What are "yelp ducks"?

I'm trying to read this headline: "Yelp Ducks Court Order to Remove Defamatory Posts."

So many words that could be either nouns or verbs: yelp, ducks, court, order, posts.

The only words that aren't a noun/verb are to, remove, and defamatory. (Remove can be a noun, but not with to in front of it.)

That headline had me picturing a type of annoying duck that was wooing... order???

As we've discussed before, Language Log calls this problem with compressed words in headlines a  "crash blossom" (because there was once a headline, "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms").

Anyway, the story, from Courthouse News Serivce, is about a duck... I mean, a Bird — Ava Bird — who had a default judgment entered against her over a 1-star review posted on the website Yelp. The plaintiff — another great name — Dawn Hassell — took the judgment to Yelp, but Yelp wasn't a party to the lawsuit, and the California Supreme Court said the judgment couldn't be enforced against Yelp:

But writing for the 4-3 state high court on Monday, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said the lower courts read the [federal] Communications Decency Act too narrowly in rejecting Yelp’s claim of immunity.

“Had plaintiffs’ claims for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and false light been alleged directly against Yelp, these theories would be readily understood as treating Yelp as the ‘publisher or speaker’ of the challenged reviews,” Cantil-Sakauye wrote in the 33-page opinion. “In this case, however, Yelp is inherently being treated as the publisher of the challenged reviews, and it has not engaged in conduct that would take it outside section 230’s purview in connection with the removal order.”

Yelp's statement:

“Of course, Yelp has no interest in publishing defamation, which is not helpful to consumers, and our terms of service prohibit the posting of defamatory content. But defamation is more than just a label, and so Yelp studies court orders to ensure they are valid and actually make a showing that defamation has occurred, before Yelp removes reviewer content.”

I like Yelp's position and, of course, I love the Communications Decency Act and don't want to see it eroded by judges. Without it, I couldn't have a comments section on this blog.

"I thought my review was fair and honest, like most of the reviews I leave on Yelp, and I even said I’d give their pizza a chance."

"Apparently that wasn’t good enough for the restaurant’s manager. At 10:05 p.m., I was in bed on the verge of falling asleep when I heard someone knocking on my door. I live alone. People rarely visit without warning me first. So needless to say, I was startled. I am not a white person in a horror flick, so I did not leave my room to walk down a flight of stairs in a house without power to see who was knocking at my door. Then the phone rang. I didn’t answer because I didn’t recognize the phone number. Again, not a white person in a horror movie. I sent the call to voicemail. A few seconds later, the same call came in. I sent it to voicemail again. This time, they actually left a message. 'Hello, this is [inaudible name], the manager of La Porchetta. I am outside your door. I want to speak to you about your Yelp review,' the heavily accented Middle Eastern voice said...."

From "Here’s What Happened After I Left a 3-Star Yelp Review for a Pizza Parlor" by Yesha Callahan at The Root.

The Yale dean's Yelp reviews use phrases like "white trash," "low class folks," and "barely educated morons."

WaPo reports under this faux-naive headline: "Yale dean once championed cultural sensitivity. Then she called people ‘white trash’ on Yelp." As if it's a puzzling paradox that an elite administrator would propound the usual diversity pap and actually view nonelites with contempt.

The most uncalled-for word in that headline is "once." I can't believe the dean — her name is June Chu — doesn't continually "champion cultural sensitivity." That's built into her job and no trouble to do. It would be trouble not to do. What dean at an elite — or nonelite — institution of higher education would renounce cultural sensitivity? It would take a very strangely bold dean to say: Hey, snowflakes, how about some old-school insensitivity for a change?*

But on her own, outside of work, Chu does some social media, and she doesn't talk like a dean, she talks like a person on social media. She's cheeky and tweaky. It's like Trump on Twitter.

Now, another way to look at this is that Chu felt empowered by her own status as a member of a minority group. Her non-PC language came in the context of an Asian restaurant she thinks is bad:

“If you are white trash, this is the perfect night out for you!” Chu wrote in a review about a Japanese restaurant, which she said lacked authenticity but was perfect for “those low class folks who believe this is a real night out.”

“Side note: employees are Chinese, not Japanese,” added Chu, who identifies in one review as Chinese American. In another restaurant review she said, “I guess if you were a white person who has no clue what mochi is, this would be fine for you.”

She was  comically wielding a little Asian privilege. Not that she defended herself that way. She apologized and deleted her Yelp account. 

"My remarks were wrong. There are no two ways about it."

I disagree. I see at least 2 ways, but there aren't 2 ways about which way is the easiest way.

__________________

* Imagine saying something like "I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

A square look at signs.

Here's yesterday's discussion of the square format in photography. I'm shuffling through the mass of photographs from our trip. I posted a few along the way as we traveled across the country and back over the last 2 weeks, but I've got many left to pick through. I'm doing a bit of that now and experimenting with cropping to a square composition.

Here are 3 that Meade stopped the car for me to take. I love roadside signs and have missed so many over the years as I've thought of stopping but barreled past anyway. But I've gotten better at seeing how important these opportunities are — much more important than big landmarks like the Delicate Arch, which are pointed out for you and photographed so often. These roadside sights are something you find for yourself. The idea that this can be a photograph is your idea. And Meade has been a great companion, who not only does nearly all the driving and drives with professional care but who turns my idea that this could be a photograph into an actual stop and who also often has the idea that this is a photograph.

Here's something we stopped for in Orderville, Utah:



I love how generic and inclusive that big sign is. And I'm fascinated by the wacky jumble of points on the red shape. Is it Googie? Anyway, I love the contrast between the complicated, exciting red structure and the simple, bland words. But it wasn't that sign that caused the stop. It was that little yellow sign. "Buffalo Elk Gator Jerky":



It was Meade who spotted that sign and insisted that we stop and I take a picture of it. It's only as I process the photo now that I see that the requisite potshots have been taken at it. I pause to Google why do people shoot at signs? and find "The Dangers and Costs of Sign Shooting" at Outdoorhub. I'm shooting the sign myself, of course, but I don't leave my impression in Orderville. I put it here on the blog.

Now, I wasn't even sure this picture was from Utah, and I don't know if I ever knew we passed through a place named Orderville. I know it's Orderville because I swiveled around and took a shot at "Food & Drug" and saw that it did have a less than completely generic name: Terry's.



I found a Yelp review — one review, 5 stars — for Terry's Food & Drug — "Small town service for a small town" — and that's where I see this is Orderville.

Orderville. We didn't explore. We only stopped for some signs that charmed us, transitorily. I muse about the motives to name a town Orderville. I think of law and order. But that's the kind of thinking of a person who blows through town and takes in the surfaces. Gator jerky! A Sinclair sign! Numbers painted on the rocks! But Orderville is something else:

If you post a negative review of you doctor/dentist on Yelp, he might defend himself by revealing information about your case.

"One Washington state dentist turned the tables on a patient who blamed him for the loss of a molar: 'Due to your clenching and grinding habit, this is not the first molar tooth you have lost due to a fractured root,' he wrote. 'This tooth is no different.'"

WaPo reports.

Yelp has given ProPublica unprecedented access to its trove of public reviews -- more than 1.7 million in all -- allowing us to search them by keyword. Using a tool developed by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, we identified more than 3,500 one-star reviews (the lowest) in which patients mention privacy or HIPAA. In dozens of instances, responses to complaints about medical care turned into disputes over patient privacy....

Deven McGraw, the...  deputy director of health information privacy [in the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services], said health professionals responding to online reviews can speak generally about the way they treat patients but must have permission to discuss individual cases. Just because patients have rated their health provider publicly doesn’t give their health provider permission to rate them in return....

"I Can't Stop Reading One-Star Yelp Reviews of National Parks."

"Yelp is filled with one- and two-star reviews of America's most pristine and majestic natural wonders. And honestly, they're riveting...."

"Don't waste your time!!!... I paid $20 for nothing but nasty rock and salt... You can find the exact same things in other places, and generally, they do it better...."

Rating you, the customer.

"Companies are rating their customers, shunning those who do not make the grade...."

[T]he new platforms let reviews go both ways, and vary in their transparency about the process. Yelp is straightforward: Businesses can post replies to critical customers. On Lyft, the second-biggest of the new cab companies, passengers are vaguely warned that “a low star rating” means requests for rides may not be accepted. Uber does not mention passenger ratings at all in its user agreement but noted in a blog post that “an Uber trip should be a good experience for drivers too.”

It does not seem to take much to annoy some Uber drivers. On one online forum, an anonymous driver said he gave poor reviews to “people who are generally negative and would tend to bring down my mood (or anyone around them).” Another was cavalier about the process: “1 star for passengers does not do them any harm. Sensible drivers won’t pick them up, but so what?” 

Ha! I think this is great. I put effort and ethics into being a good customer, don't you? It's just a bonus to get better service long term because of something I feel bound to do anyway. Who is hurt? Only the people who were relying on the size and complexity of the modern world as camouflage for their jerkiness and lack of empathy for those who perform services for them. In a simpler, more localized economy, this kind of information would always already be known.

The culture finds one way or another to get us to behave well.

"This is what happens when you think you are more intelligent than the Internet."

The internet talks back.

Beautiful woman reads a book in Russian by the light of the refrigerated pastry case.

In Caffe Reggio on MacDougal Street in NYC last Saturday. Here's the top comment about Caffe Reggio at Yelp! on the Caffe Reggio page at Yelp!:

I sat in Caffe Reggio and drank an Americano, because I had to remind myself that I could, in fact, sit in Caffe Reggio and drink an Americano. It's downstairs from my apartment, and it's been there for thousands of years, and yet I seldom make my way inside. I could feel something deep inside me stirring, and suddenly I had an intense craving to break free from the pattern I had been running as of late. I wanted to be free. My my routine of sulking, and whining, and going to the same places that I always went day in and day out had exhausted me. So I opted for a little bit of history, and a little bit of Old New York, and I began to write a rant about why these things were at the same time toxic as they were healing. It went something like this:

It's been a constant topic of discussion, and it seems to be on all of our minds: New York is dead.

"They do live up to the hype. Get the corn, don't argue. Even when you're on a date."

"They give toothpicks to help with the stuck corn. Very helpful because that would have bothered me the rest of the evening."



We just got back from a road trip that took us to New York City, where seemingly the most ordinary thing is a thing. I was amused by the corn-on-the-cob chomping on the sidewalks of NoLita. We're back home now — in the Midwest, where festivals premised on corn-on-the-cob are a summer tradition.

The quote in this post's title comes from a Yelp! review of the restaurant in my photograph, and I see there is a Yelp! review for the Sun Prairie (Wisconsin) Sweet Corn Festival:

"I will not sleep with you until you stop talking about bacon."

"I'd never sleep with a woman who thinks talking about how much they love bacon is cool or funny."

Seriously, it's been at least 7-8 years of this bacon obsession. Do we need bacon underwear? Bacon peglegs? Bacon wrapped tampons? So what, bacon tastes good. So does chicken fried steak. You don't see hipsters running around with ironic chicken fried steak shirts. If you're going to be a mindless follower, fine. But don't expect to bed down with me....

"A complex and secretive algorithm chooses which reviews to display on Yelp.com."

"Some small business owners say they feel pressured to advertise with Yelp for favorable filtering."