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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

> A Yelp post from December 2017 was the first crucial clue. “Melissa R.” wrote, “I was offered money to leave a positive review for Savant Care Clinic. Must be a shady company.” The user attached Craigslist screenshots of the apparent offer, which Dean took her own screenshot of just before Yelp removed the post for violating its terms of service.

Why would Yelp forbid people from talking about this? While it is certainly possible to create fake email screenshots, this seems like a relatively small risk compared to the much more common risk that's being called out here.

I guess they just don't want people to know how common this type of occurrence is, since it would undermine all trust in their platform.

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The risk (mostly) isn't fake email screenshots, the risk is that I create postings for (or even commit to paying for fake reviews for) my competitor, and tarnish their reputation. It's hard to establish provenance of such an arrangement.

I think we're thinking the same thing — that someone would (on their own or for money) write a review claiming that an innocent business had tried to pay for a good review, or take down a bad review. This could happen, but it's just as easy to pay someone to write a review saying the service/food/etc. was lousy. Why spend more time faking an email screenshot?

But from Yelp's perspective, a paid-for review claiming bad food is just fine, because it only tarnishes the restaurant's reputation. On the other hand, a claim of fraudulent review manipulation hits both the business and Yelp's reputations.

It'd be easy for a reader to ignore a review about the quality of food since that's subjective on the reviewer's personal tastes.

A review claiming paid-for-fraud isn't so easy to wave off.

It's not in Yelp's interest to publish content that undermines the credibility of their entire product.

I think they tend to interpret anything that makes Yelp look bad as a violation. The owner of a wine store I bought thousands of dollars of wine from was arrested for running a $45 million Ponzi scheme (and eventually went to prison for years). I immediately put up a review, and Yelp took it down because the arrest wasn't my personal experience. Never mind that I had to get refunded by my credit card company. I was doing a public service, as a customer, and Yelp wouldn't let me. I took down all my reviews and deleted my account.

Yelp's stated policy is to remove reviews by people who didn't actually directly interact with the business, regardless of the content.

So if I went to a business and was solicited by an employee, I could mention that in a review without it being taken down?

I'm guessing the ToS violation was that the review wasn't about an actual visit to the business, but was just a report of a Cragslist ad the user saw about buying reviews.

I agree that this sort of information is useful for potential patrons to have, but can understand that Yelp wants their reviews to be about actual visits.

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