this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site's new index documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a five-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of suspicious activity, like spamming the site with multiple reviews from a single IP address.

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Doesn't yelp let businesses erase poor reviews for a fee? Is the only difference here that yelp isn't getting paid?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yelp used to approach businesses with proposals to to that, yes. Had a friend with a small business years ago and he would get called by Yelp constantly trying to get him to pay to improve his reviews. It's so shady.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's why it's ironic, for a long time they basically ran a small business extortion arm for any business to consumer business. A family member had the nightmare of dealing with people coming to his house, because that's what the address was and it sounded like a retail business. The bank brought up his negative yelp reviews and he had to explain how he wasn't going to pay them $5k to delete reviews that they caused in the first place by missclasifying his business space. No customers were or would ever be served there.

It's like if you had a family peach canning business that grew really large. You no longer can your awesome peaches there, because you have canning facilities that you work with. But Yelp refuses to delist your business and then you have to fight with them for years about negative reviews of your peach place, that no one has actually been to but somehow has a lot of weird ideas of how to better the experience... And when you fight them they say the only solution is to pay them a fee that they calculated out of their butt to the tune of 1-5k.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yelp does not do that, those are scammers.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah! Of course I didn't click the link, but 3rd party delivery businesses are rarely more than rent-seekers. Hating on one of their restaurant clients is bad for their bad business.

*Yelp isn't a delivery service, my b. Statement stands in a smaller context.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So, like Unity, they just want to increase their share?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Pretty much. They aren't a trusted intermediary at all.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do they also notify users that they are the largest score manipulator by far of their data? And that they do so to bully small businesses to pay up or they will ruin them?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Of course not.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

So is it any wonder that a business would hire fake reviewers to increase their Yelp score, when Yelp holds these businesses hostage with their outrageous policies for bad reviews? Those reviews can make or break a small business. I'm not exactly sympathetic with hiring fake reviewers, yet I'm not sympathetic AT ALL with Yelp's business model.

Yelp needs to change how it vets reviews, and have better handling of a business' response and deletion of irresponsible patron reviews.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can someone name and shame yelp for automatically generating pages for business listings that don't exist like TOP 10 BEST CANTONESE FUSION RESTAURANTS IN HARPERS FERRY.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Are there even 10 restaurants in Harper's Ferry?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yelp is a failed experiment. Let it die.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

⭐️ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Dick_Justice is an asshole

We realize negative comments can disproportionately affect newer Lemmy users like you. For a small fee and a big apology, we'd be happy to make sure these most-likely unjust reviews do not impact your overall rating. We'd sure hate for this one-star review to accidentally end up as the top review for such a nice user as yourself.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

"More at six..."

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yelp is just the BBB for millennials. Fuck both of these extortionist organizations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

how could we build a federated open replacement for B2C reviews and ratings without getting it corrupted?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

With code and algorithms

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

One step that could help would be to require proof that you actually went to $location

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Only a couple of decades too late.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yelp names their own competitors in the "extorting businesses for good reviews" racket.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lol, like anyone would ever trust Yelp again. How are they even still in business?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Boomers. Same as BBB.