More evidence from fellow hacker - http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html
also, speaking to his specific claims of "extortion", i don't believe they hold water. paying a fee to put your favorite review on top or putting sponsored links on the site (like google) seems pretty legit to me. deleting negative reviews etc is shady, but i think the jury is out whether that is true or not.
i know i've personally found yelp invaluable moving around to new cities over the past few years. being someone who loves food, i find the vast majority of the time the reviews of restaurants are completely on point, especially if you know how to parse through the comments. does anyone remember the days when the only thing that existed was citysearch? what a piece of junk. i've found so many amazing places on yelp that i wouldn't have found otherwise.
in my experience most small businesses (mostly restaurants) i ask about yelp love it. i ran into a restaurant owner who's friends with a friend of mine in berkeley a few months ago. he was ecstatic about yelp because that night 20 of his seats were filled by yelp alone.
i'm all for exposing shady practices of yelp or any other company for that matter, but most of this stuff is baseless.
Are you kidding? It's a review site! Silently manipulating results based on payment from the reviewees is a hideous betrayal of trust. It is absolutely NOT legit.
"in my experience most small businesses (mostly restaurants) i ask about yelp love it"
Who the hell walks around asking businesses what they think about Yelp? Got something to tell us? I'd call you an astroturfer right now if you hadn't been a member so long.
"i'm all for exposing shady practices of yelp or any other company for that matter, but most of this stuff is baseless."
Baseless, is it? Well, I'm waiting for this inside info you've obviously got. Sounds pretty base-ful to me.
2. haha, oh man, i guess i can see how someone thinks im an employee, but in reality i'm an entrepreneur (yc w08 actually) who lives in san francisco. i like to have conversations with business people of all types, and it fascinates me that yelp is changing the fabric of small business. so yes... when i meet a restaurant owner i do ask them what they think of yelp. actually, a lot times they ask me, "how did you find us?" maybe i'm just too friendly or inquisitive?
full disclosure: i do have a friend and some acquaintances that work at yelp. running a startup in sf it's hard to not be connected to other startups in this city in some way shape or form.
3. i should have made this more clear, but i was speaking of jwz's "stuff" being baseless. it was 4am when i wrote that post so forgive me.
going through jwz's complaints he's essentially saying the reviewers are idiots. yeah, some are! so what! some people are idiots in real life too. the funny thing is it seems like yelp has spawned some healthy conversation about dna's bathrooms, specifically how much girls detest them for not having seats on the toilets (true).
extortion claims? granted if you don't agree with #1 then you may see direct sales as extortion, but i tend to believe it's not. i've never received a call myself so i'll reserve judgement until i do :)
does anyone on HN actually use yelp? have you guys ever talked to a small business person who's had interactions with yelp?
did anyone actually look at this:
http://yelp.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452b44469e2011278fa14eb28a...
the favorite review is clearly marked. seriously - if the claims of reviews disappearing maliciously are true then sure let's hang yelp from the gallows. i do know for a fact that they're quite aggressive about anti-spam for being such a large site.
the fact is they've had such a positive effect on my life that i'm willing to actually hear the other side.
So shenanigans or not, IMHO Yelp is still a valuable resource.
I too don't really see a problem with a clearly marked, "highlighted" review. If Yelp is dropping bad reviews in exchange for sponsorship (or worse, writing fake bad reviews), I would take issue.