Hacker News Reader

Comment by pgsbathhouse2 | Hacker News Reader

This is not a thing. No one at Yelp does this. There is literally zero evidence that Yelp does this.

Not sure why you're downvoted. The general public (including OP) still believes that Yelp manages reviews differently for businesses that purchase advertising.

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

Ok, just keep pretending it isn't happening. But the owners of thousands of small cafes & restaurants would bend your ear for hours with bullshit they have to deal with.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

Louis Rossmann has a Mac repair store in New York and, when I was subscribed to him, had posted numerous videos about his experiences with Yelp.

One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso

To summarize: Yelp account exec shared another business owner's stats with Louis. Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp and the account exec got fired. The fired account exec took it personally and got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.

That's evidence that Yelp practices extortion?

This actually convinced me that Yelp is probably unfairly being targeted. I had come into this thinking that they were in fact unethical.

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.

Just pointing out what I had heard when I was subscribed to someone who had experiences with Yelp. Honestly, I found his latest video on the subject, after searching for 'yelp extortion,' which doesn't appear to be the best one to start with.

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.)

This is not evidence.

i just watched the video and it seems more like the story of an ex-employee being upset at the narrator for being involved in their termination (due to arguably bad judgement).

i don't see what yelp had to do with it.

Don't they create profiles of businesses, ask for reviews from the public and will only take them down after paying?

If that’s true, the only part that’s in any way wrong about that is allowing businesses to affect reviews at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com