Here's what I said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849689#12850055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849689#12850055) the last time this was brough

Here's what I said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849689#12850055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849689#12850055) the last time this was brought up: > That said, it would be nice if someone presented some evidence to back up claims that yelp is doing something "corrupt". This is an extremely difficult standard to meet. A lot of the accusations against Yelp involve phone calls with their sales reps, which is not public data that can be aggregated and parsed. All we really have to go on are anecdotes. Speaking personally, I've heard from two people I know who have small businesses- a wedding photographer in Seattle and a small restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire- who separately told me how they had good Yelp reviews, and then watched them get pushed down and bad reviews pushed to the top shortly after they declined to buy Yelp ads. These two people didn't even know each their and would have no way or reason to coordinate their tales, and they told me identical stories. I never use Yelp anymore, for this reason. Anecdotes might not be scientific data, but if the circumstances are such that scientific data is impossible to obtain, they're better than nothing.