> I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company. The execution of the threat is only important when you want the consequences of non-compliance broadly known. Yelp may not alter the reviews themselves, but it does change the sorting of reviews and images for paying customers.Īlso the willingness/capability to carry through on the threat used in extortion isn't directly required, just the threat itself. > If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence They've probably carefully avoided lying while still being as misleading as possible. > or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? You're just paying for them to contact the customer and hide their bad review. No one has to pay to be listed by the BBB but you can pay for the BBB to "arbitrate" disputes between consumers and your business when someone posts a strike against you on their site. It's completely up to them and they totally line up with whether or not a company pays for Yelp's "services". Since every single one of those terms is subjective, they can change what constitutes a "recommended" review and be completely subjective about why one review is "trusted" and another isn't. They claim that these reviews are hidden behind this wall because they're from users whose reviews are biased or who don't have enough patterns to be "trusted" but this is literally just their way of hiding the reviews that people don't pay for. If you look at any Yelp business page, you'll see a tiny little link at the bottom that says "See reviews that aren't Recommended". What they're doing is sorting by "Yelp Sort" and listing "Recommended" reviews. Yes, they can say that they're not "deleting" or "altering" reviews because that's not what they're doing. This is where the nuance of their scumminess comes in and where you're either ignoring or are ignorant of it. You will even find my original 5 star review, so perhaps they made a copy of it to get it to show. Go have a look for yourself, scroll to the bottom of that shop and click the "x Reviews that are currently not recommended" link in gray at the bottom. A few other reviews have been accepted since. However, within a day my review was the only recommended review, and the barber shop was live on the site instead of gray. They assured me that an algorithm decides what reviews are recommended for protection of customers and that's all that's happening. I wrote Yelp support to ask why this review was censored, despite my other reviews for other businesses being accepted. I wasn't the first to review the shop, the other reviews were hidden. After carefully reading the site, I found that the keyword is "0 Recommended Reviews." At the bottom is a gray link that leads to more than a dozen reviews that are "Not Recommended", all 5-star, including my own. Upon checking Yelp, I noticed that the shop was still gray with 0 reviews, despite having left one a month ago myself. I heard the same story about Yelp pressuring for sales, and mentioned that I had already written a 5-star review. A month later, I returned for my second haircut and asked about business. Great little shop, I was surprised that it had zero reviews and was gray in Yelp. Having said that, I have firsthand experience in having my own review of such a business censored:Ħ months ago I wrote a review for the RazzleDazzle Barber Shop in Riverview, FL. I think the challenge with finding firsthand reports on HN is that the owners of small brick-and-mortar businesses that Yelp is alleged to exploit are not well represented in this community. I'm looking at a fully expanded review in mobile safari right now. You literally do not need the mobile app or even render the desktop site to read full reviews. I despise mobile apps as much as the next person but I hardly see how Yelp is unique or even worse than others here. I can't say the same of Twitter, Tumblr, and most major other sites. On the mobile experience, what are you referring to? The mobile site is fully functional with reviews, search, ratings, etc. I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company. I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above - or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as I have yet to see anything but anecdotal stories about some folks getting a phone call from someone allegedly from yelp allegedly having the power to do this.
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