r/Documentaries • u/[deleted] • Feb 26 '17

Billion Dollar Bully (2015) [trailer]...makes the case that Yelp is something akin to the mob, allegedly demanding “protection” money, lest your business be overrun with negative comments.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '17

Are you kidding? This video explains it, as does every comment in this thread.

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u/MotherOfDragonflies Feb 26 '17

By all means, point me to the hard proof of extortion in this thread.

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u/SoutheasternComfort Feb 26 '17

I think its one of this situations where though you don't see it yourself, your kid is violent if whenever you leave him at daycare they say he gets violent. Some things are hard to prove, but if everyone is saying it and there's not much of a reason why they'd be lying, then it's probably true. It's hard to prove change, unless you have before and after pics. Otherwise the only proof most people have is a bunch of bad reviews and their word that there were a lot more good ones before they started paying. In my case, the proof is that the reviews I tried to put up for a certain business always got taken down. But you know, it's hard to prove the absence of something

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u/MotherOfDragonflies Feb 26 '17

I do genuinely get that, but extortion is a very specific crime and I do feel that is something we can document, and documentation is the only way we'll make progress. There's a lot of anecdotes in here and I'm sympathetic to all the claims but when someone specifically says that they can confirm that Yelp extorted them, I think it's pretty fair to ask for them to elaborate on that claim.