About-Ping-Marjorie-Flack/product-reviews/0140502416 [amazon.com] would not nearly be as relevant were it written to help inflate a marketplace sellers standing...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2016, @06:43PM
You just post a review that says "I have no positive comments to post with respect to this company". There is nothing "negative" with that statement. When you see a bunch of those, you know to stay away.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Sunday September 18 2016, @11:05PM
As much as I appreciate reviews, I spend a lot of time scrutinizing them. For example, I was in New Mexico and looking for a New Mexican restaurant. Read a review on yelp for a restaurant that was written by a guy clearly expecting Taco Bell to be cooking in the back of this restaurant. I went anyway, based on other reviews, and it was awesome. So the one bad review was written by a misinformed customer expecting the product to be something it was never intended to be. And many of these reviews are written fueled by a negative experience over an innocent mistake or one person's bad day. In short, you get a lot of flame via reviews that really do a disservice to the process so it is understandable the process is in legal jeopardy when people let their rants get the best of them.
(Score: 1) by Sarasani on Monday September 19 2016, @03:00AM
[1] South Park "You're not yelping" S19E04
[2] Upcoming documentary Billion Dollar Bully [youtube.com]
[3] Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 [eastbayexpress.com]