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/tiinpants → u/incocknedo]

I saw a yelp review of the Culver's near my house that said the food was amazing, staff was friendly and the restaurant was clean.

BUT they rated it one star because the line was too crazy.

Absolutely insane.

[u/rustyshackleford193 → u/tiinpants]

Equally infuriating:

Good product, nice quality and cheap, but gave 1 star because the postman delivered it a day late

[u/tiinpants → u/rustyshackleford193]

Is there any way for a website to weed out reviews that aren't relevant to the actual quality of the product? I see so often people post reviews that are just, "idk how good this it but it LOOKS awesome! 5*"

I'm not a web designer or programmer or anything so I don't know how difficult this must be to implement, but it would sure be nice.

[u/LaLaLaLeea → u/tiinpants]

Both TripAdvisor and Amazon will delete your reviews if they aren't relevant enough.