Yelp, not to be confused with barbaric yawp

Quite a bit of fuss about the SF Yelp day kerfuffle:

San Francisco's mayor was all set to name December 3 "Yelp Day" in honor of the city's favorite review site but canceled at the last minute. Why? Proposition 8 fallout. Yelp removed a series of negative reviews on businesses that supported Prop 8, since they were based on the politics of the owners, not the food or service.

And more reaction, here, and here. and here. I really should be thinking about this in the context of my day job, for which I'll be in SF later this month, struggling with the very idea of the public sphere, but it might be worth pointing out a few things.

Two disclaimers first --
1) I am adamantly against Prop. 8, and am on the record as supporting equal rights for people, no matter the kind of genitals the person they love has.
2) I don't get Yelp, and especially the kind of cultish recursiveness it seems to foster. (And Zillow me no Zillows -- has a website ever become a noun more quickly?) It seems, by and large, to take food writing on the Internet, and lower the barrier of entry to the point that it might as well be CB Radio chatter, or people calling WFAN.

The problem is, with immersive sites like Yelp, or Facebook, or whatever, is that when a single, privately owned website absorbs a significant portion of one's daily life, it starts to seem like public property, or part of the air you breathe. It remains however, a (virtual) space, owned by somebody else -- a sandbox that you are allowed to play in, according to their rules. If I have a dry-erase board on the side of my house and encourage people to write on it, then take the markers away from anyone who does not swear that they like Marillion, I have not violated any free speech.

Personally, I think Mr. Yelp is a dick for scrubbing prop. 8 posts,  as it is legitimate information, of a kind I might want to have, if I were the kind of person who lets people who review the Applebee's near the Fulton Mall influence my dining decisions. But Mr. Yelp has done nothing more than use the space he owns to express his point of view, no different from The Cod's advocacy of Ludivigne Sagnier. If you don't like it, post your reviews somewhere where they are less likely to be scrubbed. (The question of total autonomy over content on the internet is an interesting one, in that I am not sure how much hardware you would need to be totally independent of an ISP cutting you off.)

That said, if you know of any businesses that supported prop 8, post them in the comments, and I will make a list of businesses alleged to support prop 8, and post it. Then we can get to work on making the Mormons pay taxes.

Comments

[Egy Azziera]

In my opinion, the worst part is the accusation that Yelp is using reviews written in-house to try to sell merchants on their advertising. It’s basically like asking for ransom.