Companies like this always start with a noble purpose, before the pressure to monetize causes them to ruin what was once a valuable service.
There is zero physical evidence that Yelp does or ever did this. The only thing that Yelp ever did was move one positive review to the top of the page for advertisers, and I'm pretty sure they abandoned that practice a long time ago.
It's pretty obvious to me that unsophisticated business owners are simply drawing false inferences when they receive a sales call and then receive a negative review. Confirmation bias at work.
Here's an old Hacker News comment that seems to me to probably be close to reality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149078
One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso
That's evidence that Yelp practices extortion?
However, this video very clearly shows a family who incorrectly blames the business owner for one of their members losing a job. Yelp fired them, as they should have.
https://youtu.be/BHEbVh3Yhrw?t=442 may be better, as he talks with two of the people behind the movie Billion Dollar Bully. (I didn't re-watch it completely, as I don't want to get myself wrapped back up in his world.)
As it notes in https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/billion-dollar-bully-do... and the above, if Yelp's culture means that employees are getting away with it, and sharing that, and tend to work with people who aren't web-savvy, there's certainly the opportunity for certain individuals within the company to give the company a bad name.
For-profit businesses, especially ones that want everyone to use them, generally don't like to talk about the fact that some part of why they exist is for the money and/or they have stakeholders that want to see a return on their investment.
It's also possible that Yelp has since gotten better, and they're still fighting off the old perspectives. Not OP so not sure where their evidence came from.
(I personally rarely use Yelp, don't have an account, and prefer the reviews built into Google Maps since that's my navigation app of choice. I didn't know about issues with Yelp until I was subscribed about the above, and after unsubscribing numerous months ago haven't heard anything else about Yelp until now.)
i don't see what yelp had to do with it.
If they're doing that, then you know that the end goal is ads, ads, ads.
I agree that no one is entitled to positive promotion, but to argue that a massive platform that's established itself as the go-to place for consumer business reviews absolutely should be held to fair promotion.
I can't believe that this an argument on HN. You're saying that if you had a small business with a Yelp profile and I found your identity and started posting false negative reviews on your business profile, you'd have no problem being called by a Yelp rep to pay money to make them go away?
Sure, there are numerous accounts (read:hearsay) but there's zero physical or hard evidence.
After all this press, don't you think there'd be at least one recorded phone conversation or email that showed up in the numerous lawsuits' discovery processes?
There is literally zero physical evidence corroborating Yelp account execs' extortive practices.
- A Yelp account exec inappropriately shared another business's profile stats with Louis.
- Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp, and Yelp decided to fire the account exec.
- The fired account exec blamed Louis for getting fired and subsequently got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.
That's not evidence that Yelp practices extortion.
Basically, Louis got the rep fired, and the rep went haywire. This doesn't suggest Yelp has extortive sales practices. If anything, Yelp made the right decision to fire this sales rep who breached privacy protocol.
When hundreds of small business owners make accusations against one company like this, and people like Louis being tangible evidence forward, a full investigation of these practices is warranted, which hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge.
This smells like a toxic sales culture that enables people to take advantage of small businesses as long as they don’t get caught. Many small business owners probably don’t have the energy or ability to do the research that Louis did, but his findings were pretty shocking.
How many more small business owners need to take time away from revenue generating activity to discover this kind of coordination before you’re satisfied that there’s a real issue here?
I never moved the goalpost. My claim has always been that there is zero physical evidence of Yelp extorting small businesses.
The posted video is not evidence of Yelp extorting business. It's an example of a fired Yelp employee blaming a business owner for getting fired, and taking it out on the business owner's Yelp page. That is not extortion on behalf of Yelp.
> When hundreds of small business owners make accusations against one company like this, and people like Louis being tangible evidence forward, a full investigation of these practices is warranted, which hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge.
There have been countless lawsuits filed against Yelp for extortion. All of them have been dismissed -- not settled; dismissed. Google is your friend.
If Yelp is in trouble, maybe their quality should get another look.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
Hell, maybe you can argue Netflix's algorithms have taken a turn for the worse, but to their credit Netflix is the only FAANG+ company (not that Yelp is in this bucket) which really hasn't "gotten evil" over time