Disclaimer: This post may ripen to foul old age faster than a banana on the side of the road. I don’t care. That ↑up there↑ needs to be addressed.

People are a communal creature. We gather, share ideas, thoughts, advancements, and Jambi-willing, we prosper. These days, gathering into communities is easier than ever before, and we can mobilize without even getting out of our chairs. We don’t even need to stand to stand for something. We don’t have to find a street corner to hoist our signs on - though obviously this still happens - all we need to do is find our people online and roll up our sleeves.

I’ve written about negative, biased, and weaponized reviews in the past, even ones that were at the center of hot button, vitriolic, 24-7 news stories. And maybe some of those were as bad as this. But this is pretty bad. And we mob of internet reviewers don’t exactly come out shining.

Getting to the Point

Unless you vehemently ignore the news (and if that’s the case, uh, thanks for choosing us), then you’ve heard a lot and maybe even too much about Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie. It’s an ugly case that promises to get even uglier, and Yelpers are helping make it that way.

Last week, the attorney for the Petito/Schmidt families sent a letter to Steven Bertolino, lawyer for the Laundrie family, demanding that he remove pictures of Gabby from his Yelp page. They accused him of capitalizing on their tragedy to advertise and bring notoriety to his business.

Unwholesome, for sure. If it were true.

This is what we see at the top of said Yelp page:

“Unclaimed” and “Claim This Business” are both signs that this is not a Yelp account managed by its business owner. Sure, I’ll allow that a business could be aware of its Yelp page and simply not claim it, but someone trying to boost business using Yelp would have to claim their business. Not doing so would prevent them from taking any number of actions as owners, chief among them being responding to reviews, building that sense of community that makes people want to choose YOU, not the competitor.

Add in that each of the nine reviews you can currently read on the page - kudos to Yelp for locking things down with their Unusual Activity Alert - each of those nine were written on 9/17 or after; ten days ago at time of writing. There are an additional nine reviews that Yelp has filtered out as “low quality,” and here’s how a few of those look:

It shouldn’t go unnoticed that these reviewers aren’t longtime Yelpers; I’ve redacted their names, but we can infer that each likely made an account just to leave a bad review.

And I’m not defending this attorney. I’m not defending Brian Laundrie. Not even close. There are plenty of reasons to think Laundrie is a scumbag - I hate that 25¢, strip mall laundromat name. I hate his goofy noggin. I hate that his future father in law said he “seemed harmless,” like that’s ever a winning endorsement. I hate that he joked with officers about the mental state of his fiance who, even if he just “harmlessly” split up with, he still would have left van-less in big-ass Wyoming or something, had he not, you know, almost definitely murdered her before fleeing into the gangrenous Florida swamp. So again, NOT defending him.

But reviews like the one at the top of the page are problematic. I know, it’s somewhat obscured (for style!), and yes, I redacted the name again. But after making stupid Better Call Saul references, this reviewer *jokes* that if Bertolino’s client (Laundrie) “is too cowardly to off himself, I’m available for hire.”

Hilarious.

Again, I know that this is part of how the world works now.

Even more recently than this “get that picture off of Yelp” controversy - and a sidebar on that: it was a picture someone left in a review, meaning that even if Bertolino was the page owner, he’d have been powerless to remove it, BUT it has now been removed - just days before this blogger sat down to this blog, the following article was published:

I know not everyone is a gamer, so let’s take a minute to clear a few things up. DRM means a game must be connected to the internet to be played, which obviously isn’t always possible. That makes DRM free games enticing; it may be the norm for console players, but less so for those who do their gaming on PCs.

Further, if a game gets released as a Game of the Year Edition, it means some gaming editorial or organization (Game Critics Awards, Gamespot, IGN, Golden Joysick Awards, etc.) has proclaimed it their best game of the year. Gaming websites generally know their games, so anything they call a GOTY is generally pretty good.

And Hitman likely is great, but the promise was that it would be DRM free, and according to many players, that is not the case. So they’ve been review bombing the heck out of it. Here’s what you can see in the middle of the page, in the flavor text:

Looks sterling, huh? Well, the top of the page tells us that GOG users think this is a 1.4/5.

And they have every right to call out what they see as a problem. They didn’t get what was advertised (allegedly), and they’re angry. It might not even be review bombing in this case. GOG calling it such, definitely didn’t help their cause in putting out the fire.

And that’s really what this is, a conflagration of human emotion. I’m not going to get into reviewers bagging on Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman, just because they featured strong women (that’s for another day), but man, this isn’t good for anybody!

If review bombing helps you get a refund for your less-than-optimized video game, okay, fine, good. The world is better, GOG learned it’s lesson (for now).

But who benefits from you saying you’re willing to kill an attorney’s client, assuming he’s too cowardly to kill himself? Let me know when the LULZ start, because they haven’t reached me yet.

I don’t really know where to go from here. I’m exhausted. Seeing this stuff, other people’s wrath and destruction, it’s draining. And we should do better. Reviews aim to help your fellow consumer. It’s about being a helpful community. Let’s aim for that.