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Comment by sharadov | Hacker News Reader

They are becoming Yelp.

I could write a similar story to one about Glassdoor on Yelp -- they banned me from leaving a review because I had professional experience in the same field. Even though I wasn't actively in the field and offered to prove through a number of pieces of documentation, they considered it to be "attacking competitors".

Per this, that means they only allow non-professional reviews on their platform. So if one professional sees flaws/someone getting duped, they're helpless to point it out.

I heard that Yelp lets you pay to have bad reviews sorted towards the bottom. I recently listened to a podcast episode [0], where the CEO claimed that is not true. Would be interested in evidence on either side.

[0] - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918845338/how-i-built-resilie...

Yelp has class action lawsuits filed against them. Scumbags!

This? https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-finally-d...

It's even worse than that, Yelp has been accused and proven that they write or have written bad reviews themselves.

Lous Rossmann goes over this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYzK8Nny_Yo

Rossman exploded on Reddit with an Apple device repair rant several years ago, and then leaned super hard into that to keep his views up.

Much like Glassdoor, I find it hard to trust him since it’s clear he has a moneymaker. He’s incentivized to accuse the Big Corps of wrongdoing and he never has to back it up.

He owns a apple repair shop and complains about apple all the time. He just happened to go viral on reddit once (actually a few times). He makes most of his money from his repair business, his sitting-in-a-chair videos (that aren't about apple), and his bike videos are just him talking. I don't really agree with a lot of what he says (esp. about NYC) but I don't think he's being biased in this video.

This issue is complicated by the fact that there's a thriving ecosystem of marketers and scammers who operate around Yelp, and will call and tell you they work for Yelp and can have negative reviews removed and other things. So people really are getting these calls, it's just that it's a scam.

Isn't this just extortion and racketeering with extra steps.

"Hey I have this magic problem I created for you, now you have to pay me to fix it or your business will dry up."

I think you missed that it's third parties offering to perform these services. They target Yelp because it's one of the more prominent review sites, but I've gotten calls from people claiming to be able to manipulate Google reviews as well.

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