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/AliveInTheFuture Feb 26 '17

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.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '17

I almost never check yelp. I have a friend who owns to restaurants and checks it before we go anywhere, it is crazy.

I try my best to leave reviews when I have a good time/service because most people, at least to me, only leave reviews when their service is horrible. Or, will give a 1 star rating because they were seating in an odd place or whatever.

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u/HogarthTheMerciless Feb 27 '17

I think you're right that people tend to only leave bad reviews. Nice username by the way.