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How to destroy your business with one email

142 points by loewenskind 16y ago

loewenskind 16y ago
Background story found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a_negative_yelpcom_review_and_now_im/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a...
- maxer 16y ago
  would have been good to post this as well
bdfh42 16y ago
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.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Perhaps, but if this nut job is behaving this way purely to get more hate reviews he's played it well enough to work in Hollywood.
- piguy314 16y ago
  Yelp should automatically add nofollow to all links in rating comments with 2 stars or less.
- klbarry 16y ago
  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.
- mothaiba 16y ago
  There's a recent story in the New York Times about this, and a business called DecorMyEyes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html
- memetichazard 16y ago
  I read http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/11/five-short-links-4.html http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/11/five-sho... today. GetSatisfaction and other major sites are using 'nofollow' (see the wikipedia article) and therefore should not be contributing to increasing the pagerank of the sites. 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.
swombat 16y ago
Doesn't look like there was a business to destroy in the first place. Just a scam that was, apparently, recognised as such by all the reviewers.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  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.
- tedunangst 16y ago
  except none of the reviewers even tried to do business with the company. reddit said give one star reviews, monkeys give one star reviews.
  - AndrewS 16y ago
    To be fair, we can't verify that either way. If a company treated me as the reviewers claim, I wouldn't give them more than one star either. As was mentioned in other comments, there needs to be some validation of reviewers built into yelp.
Kurtz79 16y ago
Epic fail.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sokoloff 16y ago
  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...)
  - Kurtz79 16y ago
    "The company in question is Epic Data Recovery Lab" That was sort of the point of the comment. :) People should be less edgy...
    - adaml_623 16y ago
      I think his point was that this isn't reddit and the general consensus is to avoid creating punful comment threads. Might be wrong and misinterpreting.
      - Silhouette 16y ago
        Ironically, it's also an interesting commentary on how quickly groupthink and follow-the-leader actions take over on social news sites. Did everyone who originally downvoted the "epic fail" post realise the context and just not like jokes on HN, or did a couple of people choose to downvote, and then more people see what looked like a Reddit-esque joke that was being downvoted and just join in without understanding the point of the post? As others pointed out, a similar mentality could explain the results on the Yelp page we are discussing, even if the entire thing was actually orchestrated by a competitor and/or triggered by a single unhappy customer where we don't know the full story.
        16y ago
ZachPruckowski 16y ago
Why are all the reviews posted yesterday?
- duck 16y ago
  The Internet was awaken by evildoers.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    Then the Internet is never going to get back to sleep again.
mike-cardwell 16y ago
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...
- wladimir 16y ago
  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.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    I think some customers do this, but they're in a minority. I don't have any figures to back this up, it's just my general observation of peoples behaviour...
    - ams6110 16y ago
      I typically don't. I have zero reason to believe anything on any "review" website. I talk to people I know and get recommendations from them.
vaksel 16y ago
all he'll do is rename it and nothing will be lost.
desigooner 16y ago
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...
- JshWright 16y ago
  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?
  - desigooner 16y ago
    Yes they are. It's just a form of internet vigilantism. Ideally, all the false reviews (positive or negative) should be taken down by yelp .. else, there's not much to trust on yelp if this expands to a bigger scale.
samstokes 16y ago
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".
- fname 16y ago
  I think this is the email the poster is referring to: http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-york#hrid:kDSNyqHT3okOl6_de0hR3A http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-york#hri... If you scroll down further, there's the same email in the comment that was posted on 12/8/2009
plusbryan 16y ago
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.
- cracki 16y ago
  calling it a "small business" invokes images of a struggling entrepreneur out to improve the world. 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?
  - ceejayoz 16y ago
    You totally missed plusbryan's point. The evidence of this being a scam is that someone posted an e-mail the owner allegedly sent. That e-mail could be a total sham, or it could be exaggerated, or there could be a huge other side of the story. There are absolutely scammers out there, and this business might be one of them. There's no hard evidence either way, though.
    - duck 16y ago
      Yeah, it is kind of scary if you own a small business. Basically there is no trial, but rather just a guilty verdict.
      - alttab 16y ago
        My experience tells me those who are defending this business out of principle have never been truly, truly scammed.
        derefr 16y ago
        Other, similar phrases: - "Anyone who is defending this child molester was never molested as a child." - "Anyone who is defending this racist has never been the victim of prejudice." Some events overtrain our minds, such that we can never emotionally react to them in a genuinely rational way again. However, we can stop ourselves from doing this, by holding fast to the one principle that has always, always worked: Innocent until proven guilty, please.
eli 16y ago
Would also be a good way to destroy a competitor's business with one faked email.
zzzeek 16y ago
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.
Vivtek 16y ago
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.
- joshu 16y ago
  As an aside, your second sentence is an excellent one.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Yeah, and my the first one isn't.
antidaily 16y ago
I've seen businesses respond to comments on Yelp reviews - wonder why he didn't try to do that.
mambodog 16y ago
See also: http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace-Overachiever/dp/1599211793 http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace-Overachie... 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.
dnsworks 16y ago
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.
thomaz 16y ago
It's weird that their pictures on Yelp are just HD parts.
mkramlich 16y ago
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.

142 points by loewenskind 16y ago

Background story found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a_negative_yelpcom_review_and_now_im/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a...

maxer 16y ago
would have been good to post this as well

bdfh42 16y ago

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.

loewenskind 16y ago
Perhaps, but if this nut job is behaving this way purely to get more hate reviews he's played it well enough to work in Hollywood.
piguy314 16y ago
Yelp should automatically add nofollow to all links in rating comments with 2 stars or less.
klbarry 16y ago
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.
mothaiba 16y ago
There's a recent story in the New York Times about this, and a business called DecorMyEyes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html
memetichazard 16y ago
I read http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/11/five-short-links-4.html http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/11/five-sho... today. GetSatisfaction and other major sites are using 'nofollow' (see the wikipedia article) and therefore should not be contributing to increasing the pagerank of the sites. 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.

swombat 16y ago

Doesn't look like there was a business to destroy in the first place. Just a scam that was, apparently, recognised as such by all the reviewers.

loewenskind 16y ago
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.
tedunangst 16y ago
except none of the reviewers even tried to do business with the company. reddit said give one star reviews, monkeys give one star reviews.
- AndrewS 16y ago
  To be fair, we can't verify that either way. If a company treated me as the reviewers claim, I wouldn't give them more than one star either. As was mentioned in other comments, there needs to be some validation of reviewers built into yelp.

Kurtz79 16y ago

Epic fail.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sokoloff 16y ago
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...)
- Kurtz79 16y ago
  "The company in question is Epic Data Recovery Lab" That was sort of the point of the comment. :) People should be less edgy...
  - adaml_623 16y ago
    I think his point was that this isn't reddit and the general consensus is to avoid creating punful comment threads. Might be wrong and misinterpreting.
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      Ironically, it's also an interesting commentary on how quickly groupthink and follow-the-leader actions take over on social news sites. Did everyone who originally downvoted the "epic fail" post realise the context and just not like jokes on HN, or did a couple of people choose to downvote, and then more people see what looked like a Reddit-esque joke that was being downvoted and just join in without understanding the point of the post? As others pointed out, a similar mentality could explain the results on the Yelp page we are discussing, even if the entire thing was actually orchestrated by a competitor and/or triggered by a single unhappy customer where we don't know the full story.
      - 16y ago

ZachPruckowski 16y ago

Why are all the reviews posted yesterday?

duck 16y ago
The Internet was awaken by evildoers.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Then the Internet is never going to get back to sleep again.

mike-cardwell 16y ago

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...

wladimir 16y ago
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.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  I think some customers do this, but they're in a minority. I don't have any figures to back this up, it's just my general observation of peoples behaviour...
  - ams6110 16y ago
    I typically don't. I have zero reason to believe anything on any "review" website. I talk to people I know and get recommendations from them.

vaksel 16y ago

all he'll do is rename it and nothing will be lost.

desigooner 16y ago

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...

JshWright 16y ago
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?
- desigooner 16y ago
  Yes they are. It's just a form of internet vigilantism. Ideally, all the false reviews (positive or negative) should be taken down by yelp .. else, there's not much to trust on yelp if this expands to a bigger scale.

samstokes 16y ago

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".

fname 16y ago
I think this is the email the poster is referring to: http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-york#hrid:kDSNyqHT3okOl6_de0hR3A http://www.yelp.com/biz/epic-data-recovery-labs-new-york#hri... If you scroll down further, there's the same email in the comment that was posted on 12/8/2009

plusbryan 16y ago

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.

cracki 16y ago
calling it a "small business" invokes images of a struggling entrepreneur out to improve the world. 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?
- ceejayoz 16y ago
  You totally missed plusbryan's point. The evidence of this being a scam is that someone posted an e-mail the owner allegedly sent. That e-mail could be a total sham, or it could be exaggerated, or there could be a huge other side of the story. There are absolutely scammers out there, and this business might be one of them. There's no hard evidence either way, though.
  - duck 16y ago
    Yeah, it is kind of scary if you own a small business. Basically there is no trial, but rather just a guilty verdict.
    - alttab 16y ago
      My experience tells me those who are defending this business out of principle have never been truly, truly scammed.
      - derefr 16y ago
        Other, similar phrases: - "Anyone who is defending this child molester was never molested as a child." - "Anyone who is defending this racist has never been the victim of prejudice." Some events overtrain our minds, such that we can never emotionally react to them in a genuinely rational way again. However, we can stop ourselves from doing this, by holding fast to the one principle that has always, always worked: Innocent until proven guilty, please.

eli 16y ago

Would also be a good way to destroy a competitor's business with one faked email.

zzzeek 16y ago

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.

Vivtek 16y ago

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.

joshu 16y ago
As an aside, your second sentence is an excellent one.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Yeah, and my the first one isn't.

antidaily 16y ago

I've seen businesses respond to comments on Yelp reviews - wonder why he didn't try to do that.

mambodog 16y ago

See also: http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace-Overachiever/dp/1599211793 http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace-Overachie... 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.

dnsworks 16y ago

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.

thomaz 16y ago

It's weird that their pictures on Yelp are just HD parts.

mkramlich 16y ago

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.