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Comment by obmelvin | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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