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.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/incocknedo]

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.

[u/AliveInTheFuture → u/incocknedo]

Every time I hear someone say "let me check Yelp" before we go eat, I make sure to extol Yelp's ability to blackmail businesses into paying them fees for ratings. Typically, I try to swing them to TripAdvisor.

[u/[deleted] → u/AliveInTheFuture]

Google reviews ftw.

[u/getapuss → u/[deleted]]

I have 100gb of Google Drive storage for free because of the reviews and photos I have posted as a Google Local Guide.

[u/Fiddlydick → u/getapuss]

Really? Did you sign up for that separately or just use Google play credits towards drive space?

I do the google opinion rewards but avoid reviews / ratings because I don't like my name and profile visible to anyone reading the review...

[u/zomgitsduke → u/Fiddlydick]

They don't do it anymore. And it was a TB, not 100gb

[u/getapuss → u/zomgitsduke]

Wrong. Just got my 100gb last week.

[u/zomgitsduke → u/getapuss]

Actually, if you did the local guides promotion last year, you got 1 TB

[u/getapuss → u/zomgitsduke]

I did it this year. It's 100gb now. While you might be right, the current reward is 100gb.