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Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Yelp reviews are also intregal to the suc

Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Yelp reviews are also intregal to the success of a restaurant and similar complaints are lobbed at them for destroying revenue at small companies. Have you ever gone to a restaurant that is poorly ranked on yelp? I have. They tend to deserve the poor ratings. This is a valuable service to the consumer and good restaurants will thrive while bad ones will fail. Also, any halfway decent owner/marketer knows you need to capture email addresses for people you want to sell to. Never rely on social media alone. Just use it to get them to give you an email.

gthtjtkt 10y ago
> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Transparency has nothing to do with it. Amazon has a history of shutting down Fulfillment By Amazon seller accounts in an extremely arbitrary and capricious manner. If they only shut them down due to legitimate complaints then sure, you might have a point. The story I linked proved that's not the case, and there are many more like it. That man's life would still be in ruins if he hadn't (luckily) gotten so much attention through Reddit and HN.
pjlegato 10y ago
It'd be fine if it were simply transparency, if the companies that get kicked off had all done something legitimately "bad" in some sense. The problem is that Amazon often doesn't seem to really investigate issues in any depth at all; they just kick the seller off reflexively. It's trivially easy to be kicked off the platform for reasons other than doing something legitimately "bad," such as software error, human error, or even a deliberately orchestrated fraud campaign conducted by your competitor -- and many other sellers don't get kicked off for doing the same thing, or worse. It's all very random.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Yes, because people are poor at dealing with selection bias. A data source with 100% real and true complaints and favorable reviews can tell any story you want it to with the right filtering, so especially in the presence of a malicious adversary you have to completely discard this data from your decision making.
moron4hire 10y ago
> Yelp reviews are also intregal to the success of a restaurant That's really only on the West Coast. People don't live or die by Yelp here on the East Coast. Frankly, I'm always surprised to see people are still using it after all the revelations of extortionist behavior they were engaging in against restaurants.
anigbrowl 10y ago
Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? That's a false premise, which assumes any and all complaints are made in good faith. Some people are assholes and will leave a bad review because they disliked the person who delivered a meal or any number of other spurious reasons. You really sound like the sort of person who has never worked in any other field than IT and has a naive and largely illusory view of business conditions.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  My SO has lots of experience working in businesses selling stuff on-line and while negative comments "out of spite" happened rarely to her, what she often told about is how dishonest employers made workers bribe people so that they cancel/remove their negative reviews. Hearing the stories that I did from her, I no longer treat lack of negative ratings / reviews as a strong quality signal. EDIT: Oh, and speaking of Amazon, Google and their automated bans, my SO's company's work account got temporarily blocked by Google recently, apparently for the sin of sending several files in quick succession to her boss' account. Apparently "atypical usage" is grounds for a ban now. Fortunately, the account was unlocked few hours later, and I didn't have to make fuss about it here on HN...
uptown 10y ago
I'm not sure I want Yelp being the arbiter of factual information about restaurants: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237102 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237102

gthtjtkt 10y ago

> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Transparency has nothing to do with it. Amazon has a history of shutting down Fulfillment By Amazon seller accounts in an extremely arbitrary and capricious manner. If they only shut them down due to legitimate complaints then sure, you might have a point. The story I linked proved that's not the case, and there are many more like it. That man's life would still be in ruins if he hadn't (luckily) gotten so much attention through Reddit and HN.

pjlegato 10y ago

It'd be fine if it were simply transparency, if the companies that get kicked off had all done something legitimately "bad" in some sense. The problem is that Amazon often doesn't seem to really investigate issues in any depth at all; they just kick the seller off reflexively. It's trivially easy to be kicked off the platform for reasons other than doing something legitimately "bad," such as software error, human error, or even a deliberately orchestrated fraud campaign conducted by your competitor -- and many other sellers don't get kicked off for doing the same thing, or worse. It's all very random.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Yes, because people are poor at dealing with selection bias. A data source with 100% real and true complaints and favorable reviews can tell any story you want it to with the right filtering, so especially in the presence of a malicious adversary you have to completely discard this data from your decision making.

moron4hire 10y ago

> Yelp reviews are also intregal to the success of a restaurant That's really only on the West Coast. People don't live or die by Yelp here on the East Coast. Frankly, I'm always surprised to see people are still using it after all the revelations of extortionist behavior they were engaging in against restaurants.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? That's a false premise, which assumes any and all complaints are made in good faith. Some people are assholes and will leave a bad review because they disliked the person who delivered a meal or any number of other spurious reasons. You really sound like the sort of person who has never worked in any other field than IT and has a naive and largely illusory view of business conditions.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
My SO has lots of experience working in businesses selling stuff on-line and while negative comments "out of spite" happened rarely to her, what she often told about is how dishonest employers made workers bribe people so that they cancel/remove their negative reviews. Hearing the stories that I did from her, I no longer treat lack of negative ratings / reviews as a strong quality signal. EDIT: Oh, and speaking of Amazon, Google and their automated bans, my SO's company's work account got temporarily blocked by Google recently, apparently for the sin of sending several files in quick succession to her boss' account. Apparently "atypical usage" is grounds for a ban now. Fortunately, the account was unlocked few hours later, and I didn't have to make fuss about it here on HN...

uptown 10y ago

I'm not sure I want Yelp being the arbiter of factual information about restaurants: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237102 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237102