To be clear, businesses are not supposed to be able to remove any review from the site. Yelp makes a big deal about claiming that they don't let businesses, even Yelp Sponsors, remove negative reviews. That being said, I know first-hand that they do remove negative reviews, so... fuck Yelp, I guess.
I'm angry too that Yelp pits businesses against customers for profit while claiming to be an unbiased source. Just the fact that it's even possible for a business to "sponsor" an "unbiased" review site should set off a lot of red flags.
Yeah this feature pisses me off. I hope that they only use those ratings internally and don't factor them in to the reviews on the App Store.
It's just insane to only actively solicit the opinion of people who think "I'd rather have this 60x60px area of screen real estate and a few megs of space than ever use this app again."
Doesn't she know she can just become a "Yelp! Sponsor" and have the offending reviews removed?
My whole Yelp account was banned for calling out a local restaurant owner for being so psycho that he made my date cry. It was a mighty coincidence that my account ban and deleted reviews coincided with his shit-hole restaurant deciding to sponsor Yelp.
But I'm sure Yelp has excuses. Maybe I didn't log in frequently enough, or they thought because my experience was so out-there that it must be fake. Either way, I'll never trust or use Yelp again. It's pay for play all the way.
$10, or even the $40 plan, is a negligible cost to even a 1-man operation, and to a "big ticket" company, it might as well be free. So don't even take into consideration the cost. Keep in mind "open source" software isn't actually free, you have to pay an engineer to install and maintain it, learn how to configure it, fix it when it breaks, etc. Those costs are easily higher than $40/mo even if someone's only spending 15 minutes a month on it.
What Pingdom seems to be offering is a (basically free if your business isn't being funded on a credit card) service that requires very little time and know-how to maintain. Clients probably chose it because their time is more valuable than the monthly cost of the service. Contrast that to open-source, which is perfect for those who'd rather spend extra time than extra money.
> The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc.
I have nothing against naming things in such a manner (my computers at home are cartoon characters), but the problem is that it doesn't scale. The company I work for is under 10 years old, and while a bit too old to still be called a startup, we already have more print servers than there are planets, let alone DB, dev, QA, and web servers. The last couple start-ups I had also had hundreds of boxes, and I'd go insane if "db-35" was actually named "WASP-18b" and I had to remember a list of 50-ish planets.
To be clear, businesses are not supposed to be able to remove any review from the site. Yelp makes a big deal about claiming that they don't let businesses, even Yelp Sponsors, remove negative reviews. That being said, I know first-hand that they do remove negative reviews, so... fuck Yelp, I guess.
I'm angry too that Yelp pits businesses against customers for profit while claiming to be an unbiased source. Just the fact that it's even possible for a business to "sponsor" an "unbiased" review site should set off a lot of red flags.
Just ran a search on "yelp unbiased" and this popped up: http://ask.metafilter.com/142694/Yelp-sucks-I-need-unbiased-...