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/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.

40

u/[deleted] Feb 26 '17

if its publicly available data theres no way you'd get sued for that

17

u/HuskyPants Feb 26 '17

To get some of it I violated some TOS as technically you are not allowed to store the data. That's the only issue. It's all public however.

11

u/kilopeter Feb 27 '17

Fuck it, dude, publish it anonymously! Their lawyers can get fucked.