[atmz]

Disclaimer: I worked on this feature.

If you walk in to the restaurant, you don't need to install the app. The app will let you view your live place in line, but you can leave the line/get notified when your table is ready vis SMS.

If you want to get in line before you show up the restaurant, you can do that via the app, or the www site, or the mobile site.

[cdolan]

Did you work on it as NoWait or at Yelp (formerly NoWait).

If you worked on it as the original NoWait, have you seen any changes, positive or negative, now that the feature is under Yelp's umbrella?

[atmz]

I worked on it from the Yelp side during the intitial partnership/integration. So, I can't comment on the NoWait perspective, but I will say that almost all of the NoWait software team is still working at Yelp 2+ years post-aquisition.

[shostack]

What's the general Yelp employee vibe like when news like this comes out about features they've worked on?

Is it a feeling of "meh, we're growing revenue" or more of a "they completely misunderstood the value we're delivering based on what our users asked for" scenario?

[atmz]

Some of both; people do care, but not everyone loves every feature.

I feel that small business owners tend to be less tech savvy and more open to conspiratorial thinking, which leads to a lot of attention to anything Yelp does. If you read the comments even here on hn, many are not about the actual thing in question and many make accusations of unfair practises which have neve been accompanied by evidence.

In this particular case, we redirect calls about delivery just for restaurants who have signed a contract with GrubHub (which presumably included language allowing GrubHub to do this), so that GrubHub can attribute orders as coming "from Yelp" and charge for them the same way as they do online orders. I think there's some interesting things to discuss there, but it's not an obvious "this is wrong" feature to me.

(and the delivery market as a whole is a little messy -- see the Doordash tipping controversy for an example of something that I do feel is wrong and I would not be happy working on)

[shostack]

Thanks for the insight and for wading into the firestorm here.

From the screenshots in the article, it appears there is zero indication to the user that this will be going through Grubhub when they tap that button. Was that discussed? How do you feel about that in terms of it being sufficient notification?

Would you agree that in addition to the limited tech savvyness of restaurant owns, there may also be limited business savvy such that they would have been aware of a term that would allow Grubhub and Yelp to do this? In this case, the restaurant owner seemed to have no clue it was occurring. So presumably if the user and restaurant owner are clueless, and Yelp and Grubhub are taking a cut they may not have otherwise received, I'm a bit unclear as to how that could be viewed as any sort of positive.

Do restaurants receive any reporting of "Grubhub via Yelp" orders/calls?