[timr]

"Plus Yelp has a bad history of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up."

No, they don't. This is a rumor that is often repeated, but is never backed with evidence that goes beyond hearsay.

Also, I worked at Yelp, on the systems in question, and I can tell you that it's false.

[majos]

The evidence against Yelp seems to amount to a (from what I can tell sizeable) population of small business owners who claim that Yelp 1. is extremely aggressive about selling its advertising services (perhaps annoying, but not criminal) and 2. responds to failure to buy these services by filtering or deleting positive reviews.

Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least.

Yelp has turned these attacks away in court, but the (apparent) last ruling on this seemed to come down to an inability on the plaintiffs' side to prove Yelp actually changes review visibility based on advertising [1].

It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation. But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms. It's not like I'm using Reddit posts to support anti-vax arguments, small business owners can definitely reason about how Yelp operates from their interactions with it.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/11/people-keep-suing-yelp-over-it...

[timr]

"Now, this evidence exists mostly in hearsay-type form: blog posts, forum posts, huge reddit threads. You can find similar stuff for BBB and Angie's List. There are also a couple thousand FTC complaints against Yelp, at least."

No, the "evidence" exists entirely in hearsay form. All you ever see are stories about parents, friends of friends, distant cousins, and so on. There's almost never so much as a link to the business page. Why? Because it's trivial to debunk these claims when you can see the reviews.

"It seems silly to believe random people on the internet over tossed lawsuits and a dropped FTC investigation."

Not just silly, but absurd. It's internet conspiracy theory, and people are just thoughtlessly repeating it as fact.

"But I see this as the likely result of Yelp being cagey about how reviews and advertising interact, and being able to hide behind a policy that promises a scrupulous approach and proprietary algorithms."

If Yelp revealed how reviews are filtered, the filters would be rendered useless overnight. It would be the equivalent of Google publicly documenting their search algorithm. And while I think Yelp does many things badly when it comes to this stuff, they're 100% clear about how reviews and ads interact: they don't.

[paulgb]

> I worked at Yelp, on the systems in question, and I can tell you that it's false.

I wouldn't expect there to be a literal code switch that deletes bad reviews if someone pays for ads. But I can imagine a system developing naturally (even by accident!) where it's easier to get a human at Yelp to intervene when non-customers or bots left bad reviews.

Did Yelp have systems in place (e.g. a "Chinese wall") to prevent someone's status as a customer from impacting their ability to resolve a complaint about abusive negative reviews?

[timr]

Yes.