Yelp Accused of Hiding Positive Reviews for Non-Advertiser

Yes, they do hide reviews regularly - and their marketing team basically tells you if you own a business listed on Yelp with correct information. Positive reviews get hidden for non-advertisers, negative ones for advertisers. In essence when you switch from consumer side to business-owner side, the site goes from a friendly place to post reviews into a vicious protection racket - i.e. "That's a nice reputation you got there, pal. Be a shame if something... happened to it, y'know?" I wish that was so very different than what their official team members said on the phone.

>A statement was sent along with a screenshot of 14 reviews Yelp claims came from the same IP address belonging to Sinnott’s Yelp account.

Probably because they were all on the cafe's wifi network when they reviewed the place.

This could be easily answered by asking on Blind for an anonymous confirmation of whether or not there is any biasing factor built into the codebase.

My opinion is not, the algorithm has been examined by 3rd parties and if there are bad actors it’s probably overeager salespeople who will say anything to make their quota.

I also tend to believe that fraud detection is also playing a big part in the form of false positives in identifying untrustworthy 5-star reviews. I’m a Yelper myself and my SO is Yelp Elite and it’s not very commmon that good reviewers write reviews on the spot (using cafe wifi) for restaurants. I’m sure some store owners prod their customers to create Yelp accounts to rate them or have a sign up with “Rate us 5-stars on Yelp” which is fine but would make these reviews from new members more suspicious.

We've updated the link from https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-accuse....

Fits the standard narrative (and I love to hate Yelp), but is there any proof?

Why did you hell ban me?