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Comment by ivanca | Hacker News Reader

Is a common believe by some people that the business model of Yelp for big restaurants is plain old extortion: "Please Pay us a fee to have premium priority! Otherwise some strange negative reviews may appear that you cannot refute nor delete."

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I believe the details of the extortion scam is that if you don't pay up, they "flag" all of the positive reviews so that they are not shown by default and not included in the average. The algorithm for flagging is of course "proprietary."

Hey, that's the BBB we are talking about here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw

Watch the whole video if you haven't seen it before.

It is also a common belief by some people that homeopathy is effective.

It is also a common belief by some people that breathing air is necessary to stay alive

There is just too many beliefs, we need an app to destroy them all. /cj /s

I believe there are some instances where business owners claim that Yelp offered to 'make bad reviews go away' if they sign up the premium service (i.e. start paying Yelp money). Even if Yelp! doesn't mess with the reviews otherwise (flagging positive reviews, creating bogus negative reviews, etc), that seems very much anti-user (at least towards the people looking for recommendations).

Yeah, but homeopathy has no financial incentive to work. Chemistry just doesn't care about things like revenue. Yelp! on the other hand...

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