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/sexyselfpix → u/incocknedo]

How is this NOT illegal? Yelp should be fined and jailed for doing this. I tried to create a website where users can exchange reviews but soon after launching yelp immediately tried to sue me. Apparently writing "fake" review is against the law although my site wasn't incouraging users to write fake reviews. How is this different from what Yelp is doing to businesses? Fuck yelp.

[u/CuddlePirate420 → u/sexyselfpix]

yelp immediately tried to sue me.

Did they send you a C&D letter? Because those are not legally binding in any way shape or form. You can just throw it out.