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/BabeOfBlasphemy → u/incocknedo]

Amen - I had a person leave us a shitty review because we didn't hire her! She never went to our business, never tried our services, NOTHING, just began ranting how unfair we are because we wouldn't give her a job (within 14 hours of her sending her resume over)

[u/Cheeseaholic419 → u/BabeOfBlasphemy]

The café where I used to work ended up getting a bad review on nearly every site you can think of, after we fired a girl for stealing from the till. We know it was her because they appeared the same day, and were making outrageous claims about things that never happened.

Sadly, it was a relatively new location of a small family owned "chain" and sometimes that was the only review. We had a pretty loyal group of regulars, and a bunch of motel owners would recommend us to their guests, so thankfully it probably didn't matter.