This is not a thing. No one at Yelp does this. There is literally zero evidence that Yelp does this.

Not sure why you're downvoted. The general public (including OP) still believes that Yelp manages reviews differently for businesses that purchase advertising.

There is zero physical evidence that Yelp does or ever did this. The only thing that Yelp ever did was move one positive review to the top of the page for advertisers, and I'm pretty sure they abandoned that practice a long time ago.

It's pretty obvious to me that unsophisticated business owners are simply drawing false inferences when they receive a sales call and then receive a negative review. Confirmation bias at work.

Here's an old Hacker News comment that seems to me to probably be close to reality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149078

Ok, just keep pretending it isn't happening. But the owners of thousands of small cafes & restaurants would bend your ear for hours with bullshit they have to deal with.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

Louis Rossmann has a Mac repair store in New York and, when I was subscribed to him, had posted numerous videos about his experiences with Yelp.

One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso

To summarize: Yelp account exec shared another business owner's stats with Louis. Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp and the account exec got fired. The fired account exec took it personally and got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.

That's evidence that Yelp practices extortion?

This actually convinced me that Yelp is probably unfairly being targeted. I had come into this thinking that they were in fact unethical.

However, this video very clearly shows a family who incorrectly blames the business owner for one of their members losing a job. Yelp fired them, as they should have.

Just pointing out what I had heard when I was subscribed to someone who had experiences with Yelp. Honestly, I found his latest video on the subject, after searching for 'yelp extortion,' which doesn't appear to be the best one to start with.

https://youtu.be/BHEbVh3Yhrw?t=442 may be better, as he talks with two of the people behind the movie Billion Dollar Bully. (I didn't re-watch it completely, as I don't want to get myself wrapped back up in his world.)

As it notes in https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/billion-dollar-bully-do... and the above, if Yelp's culture means that employees are getting away with it, and sharing that, and tend to work with people who aren't web-savvy, there's certainly the opportunity for certain individuals within the company to give the company a bad name.

For-profit businesses, especially ones that want everyone to use them, generally don't like to talk about the fact that some part of why they exist is for the money and/or they have stakeholders that want to see a return on their investment.

It's also possible that Yelp has since gotten better, and they're still fighting off the old perspectives. Not OP so not sure where their evidence came from.

(I personally rarely use Yelp, don't have an account, and prefer the reviews built into Google Maps since that's my navigation app of choice. I didn't know about issues with Yelp until I was subscribed about the above, and after unsubscribing numerous months ago haven't heard anything else about Yelp until now.)

This is not evidence.

i just watched the video and it seems more like the story of an ex-employee being upset at the narrator for being involved in their termination (due to arguably bad judgement).

i don't see what yelp had to do with it.

Don't they create profiles of businesses, ask for reviews from the public and will only take them down after paying?

If that’s true, the only part that’s in any way wrong about that is allowing businesses to affect reviews at all.

For Yelp it seems like it's more of a failure to innovate and grow beyond their initial review site concept. The idea was good, but easily challengrd by others who bring additional utility to the table like OpenTable and Google Maps.

I don't see it that way. It's a review site. There is no need for it to innovate beyond that, nor is there any basis for thinking that reviews should be enough to take a company public.

If they're doing that, then you know that the end goal is ads, ads, ads.

I see it differently: Yelp has built a platform that has a large audience. If you don't pay for certain things then you don't get visibility in their platform. Everyone from Google to Capterra does some version of the same thing. You can call it "shaking down" local businesses but no one is entitled to positive or even fair promotion on someone else's platform.

There are numerous accounts of businesses receiving calls from Yelp salespeople essentially telling them to buy an ad package or the negative reviews get prioritized.

I agree that no one is entitled to positive promotion, but to argue that a massive platform that's established itself as the go-to place for consumer business reviews absolutely should be held to fair promotion.

I can't believe that this an argument on HN. You're saying that if you had a small business with a Yelp profile and I found your identity and started posting false negative reviews on your business profile, you'd have no problem being called by a Yelp rep to pay money to make them go away?

> There are numerous accounts of businesses receiving calls from Yelp salespeople essentially telling them to buy an ad package or the negative reviews get prioritized.

Sure, there are numerous accounts (read:hearsay) but there's zero physical or hard evidence.

After all this press, don't you think there'd be at least one recorded phone conversation or email that showed up in the numerous lawsuits' discovery processes?

There is literally zero physical evidence corroborating Yelp account execs' extortive practices.

Louis Rossmann disagrees - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hhL15yJUnI

To summarize:

- A Yelp account exec inappropriately shared another business's profile stats with Louis.

- Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp, and Yelp decided to fire the account exec.

- The fired account exec blamed Louis for getting fired and subsequently got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.

That's not evidence that Yelp practices extortion.

Louis also found negative reviews from people who didn't live in his community and who were also friends with the Yelp salespeople who attempted to solicit business from Louis, which is so egregious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY

I acknowledged that in my previous comment. All the fake reviews were written by friends of the fired sales rep.

Basically, Louis got the rep fired, and the rep went haywire. This doesn't suggest Yelp has extortive sales practices. If anything, Yelp made the right decision to fire this sales rep who breached privacy protocol.

You’ve moved the goalposts here though. You first argued how none of these small business owners brought forward evidence and therefore this isn’t a real scandal, and then you concede that this is a legitimate example but Yelp handled it correctly by firing the rep.

When hundreds of small business owners make accusations against one company like this, and people like Louis being tangible evidence forward, a full investigation of these practices is warranted, which hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge.

This smells like a toxic sales culture that enables people to take advantage of small businesses as long as they don’t get caught. Many small business owners probably don’t have the energy or ability to do the research that Louis did, but his findings were pretty shocking.

How many more small business owners need to take time away from revenue generating activity to discover this kind of coordination before you’re satisfied that there’s a real issue here?

> You’ve moved the goalposts here though. You first argued how none of these small business owners brought forward evidence and therefore this isn’t a real scandal.

I never moved the goalpost. My claim has always been that there is zero physical evidence of Yelp extorting small businesses.

The posted video is not evidence of Yelp extorting business. It's an example of a fired Yelp employee blaming a business owner for getting fired, and taking it out on the business owner's Yelp page. That is not extortion on behalf of Yelp.

> When hundreds of small business owners make accusations against one company like this, and people like Louis being tangible evidence forward, a full investigation of these practices is warranted, which hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge.

There have been countless lawsuits filed against Yelp for extortion. All of them have been dismissed -- not settled; dismissed. Google is your friend.

This is exactly the video I was about to respond with

Why shouldn't negative reviews get priority? I'm not simply playing devils advocate but genuinely curious. If I go to a restaurant and there are 100 reviews that break essentially as 80 good, 10 mediocre, and 10 "there are rats in the kitchen" then dont all of them have SOMETHING useful for me? And an average star rating system blends that utility? Positive reviews are dishonest as often as negative reviews I would guess. And negative reviews are as honest as often as positive reviews as well I would guess.

Ok, well then I suppose that you agree that I am free to spread false rumors about you, as long as I do it on a platform that is privately owned?

You can already spread false rumors about anyone or anything with your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. There's very little stopping you (within reason, of course).

That sure sounds like potential defamation.

Ha good luck suing for defamation for every random tweet and internet comment from a bunch of random nobodies. That's neither possible nor sustainable.

Oh you're right I guess this situation would only really apply to large identifiable entities, like maybe tech corporations that selectively surface and moderate reviews.

Yelp would _never_ do that. Far too moral.

Who said anything about false rumors?

I’m not sure if they do this as I’m not willing to pay to find out. But when their salesperson called me I had a discussion with them about how the first review that shows up, the one that’s a thumbnail when my business appears on other listings, is from 2012 and pertains to the business before I bought it and changed management. Not just that but it’s clearly a vengeful review written by a crazy person. I told them that I have no interest in making my profile more visible if that is what Yelp considers a quality review. (As usual, all of the decent reviews are “hidden”.) My good reviews were unsolicited.

If Yelp is in trouble, maybe their quality should get another look.

>Companies like this always start with a noble purpose, before the pressure to monetize causes them to ruin what was once a valuable service.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Hell, maybe you can argue Netflix's algorithms have taken a turn for the worse, but to their credit Netflix is the only FAANG+ company (not that Yelp is in this bucket) which really hasn't "gotten evil" over time

The Yellow Pages used to do the same thing before the internet. There is always money in being a monopoly of something. The problem for Yelp (and really, most other platform companies) is they are beholden to G, the mother of all monopolies, who can cut off their gravy train at a moment's notice.