but that's not what's happening - they're not paying people to write reviews, they're (allegedly) collecting money for removing unfavorable reviews. i think that's more damaging.
... then i would use other, less centralized and organized sources, as i did before yelp existed. what's your point?
i'm certainly not saying that yelp is stealing money from me, but trusted (yes, only to a certain extent) information is trusted information. if misleading, there are consequences to the consumer.
hurt financially == going to a restaurant/store/{insert random b&m service provider here} that i shouldn't have gone to, and spend more time/money + get worse service/product out of as a result.
isn't the whole point of a review system to influence people's decisions?
my issue isn't impact on the guys that don't play, it's impact on the consumer from the guys that do. a crappy restaurant that has 5 star reviews because the bad ones were paid off hurts me financially.
interesting. well - we had the same problem with ndjango. worked fine with beta, crapped out with rc. that, and the shifty api is getting annoying. their last minute shift away from ocaml naming was pretty annoying.
yeah - that's been my experience too. the few times i've dealt with them, they've been back at me in hours tops. hopefully that'll continue despite them hitting RC
i was tempted to blog about this a while back. i've gone from java (back in the 'ole days), to c#/net only, to the view that platforms don't matter. or rather platform boundaries don't matter. i spent the last few months developing out a .net mvc framework for my dayjob. when it came time for us to build http://friendsell.com, that's what i and the guys knew best, so that's what we built on. but we wanted to use CouchDB as the backend... and so we did.
there are subtle implications to the platform decisions you make, but on the scale of most startups, the extra $40 bucks a month you'll pay for that windows ec2 ami isn't gonna make a difference. what will make a difference is you building on top of the stack you're most proficient with. for us that meant building on .net and couch. for someone else that'll be RoR and mysql.