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?
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.
- 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.
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.
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?
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.