[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?