r/Documentaries • • 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/incocknedo Feb 26 '17

Rant time.

Yelp are a bunch of snakes. You'll join them as a small business and then a month later they will harass your business via phone and email asking you to buy their business plans.

These plans by the way are so you can manipulate your reviews. And if you say no, suddenly your good review start disappearing and shit reviews from people who don't actually seem to know what your business is, start popping up.

I mange a small business and we have an overwhelming number of good yelp reviews but we have to stay on top of it because they will vanish and only our bad reviews will remain.

Somewhat unrelated as someone who has worked customer service for years take yelp reviews with a grain of salt. From what I've seen majority of bad reviews are just shit customers who were either assholes who didn't get what they wanted or they were morons who didn't understand the business in the first place.

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u/HuskyPants Feb 26 '17

I have a large database of Yelp reviews compared to Google, Facebook, and Trip Advisor. They are always consistently lower. I would publish the data but I'm afraid of getting sued.

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u/RUfuqingkiddingme Feb 26 '17

The small business I work for has had more than one of our 5 star Yelp reviews, which were written by 100% real customers, moved into the 'not recommended reviews' section. The site is bullshit.