Most companies face stiff competition and that's no reason to excuse immoral behavior. Not to mention that Google tried to acquire Yelp and was turned down. Either Yelp's plan to take on Google always included copious dark patterns, or their earlier plans totally failed and this is what they've fallen back on. Either way Yelp can't die soon enough.

What are you talking about stiff competition? Google just lazily cloned it and hijack the results of restaurant searches so they win by default.

You challenge that it is stiff competition in your first sentence, then you define that Google is, indeed, stiff competition in your second.

Hijacking search results because they are sour the Yelp deal didn't go their way isn't competing LOL. They've already been fined billions for similar behavior.

They own the search results. Google isn't a public utility that gets hijacked.

Yelp can start their own search competitor if they enjoy(ed) the synergy.

EU regulators disagree.

They could have just done a better job and not been shady. Not that hard really.

Google also did it better, but that's just my opinion.

They're still pretty bad

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/20/18693144/google-maps-fake...

the moment became apparent that bad review removal (or yelp "sorting" them to the very bottom) was available to paying users yelp lost my trust. they don't have anyone else to blame for that.