Hacker News Reader

Seems a lot of reviews are hidden. Suspect they hide good reviews unless the owner pays to be an advertiser.

They hide reviews of newly active users without histories. The idea (at least) is to prevent fraud of owners asking their friends to make yelp accounts.

The same way HN uses green usernames.

I understood they do NOT hide reviews unless you pay; so if you get bad reviews you can sign up and hide them.

But perhaps they do the other thing that you suggest too.

They don't do either of these things. There are some anecdotes online but no evidence of this happening.

Was that always true? I had a call from Yelp at work where one of the selling points was controlling your profile, in which they mentioned "removing spam" and "offensive reviews" (they might have said "fake"). I took that euphemistically when combined with rumours I'd heard. But that was some years ago (maybe 5+, in UK); and could have been overselling or phishing by a third party I suppose.

How do you handle offensive reviews (like swearing, libel, personal details), do Yelp really manually intervene?

Don't they remove fake reviews, in which case a business can say the review is fake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com