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A business I used recently for some tree maintenance in my town had a 1-star Yelp review which was perplexing. In this case, the business and owner are well-known in the area as one of the best at what they do and top subject matter experts.

While digging a little, I found that Yelp was highlighting only the four 1-star reviews and factoring only those into the score. Each of these reviews is responded to by the owner with an explanation, all of which look fairly reasonable to me.

Below this, hidden away under a link and not factored into the score were 15 other reviews that Yelp tagged as 'not currently recommended'. These reviews span a period of 4-5 years+ and are mostly positive 4-5 star reviews. I am no expert but they do not look faked at all to me. Why would this be the case? This business also had 42 5-star reviews on Google. Seems a little odd to me and this really swayed my opinion for good on Yelp.

Were the one-star reviews the most recent ones? it seems like a fairly reasonable optimization that if the average score takes a sharp trend in any direction, reviews from before that trend started shouldn't be counted in the score.

A common anecdote. Please provide the link.

You and your facts, proof, and blood-samply hocus-pocus. Yelp is obviously a witch, and these very sophisticated small business owners uncover their racket every month. Burn them!

If this is true, wouldn't it be pretty easy to write some sort of scraper that pulls all of this information from both yelp and google and reveals such discrepancies?

One thing that Yelp absolutely does do, I've seen it with my own eyes, is play with 'recommended' reviews based on whether the business in question is paying them. I can't provide hard links because it's a client of my wife's business.

Specifically, a business had about 20 very positive reviews in total, all of them 'recommended'. A review that isn't 'recommended' basically doesn't exist; it doesn't count toward the average rating and it can only be viewed if a small print, difficult to see link at the bottom is clicked.

So, a business started with 20 total rating, and all 20 of them 'recommended', with a very good average rating.

Said business decides to send some money Yelp's way; that goes on for a few months, and they get a minimal uptick in hits, but worth less than what's being sent to Yelp.

So they (within the contract with Yelp) stop that relationship.

Shortly after, 75% of the reviews switch to 'not recommended'; the ones that remain are among the lowest ratings. The new average for the business isn't terrible, but it's lower.

Multiple calls to Yelp are all handled basically the same; "That's just an algorithm and we don't really control it." ... "I think if you re-establish your contract with us, you might get more business."

The language on the phone is tricky; nowhere is a direct connection between sending money and 'fixing' the Yelp score mentioned. But it's heavily implied. When asked directly, they just deflect talking about the opaque 'algorithm.'

That was the most recent case my wife dealt with. There have been at least two other fairly similar situations.

At this point, she's telling her clients that it can be dangerous to engage with Yelp if they haven't already done so.

TL;DR: Yelp is shady as hell. Full stop.

We were just discussing this with my wife yesterday. The very same story happened to our doula, who's very non-technical and she asked us what to do (we are both engineers). Short story: she had a profile on Yelp, almost 20 5-star reviews from former customers (who spend, on average, 2/3 months with her - so each star is a big deal). One day Yelp! connects with her proposing her to become a paid customer, how could that boost her visibility, etc. etc. Moreover, she has great reviews and it would be good for her to maintain that track record. She declines - also because she is not very technical and she has no idea how much business she's getting from Yelp. Within a month, half of her 5-star reviews are gone and 2 1-star reviews appeared (that she does not recollect as customers - so she reported them).

My get on the entire story is that Yelp sounds a lot like Italian's mafia (btw, I'm Italian) - where "you have a really nice restaurant there, it'd be a shame if something bad would happen to it. But if you pay us, you'd have nothing to worry about."

Yup, sounds about right.

In my wife's correspondences with Yelp (via voice and e-mail) on behalf of her clients, they kept focusing on that word 'algorithm'....like it's some magical, mystical thing that nobody really understands or controls. That was the key word that was used in all of the bullshit deflections.

Thing is, Yelp is absolutely dominant in this space, so we're all kind of stuck with it.

Not if they are exposed to the general public by way of recording / hard proof, as the original commenter said. Once people know they are lying scum, their dominance will fall.

Why are they so dominant? Do they rank so well on a Google in the U.S?

I really don't know how they became so dominant, but Yelp is basically The Way my family and tons of people we know find services, restaurants, and the like. We live in the SF Bay Area; I don't know how widely applicable it is, but based on the work my wife has done with her customers (all over the US), Yelp is generally pretty important everywhere in a lot of sectors.

Just provide a link to their profile. These anecdotes never come with links.

>When asked directly, they just deflect talking about the opaque 'algorithm.'

This is precisely why "AI" cannot be trusted and why code must be publicly auditable.

I have been thinking about it. Are most of these "clients" owned by people who don't know much about Yelp?

I'm not sure; what are you thinking?

I am talking about "a client of my wife's business".

I wonder if it would be worth modifying state extortion laws to cover this.

Your standard of proof is very high. Who records all of their phone calls (presumably without consent which is illegal in my jurisdiction) and makes an archive of their yelp page periodically?

This is not the only company to face such allegations and afaik it's not the first time yelp has been accused either. I think you'll have to base this one on anecdotal stories.

Especially when most of the calls are cold calls, and you haven't had the opportunity to record them.

I think they were not saying that everyone has to record their conversations as a matter of course, but that no one making these allegations has any hard proof. They even mentioned that in many of these stories, Yelp is calling them multiple times - it would be nice if next time this happens to someone in a 1-party consent state, they would record the second call from Yelp.

In my experience, almost all stories get bigger in the retelling, especially when you have a grievance, having some hard proof at least helps to give you a baseline assessment of how much of an exaggeration the claims are.

If they are calling from California, they are covered by the 2-party consent state law. It's very easy to get accused of wiretapping under these laws, so watch out. Last, even if you get such a recording, it'd be an unnamed guy saying stuff on behalf of Yelp. You'd still have to proof it's a legitimate recording, from a legitimate phone call with Yelp.

What people accuse Yelp of doing is pretty close to racketeering (or is? IANAL) and thus there is a high burden of proof. As a sibling comment points out, not every accusation needs detailed proof but some do and despite the years of accusations there isn't any definitive proof.

Also, look at the information you've seen about bad practices at Uber recently. I'm aware my next statement is pretty weak reasoning, but if Uber with all its money and talent has these problems out in the open what makes you think Yelp would be that much better at keeping this a secret?

Uber's problems are internal or started with disgruntled internal employees, Yelp's problems are External, Completely different.

>>What people accuse Yelp of doing is pretty close to racketeering (or is? IANAL) and thus there is a high burden of proof.

Where there is smoke there is likely fire. I am probably not willing to believe it is corporate mandate with the evidence shown, however I can see a Wells Fargo style situation where perverse sales incentives combined with lacking internal controls allows for Sales people and Middle Managers to cause some of these issues that have been reported.

Exactly. When I heard the first accusations against Bill Cosby, I was skeptical. I thought "innocent until proven guilty". But then after accuser number 50 came around, I find the accusations very likely true. Even though there is no hard proof.

Without proof you may still be innocent in the eyes of the law, but if I was a young lady, I sure wouldn't be anywhere around him alone.

In Italy, where racketeering is very common in the South, we have special laws and protections to fight it - because proving it, it is not easy at all. You get threats that are implied and not explicit. If "something happens" you cannot automatically ascribe it to the former threat. It should be the role of an investigative agency to look into that and discover the high burden of proof, not of private citizens.

I would think a class-action would be effective. He said/she said is tough, but everyone said/Yelp said becomes a different story.

their phone calls (presumably without consent which is illegal in my jurisdiction)

IANAL, but if the call starts out with the standard, "Please note that this call is being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes", or similar, then you are free to record that conversation and it would not be illegal. All parties to the call have been informed that the call is being recorded, and thus no wire tapping laws have been broken. This works for both 1 party and 2 party states as far as I'm aware.

Yes, I believe the "consent" is judged to have been given if a party continues the call after being informed that it is not a private, unrecorded call. So if one party announces that it's recording the call, all parties who continue the call (including the recording party) have supposedly consented to that breach of privacy.

It's probably also not that unusual for Yelp to call a business that plays this announcements to its incoming callers, and actually records them. I can only guess that we haven't seen this evidence because the offended business might have preferred to settle things in private.

I found the company name from that user's Reddit history. Here's the link to the Yelp page https://www.yelp.com/biz/full-channel-warren-5?sort_by=date_...

They currently have a total of 14 reviews. Only 4 out of the 14 were "out of state" and one of them was 5-star, so the accusation seems overblown.

This also could be simple mistake of users leaving a review on the wrong page. I see this done in both directions. Just yesterday I saw a 5-star review that raved about a restaurant, only at the end they were thanking a different restaurant.

More likely, changing their Yelp profile location is nowhere on their list of things to do when they've moved.

Reminds me of the unmet challenge to prove that airlines charge different ticket prices based on your browser cookies: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1ekv6e/lpt_bou...

Here is some hard proof... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY

damn, does this dude know how to make short videos. i remember watching his apple computer rant video and that was over 1hr long.

Here's what I said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849689#12850055) the last time this was brought up:

> That said, it would be nice if someone presented some evidence to back up claims that yelp is doing something "corrupt".

This is an extremely difficult standard to meet. A lot of the accusations against Yelp involve phone calls with their sales reps, which is not public data that can be aggregated and parsed. All we really have to go on are anecdotes.

Speaking personally, I've heard from two people I know who have small businesses- a wedding photographer in Seattle and a small restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire- who separately told me how they had good Yelp reviews, and then watched them get pushed down and bad reviews pushed to the top shortly after they declined to buy Yelp ads. These two people didn't even know each their and would have no way or reason to coordinate their tales, and they told me identical stories. I never use Yelp anymore, for this reason.

Anecdotes might not be scientific data, but if the circumstances are such that scientific data is impossible to obtain, they're better than nothing.

A common internet poker conspiracy story goes like this, Player becomes very unlucky after withdrawing money from site, so obviously site is punishing them for withdrawing. But there is a huge amount of variance in poker, so you can be lucky or unlucky for extended periods without being targeted by the site. And, no one ever rushes to the internet to complain about getting extra lucky after they withdraw.

I have a yelp page for my small business. I got a call from their sales team, listened to the spiel, thought about it for a few days and decided it wouldn't be worth the investment. I told the salesperson so, and that was it. No harassment, no noticeable impact on my page. Just an anecdote... Maybe I'm too small a fish to be worth their trouble :)

> but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14237684

You think they made that up?

I don't know, but there's no link to anything. Don't even know the name of the establishment. I can't change my consumer habits on the word of "that guy's friend"

Yes? No? Who knows? That's literally worthless as evidence of anything other than someone's ability to post an internet comment.

I don't think anyone is making these stories up, but with tens of thousands of businesses on Yelp, the chances of these two events randomly happening sequentially is high enough to have a steady stream of people who think it happened to them intentionally.

Also, I've been reading these anecdotes on HN and other sites for years, and have never seen anyone tell this story and provide enough data for anyone to take a look themselves. Never a link to the business page on Yelp, never any links to the supposed negative reviews. Has a news organization ever asked Yelp to explain the specifics of any of these occurrences? Has any explanation ever turned up in the discovery phase of a case against Yelp?

I suspect that is because they're afraid that their 'two star reviews' become 'zero star reviews'. Just like you don't complain about Mafia customer service in public.

In this litigious society, I'd imagine a plucky suit-sponsoring hedge fund would be excited to hear of all these instances of fraud. Yet I haven't heard of any class action.

Or maybe it really is a made up story. Or embellished. Or mis-remembered.

Other than really wanting to believe, why do you assume that some random internet guy telling a second-hand story is "hard evidence" of anything?

It's possible, but it's also possible that the owner doesn't really know if Yelp is actually guilty of anything, and they're afraid that an investigation would find that the reviews are legitimate, making the owner look bad.

The video posted below has pretty good evidence of what's going on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY

He shows how he talked to a sales person at Yelp, received a bad review, which he proves is fake by showing a search from his CRM, than digs into the social media accounts of the Yelp sales person, and finds the yelp reviewer who left the bad review (but didn't have an invoice) was a friend of the sales person.

even if this is just a rouge yelp sales person, there is clearly something systematically wrong here.

It doesn't have to be that people are making stuff up. Yelp is a big site, and there will always be some people who have really bad luck, even if everyone's being honest. If popular opinion focuses on those stories, and no one really tells the stories of people who have good experiences (because why would you tell a boring story :p), it can sound like Yelp is making it happen deliberately.

It also doesn't require a coordinated conspiracy. Yelp salespeople are like anyone else...there are some a-holes in the bunch. They could, individually, make this sort of thing happen. Even without any admin access. A few fake accounts, or friends and family, etc.

A subset of restaurant owners will get negative reviews after cancellations, it doesn't necessarily mean that those two things are correlated. Neither the Reddit post, nor the comment you link to actually bother to link to these negative reviews. It would go a long way to show even the slightest bit of evidence.

It's possible that the friend made it up or exaggerated. Kind of like when you send your drunk friend home in an Uber and you get a bill for cleaning up vomit. Your friend insists they didn't, but it's plausible that they simply don't remember.

Looks like they are working on it.

http://yelplawsuit.com/