Why We Created the Yelp Elite Squad
medium.com
medium.com
Jeremy Stoppelman, the co-founder of Yelp, has a much more modest story of why they started Yelp Elite.
"[W]e had at the time one marketing person who was like, ”Maybe we should meet some of our users that are addicted Yelpers now. . . . They’re in San Francisco; we’re in San Francisco, it can’t be that hard to meet up.” And I thought, ”That’s a great idea, let’s look these people in the eye.” . . . We had this first meeting; it was this really social bunch that came out and met up with us for drinks, and we’re like, ”Wow, this is really interesting.” [The meetings] sort of spun out of that. We did our major event [at] Armani Café. It was really successful. People had a great time. . . . So it just seemed like, ”Hey this really fits and makes a ton of sense, so let’s just keep doing it.” And so we kept doing it, and it got bigger and bigger and now [we’re] a little notorious for it."
(Quote sourced from the 2011 HBS case study on Yelp)
From what I gather, they needed people to participate (because this is a social website, not just 1s and 0s, you see), so they created a community-based incentive program. Groundbreaking.
1) https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*XMPIYnig9xlHII4bh...
2) "The brazen quality of this new urban tribe spoke to the power users who contributed weekly, if not daily and hourly, to the site." from the article
http://kitchenette.jezebel.com/yelp-downgrades-restaurants-r...
> Instead, they’ve declared that legally, Yelp is entirely allowed to extort restaurants. In case you’ve forgotten, almost exactly a year ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that Yelp was well within its rights to extort restaurants. As above, Yelp desperately and frantically claims they don’t actually do this because to admit to what they’re widely accused of would be to pull back the curtain on the shell game that many, many restaurant owners believe is Yelp’s core business model. The first part of the above statement is thus simple PR sleight of hand; the lawsuits have been dismissed, but not because they’re not true—because legally, Yelp is perfectly free to engage in whatever extortionist practices it feels like.
I worked at Yelp for two years as a software engineer. I have seen everything there is to see: the code, the databases, etc. There is no extortion table. There is no extortion code. Businesses like to make this claim because it generates sympathy and attention. It's just not true.
if business_has_paid_extortion_money:
show_good_reviews()
else:
show_bad_reviews()
There is also no code to allow manual review ordering. They are sorted according by an algorithm with a variety of inputs including who you are friends with, who has Elite status, etc.