> In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read?

I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? If this were the case, we'd reach one of those dumb school-book economic equilibriums where no class-action lawsuits would take place. Businesses evaluate the risk of doing things, balancing profit against loss. Exposure to a lawsuit is just another number in that calculation.

> independent scientific study

That study is looking at whether fraudulent reviews are being added to the platform, not whether Yelp is calling up businesses and offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for money, which was my understanding of the original complaints against Yelp.

>I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things?

Businesses doing shady things will dance around the allegation of shadiness with clever language, legalese, and PR-talk to avoid saying the truth. They will rarely intentionally give an unequivocally simple and straightforward answer when there is some truth the allegation.

Or... just informally incentivize employees to do the wrong thing and make sure they have (or refuse to remove availability of) the tools they use to do so.

If yelp has salespeople that can alter reviews or how they show in any way, and those salespeople are incentivized to hit sales numbers, some subset of them will use the tools at their disposal to facilitate their sales.

In this theoretical scenario, is Yelp extorting businesses? No, it's just a few bad employees with an outside influence (and outsize sales numbers likely, too). But if Yelp knows about this and does nothing about it? It's gets more complicated then, and almost impossible to prove.

That's just one possible scenario where Yelp's statement is true, and the people reporting extortion are also being truthful, and depending on the details, Yelp is or isn't complicit in some way. A simple statement from either side doesn't really eliminate myriad possible situations like this, but given the number of reported instances of businesses having problems, I'm not so willing to discount that something is going on.

>If yelp has salespeople that can alter reviews or how they show in any way, and those salespeople are incentivized to hit sales numbers, some subset of them will use the tools at their disposal to facilitate their sales.

I've been threatened by SEO sales people that they can hurt my site's search rankings if I don't sign up for their service. There are robocallers[1] that pretend to be Google employees making these threats. Does that mean they have direct access into Google's database, or even the power to fulfill their threats? Do you think that local businesses, often run by much less technically-literate people, aren't hit by the same kind of scam for their online reviews?

[1]:https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-robocall-scam-were-suin...

I'm sure they probably are at some times. My only point was to say that there are situations where a statement from Yelp to the contrary doesn't really mean something isn't happening, with or without Yelp's informal approval, so it doesn't necessarily put the discussion to bed. It's just one more point of reference, and should be seen as such when people are making their own assessment of the situation.

Someone hearing complaints of Yelp coercing people shouldn't immediately believe it or believe it explains the whole situation, and neither should someone hearing Yelp's response. They are both possible insights into the actual reality of the situation, which may accurately describe part or al of that reality to varying degrees, and should be seen as exactly that.

We're getting off topic; are you suggesting that the people calling small businesses claiming to be Yelp employees are lying about who they work for?

This HBS Associate Prof just seems like a pro-yelper. He has another paper about how ads on yelp really work!

Hmm, I wonder why Yelp would keep mentioning him.

https://blog.yelp.com/2016/10/academic-study-shows-yelp-ads-...