24 ms·

Yelp is such a slimy company. First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket

Yelp is such a slimy company. First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket going trying to strongarm restaurants into paying for advertising, and now this. Friendly reminder - if you are on mobile and trying to read a Yelp review and don't want to download their app, simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" and it will load the full review without forcing you to get the app.

ilikehurdles 7y ago
https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-businesses?l=en_US https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as I have yet to see anything but anecdotal stories about some folks getting a phone call from someone allegedly from yelp allegedly having the power to do this. I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company. On the mobile experience, what are you referring to? The mobile site is fully functional with reviews, search, ratings, etc. I can't say the same of Twitter, Tumblr, and most major other sites. I despise mobile apps as much as the next person but I hardly see how Yelp is unique or even worse than others here. Please clarify. You literally do not need the mobile app or even render the desktop site to read full reviews. I'm looking at a fully expanded review in mobile safari right now.
- master-litty 7y ago
  Fascinating. I totally fell for the drama and didn't realize it. Thanks for posting that link. A good reminder to be critical about what you hear.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    I don't use Yelp so my opinions are both irrelevant and formed entirely by what I've heard from others. I'm not sure I believe Yelp hides/shows reviews based on whether businesses are willing to pay but I'm not sure I put too much weight in the above posted link either. If Yelp's review algorithm has nothing to do with advertising spend then it should be fairly easy to have someone from PwC/Deloitte/E&Y look at the algorithm and issue a letter saying advertising spend isn't a factor. I'd give a lot more weight to a third-party review than I do the Buzzfeed article (not Buzzfeed News) and academic study on the ethics and incentives behind review fraud that Yelp has cited.
    - drucik 7y ago
      In my experience audits done by big 4 are worth nothing. Irregularities are raised, and handled, unofficially, so when the report comes, everything is fine, everything’s legit. That’s what you get when auditing companies also do consulting.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  > www.big-bad.wolf > Does the Big Bad Wolf blow down houses? > "Of course I don't!"
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read? If you opened the link, you'd also see a link to an independent scientific study on the subject: http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/papers%20on%20ris/fakeittillyoumakeit.pdf http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/papers%20on%20ris/fakeittillyoum... Perhaps the issue is more with folks falling for conspiracy theories and urban myths without investigating the claims in an unbiased manner.
    - pavel_lishin 7y ago
      > In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read? I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? If this were the case, we'd reach one of those dumb school-book economic equilibriums where no class-action lawsuits would take place. Businesses evaluate the risk of doing things, balancing profit against loss. Exposure to a lawsuit is just another number in that calculation. > independent scientific study That study is looking at whether fraudulent reviews are being added to the platform, not whether Yelp is calling up businesses and offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for money, which was my understanding of the original complaints against Yelp.
      - ilikehurdles 7y ago
        >I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? Businesses doing shady things will dance around the allegation of shadiness with clever language, legalese, and PR-talk to avoid saying the truth. They will rarely intentionally give an unequivocally simple and straightforward answer when there is some truth the allegation.
- bg4 7y ago
  How's your internship at Yelp going?
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    High quality banter. Truly enlightening commentary.
  - dang 7y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this to HN again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nemosaltat 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I use Yelp for client lunches because I rarely know the area well, and it easily identifies restaurants that deliver. I always felt kind of slimy because of anecdotal rumors. I may have even perpetuated those rumors in passing. Now I feel a bit better, and I have some resources to back it up.
- Kique 7y ago
  The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system. If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking. Once I starting paying they're typically hidden. Now if you manually go and and sort by Date they will still be there, they're not deleted and my star rating doesn't change - so I guess you're technically right that I don't get better ratings. I do think that most people don't realize that the most recent bad reviews aren't necessarily as visible though if you advertise with Yelp.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Is the extortion scheme as simple as that? Paying businesses get "Yelp Sort", non-payers get "Default Sort"? If so, that answers a lot of questions.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ViViDboarder 7y ago
      No. I believe every page defaults to the same sort.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        They default to the "same" sort, but that sort acts differently depending on whether you've given Yelp money.
    - InitialLastName 7y ago
      That's not far off of how (Yelp's partner) Grubhub operates, where the default sort for restaurants is in descending order of the cut they give Grubhub.
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
- largbae 7y ago
  I think the challenge with finding firsthand reports on HN is that the owners of small brick-and-mortar businesses that Yelp is alleged to exploit are not well represented in this community. Having said that, I have firsthand experience in having my own review of such a business censored: 6 months ago I wrote a review for the RazzleDazzle Barber Shop in Riverview, FL. Great little shop, I was surprised that it had zero reviews and was gray in Yelp. A month later, I returned for my second haircut and asked about business. I heard the same story about Yelp pressuring for sales, and mentioned that I had already written a 5-star review. Upon checking Yelp, I noticed that the shop was still gray with 0 reviews, despite having left one a month ago myself. After carefully reading the site, I found that the keyword is "0 Recommended Reviews." At the bottom is a gray link that leads to more than a dozen reviews that are "Not Recommended", all 5-star, including my own. I wasn't the first to review the shop, the other reviews were hidden. I wrote Yelp support to ask why this review was censored, despite my other reviews for other businesses being accepted. They assured me that an algorithm decides what reviews are recommended for protection of customers and that's all that's happening. However, within a day my review was the only recommended review, and the barber shop was live on the site instead of gray. A few other reviews have been accepted since. Go have a look for yourself, scroll to the bottom of that shop and click the "x Reviews that are currently not recommended" link in gray at the bottom. You will even find my original 5 star review, so perhaps they made a copy of it to get it to show.
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    Curious! I'm looking at it and don't see a duplicate review in the "not recommended" section. I do see one trend which matches my experience with "not recommended" that I mentioned in another comment: 10 out of 13 reviewers have no connections on yelp. It seems like the account's social network is one heavy factor in deciding whether to recommend a review or not. There is one curious review that shows up in the normal sort that looks like a "follow up" review despite both version of it being identical.
  - kjeetgill 7y ago
    It's their anti-fraud system. Reviews get moved to Recommend after the user passes some minimum anti-fraud Activity threshold. If that was your first review, it's almost always unrecommended at first. This stops a lot of the "ask your friends and families" for 5 stars sorts of reviews.
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  Except in this case there's a million anecdotal stories about Yelp doing this. I've been in the restaurant industry a long time, I've taken calls from Yelp sales agents, they're shit. And their sales pitch basically is extortion (pay us to hide your bad reviews, or else). I've seen owners straight up tell them to fuck off. Thankfully they have zero traction here; my last place had a 4.5 rating on Google with 250+ reviews, and a 3.3 rating on Yelp with about 10 reviews.
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    JFYI: http://www.bottobistro.com/YELP.html http://www.bottobistro.com/YELP.html
    - joncrane 7y ago
      This is hilarious and great. The whole website is really funny.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      I do not have enough thumbs to adequately show my support for this.
- heartbreak 7y ago
  It's not Yelp directly, it's their outside sales contractors. Anyone who manages the online presence of a small business can contribute corroboratory anecdotes, including me. Yelp encourages this behavior from their contractors. I'm sorry that no one has formally studied Yelp's shady business practices, because that leaves us without data you find worthy of consumption. Maybe an enterprising law firm will change that once they smell enough blood in the water. Until then, consider that swaying someone's opinion on Yelp using their own PR resources is a complete waste of everyone's time.
  - JaRail 7y ago
    The practice of using a contractor to avoid liability really speaks to the fact that they know what they're doing is wrong.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  > or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? They've probably carefully avoided lying while still being as misleading as possible. > If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence yelp may not alter the reviews themselves, but it does change the sorting of reviews and images for paying customers. Also the willingness/capability to carry through on the threat used in extortion isn't directly required, just the threat itself. The execution of the threat is only important when you want the consequences of non-compliance broadly known. > I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company. Really? Yelp is a business which provides little to no customer support bandwidth. Sales is easiest point of contact for Businesses with questions about reviews. Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened. For specific a specific claim that seems to provide evidence that something weird is going on: > And what is indisputably clear is that Yelp’s claim that 75 percent of the reviews that get posted by Yelp users become recommended reviews is wildly inaccurate in the case of Baraka Café. When Yelp was only displaying 16 reviews and filtering out 30, it was displaying roughly 35% of all the reviews of Baraka Café, and suppressing 65% of them. It recommended less than half the claimed figure of 75%. Most importantly, none of the suppressed views were negative, only positive reviews were suppressed.[1] [1] https://thetechnoskeptic.com/yelp-extortion-starring-role/ https://thetechnoskeptic.com/yelp-extortion-starring-role/
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    > Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened. I really don't disagree with this having happened or it being possible that the culture/leadership turns a blind eye to it. My issue is that there is this oft-repeated claim that paying clients' selection, ranking, or content of reviews is somehow different from non-paying ones. It shouldn't be hard to study this claim and yet there is no evidence of it being true. I've been to Baraka Cafe. It's great. Take a look at their "not currently recommended" reviews. As has been mentioned elsewhere, almost all (8 out of every 10) reviewers have 0 friends on yelp. Active accounts' reviews get preferential visibility. Perhaps if I start a business and tell all my friends and family to create accounts and review it with 5 stars, I too will have evidence of yelp "altering" reviews when theirs are inevitably hidden for looking suspicious.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  Don't want to edit my previous comment, but I just realized that you're listing one particular scam that you allege they're not running, while they're running another totally different shitty scam. This is the equivalent of "why are you mad, I didn't take your wallet" as you're riding off on my bicycle.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  This is where the nuance of their scumminess comes in and where you're either ignoring or are ignorant of it. Yes, they can say that they're not "deleting" or "altering" reviews because that's not what they're doing. What they're doing is sorting by "Yelp Sort" and listing "Recommended" reviews. If you look at any Yelp business page, you'll see a tiny little link at the bottom that says "See reviews that aren't Recommended". They claim that these reviews are hidden behind this wall because they're from users whose reviews are biased or who don't have enough patterns to be "trusted" but this is literally just their way of hiding the reviews that people don't pay for. Since every single one of those terms is subjective, they can change what constitutes a "recommended" review and be completely subjective about why one review is "trusted" and another isn't. It's completely up to them and they totally line up with whether or not a company pays for Yelp's "services". It's a lot like the BBB. No one has to pay to be listed by the BBB but you can pay for the BBB to "arbitrate" disputes between consumers and your business when someone posts a strike against you on their site. You're just paying for them to contact the customer and hide their bad review.
basch 7y ago
Are other companies that have apps but not sites (or their site is just a download button) slimy? Should yelp not be allowed to pivot from website to app? I might not agree with that strategic direction as a customer, but its well within their right as a company to choose what they want to be.
- NikolaNovak 7y ago
  Depending how you set your Criteria, certainly Facebook for example will try its darnest not to let you read your messages on mobile browser, but rather force you to download the messenger ️. I would personally characterize that as slimy and annoying; others may well disagree. Internets are also full of condemnation for Reddit's app vs website, and their attempt to force the app upon user.
  - jakub_g 7y ago
    If you're on Android, try Opera - don't know why but it works (Either Opera did some custom script to hide the 'install messenger' banner, or FB code is broken. But shhh don't tell anyone.)
  - thedaemon 7y ago
    old.reddit.com still works for me.
- oliveshell 7y ago
  No one is arguing that Yelp shouldn’t be allowed to funnel customers to their app. We’re just condemning the choice as shitty and user-hostile.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    I suppose if the app provided a better experience, then it wouldn't be user-hostile.
    - couchand 7y ago
Scoundreller 7y ago
I just turn around and go to Google’s reviews.
- noncoml 7y ago
  From Scylla to Charybdis
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Naw, one provided the service I’m looking for, and the other could and did, but now refuses to. Diametric opposites in utility.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  Google also sells your direct links to "Buy Tickets" and your phone number to 3rd party affiliates that will take a cut without your permission. I've been fighting for almost a year to get links in our profile pointed back to our website for a website with more than 1 Million hits a year and a 30k Google Ad spend.
  - creato 7y ago
    What do you mean by "profile"? I think you just need to "take ownership" of the maps place, and then presumably you can control the links and phone number and such. Hopefully there is some verification involved... I have no idea how to actually do this, I just remember seeing a link asking if I own this or that business on maps, I guess when it is unclaimed?
    - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
      We have ownership of our profile and filled out the links with what we wanted initially. In fact when we log in to manage our profile it still shows the correct link, but the link replacement is happening on a layer in between the profile management and what displays to users. After several years Google just swapped the link to a 3rd party that claims to have an agreement with us. Which there is no documentation of, and the dispute process is not handled by Google but the 3rd party directly. Which is why fixing it has taken over a year. And to correct my earlier comment our Google Ad budgets is now 120k+ per year. But even this doesn't give us the ability to appeal to a higher authority and swap the link.
soperj 7y ago
Facebook did the same thing with Messenger
- fma 7y ago
  Fun tidbit: you can still access messenger via mbasic.facebook.com Looks ugly, but does the trick.
  - jakub_g 7y ago
    And with Opera on regular mobile site (don't know why, but it works on Opera)
not_a_cop75 7y ago
I would add to this that all services that handle directory and review services are pretty slimy. Google frequently asks me about my IHOP visit much more often that I ever punch IHOP into Google Maps. While I don't mind writing reviews, stuff like this really scares me. Back in the dot com days, I worked for one of those online phone directory start ups, and those fared better only in the naivete in capturing and manipulating data.
- JaRail 7y ago
  You can turn those off. https://www.howtogeek.com/407789/how-to-stop-google-maps-review-requests-on-android-and-iphone/ https://www.howtogeek.com/407789/how-to-stop-google-maps-rev...
robocat 7y ago
> simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" Apple are changing that feature in iOS13 to be a lot more obvious (menu where reader button is). And iPadOS13 (beta 4) defaults to Desktop Mode (might break lots of websites) although there is a setting to change it to default to Mobile Mode. Android Chrome users have Desktop Mode checkbox under the hamburger menu.
- Skunkleton 7y ago
  I wish Apple would drop their partnership w/ Yelp.
  - ballenf 7y ago
    Apple Maps are frustratingly locked to the Yelp app. If it’s not installed, you simply can’t see more than the 3 excerpted reviews in maps app. To see the full Yelp listing (or full text of one of teased reviews) you have to go to yelp.com and search again for the establishment.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  I'm running the iPad OS beta and have yet to run into a site that it breaks. Mostly it's a huge upgrade, you can use sites like YouTube that have been serving the gimped phone version to iPad users for years. Set the video resolution? Don't mind if I do! It sounds simple, but I've read that at lot of work went into the desktop class browsing experience so that it can handle websites that are designed for cursors. There's more to the change than just sending a desktop useragent.
  - foobarian 7y ago
    From the other side of the fence, it has been a lot more efficient to use a responsive design on all clients, so that small screens automatically get what used to be the mobile site. The benefit for us was we don't need to maintain separate code paths which turned out to be quite a bit of code/markup and caused a lot of problems over time.
BubRoss 7y ago
Yelp always says that they don't delete bad reviews for companies that pay them, which I think is true - they just hide the bad reviews behind all sorts of harder to find links so most people won't see them and take them out of the aggregate.
yanhaoli 7y ago
That is simply so terrible, a lot of apps on the market are jockeying for the "download numbers" instead of the customer experience.
efa 7y ago
Probably a very dumb question. Why do sites like Yelp/Quora try very hard to force you to use the app instead of the web site? Isn't it easier to make money on ads on the web? In the Yelp app I don't get any ads. I may be more likely to browse longer in the app I guess.
- derivagral 7y ago
  There's been a lot of press here and otherwise lately about how lucrative mobile data is and how lax the permissions can be, particularly compared to "just" a website.
- akraut 7y ago
  The app can also do things to fine-tune your advertising profile like track your location in the background, etc.
  - russdill 7y ago
    Yup
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  > make money on ads on the web? well yeah, but a local app can get a more detailed fingerprint off the user, which includes location visited, app installed, habits etc. an app can do a lot more things when installed and closed compared to a closed browser tab. > the Yelp app I don't get any ads the profile is sent upstream and aggregated. ads served from other apps and on web pages you visit have a chance of using information collected by yelp even if yelp itself is not showing the ads, that's the point of it, a seemingly innocuous "ads free" app collects telemetry and third parties use that info to build a profile and serve personalized ads on other apps and web pages, correlating sidechannel info (last seen position, ip and other) to unmask your browser/app session and pin it to your "shadow identity" in the advertisers' system.
  - spunker540 7y ago
    Also the app can send notifications to force re-engagement.
SilasX 7y ago
Yep, it’s a sad commentary on modern web development how often I request the desktop site while on mobile.
- dwighttk 7y ago
  the worst is when the site refuses to give you the desktop version (surprised yelp hasn't done this yet) need a "demand desktop version" option
  - SilasX 7y ago
    Or a "demand better development" signal :-p
    - xyst 7y ago
      "Demand better business practices" signal
kevindong 7y ago
I wouldn't mind the constant redirects to the app IF the app was actually at least as functional as the website. The problem is that the app is less functional, which is infuriating. 1. image quality on the app is substantially worse than on desktop; a problem when you're trying to zoom into a large menu with small text 2. you can't search through image captions (i.e. to see only pictures of a particular menu item); possible on desktop but not on mobile

ilikehurdles 7y ago

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-businesses?l=en_US https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as I have yet to see anything but anecdotal stories about some folks getting a phone call from someone allegedly from yelp allegedly having the power to do this. I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company. On the mobile experience, what are you referring to? The mobile site is fully functional with reviews, search, ratings, etc. I can't say the same of Twitter, Tumblr, and most major other sites. I despise mobile apps as much as the next person but I hardly see how Yelp is unique or even worse than others here. Please clarify. You literally do not need the mobile app or even render the desktop site to read full reviews. I'm looking at a fully expanded review in mobile safari right now.

master-litty 7y ago
Fascinating. I totally fell for the drama and didn't realize it. Thanks for posting that link. A good reminder to be critical about what you hear.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I don't use Yelp so my opinions are both irrelevant and formed entirely by what I've heard from others. I'm not sure I believe Yelp hides/shows reviews based on whether businesses are willing to pay but I'm not sure I put too much weight in the above posted link either. If Yelp's review algorithm has nothing to do with advertising spend then it should be fairly easy to have someone from PwC/Deloitte/E&Y look at the algorithm and issue a letter saying advertising spend isn't a factor. I'd give a lot more weight to a third-party review than I do the Buzzfeed article (not Buzzfeed News) and academic study on the ethics and incentives behind review fraud that Yelp has cited.
  - drucik 7y ago
    In my experience audits done by big 4 are worth nothing. Irregularities are raised, and handled, unofficially, so when the report comes, everything is fine, everything’s legit. That’s what you get when auditing companies also do consulting.
pavel_lishin 7y ago
> www.big-bad.wolf > Does the Big Bad Wolf blow down houses? > "Of course I don't!"
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read? If you opened the link, you'd also see a link to an independent scientific study on the subject: http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/papers%20on%20ris/fakeittillyoumakeit.pdf http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/papers%20on%20ris/fakeittillyoum... Perhaps the issue is more with folks falling for conspiracy theories and urban myths without investigating the claims in an unbiased manner.
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    > In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read? I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? If this were the case, we'd reach one of those dumb school-book economic equilibriums where no class-action lawsuits would take place. Businesses evaluate the risk of doing things, balancing profit against loss. Exposure to a lawsuit is just another number in that calculation. > independent scientific study That study is looking at whether fraudulent reviews are being added to the platform, not whether Yelp is calling up businesses and offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for money, which was my understanding of the original complaints against Yelp.
    - ilikehurdles 7y ago
      >I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? Businesses doing shady things will dance around the allegation of shadiness with clever language, legalese, and PR-talk to avoid saying the truth. They will rarely intentionally give an unequivocally simple and straightforward answer when there is some truth the allegation.
bg4 7y ago
How's your internship at Yelp going?
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  High quality banter. Truly enlightening commentary.
- dang 7y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this to HN again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
nemosaltat 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I use Yelp for client lunches because I rarely know the area well, and it easily identifies restaurants that deliver. I always felt kind of slimy because of anecdotal rumors. I may have even perpetuated those rumors in passing. Now I feel a bit better, and I have some resources to back it up.
Kique 7y ago
The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system. If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking. Once I starting paying they're typically hidden. Now if you manually go and and sort by Date they will still be there, they're not deleted and my star rating doesn't change - so I guess you're technically right that I don't get better ratings. I do think that most people don't realize that the most recent bad reviews aren't necessarily as visible though if you advertise with Yelp.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Is the extortion scheme as simple as that? Paying businesses get "Yelp Sort", non-payers get "Default Sort"? If so, that answers a lot of questions.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ViViDboarder 7y ago
    No. I believe every page defaults to the same sort.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      They default to the "same" sort, but that sort acts differently depending on whether you've given Yelp money.
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    That's not far off of how (Yelp's partner) Grubhub operates, where the default sort for restaurants is in descending order of the cut they give Grubhub.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
largbae 7y ago
I think the challenge with finding firsthand reports on HN is that the owners of small brick-and-mortar businesses that Yelp is alleged to exploit are not well represented in this community. Having said that, I have firsthand experience in having my own review of such a business censored: 6 months ago I wrote a review for the RazzleDazzle Barber Shop in Riverview, FL. Great little shop, I was surprised that it had zero reviews and was gray in Yelp. A month later, I returned for my second haircut and asked about business. I heard the same story about Yelp pressuring for sales, and mentioned that I had already written a 5-star review. Upon checking Yelp, I noticed that the shop was still gray with 0 reviews, despite having left one a month ago myself. After carefully reading the site, I found that the keyword is "0 Recommended Reviews." At the bottom is a gray link that leads to more than a dozen reviews that are "Not Recommended", all 5-star, including my own. I wasn't the first to review the shop, the other reviews were hidden. I wrote Yelp support to ask why this review was censored, despite my other reviews for other businesses being accepted. They assured me that an algorithm decides what reviews are recommended for protection of customers and that's all that's happening. However, within a day my review was the only recommended review, and the barber shop was live on the site instead of gray. A few other reviews have been accepted since. Go have a look for yourself, scroll to the bottom of that shop and click the "x Reviews that are currently not recommended" link in gray at the bottom. You will even find my original 5 star review, so perhaps they made a copy of it to get it to show.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  Curious! I'm looking at it and don't see a duplicate review in the "not recommended" section. I do see one trend which matches my experience with "not recommended" that I mentioned in another comment: 10 out of 13 reviewers have no connections on yelp. It seems like the account's social network is one heavy factor in deciding whether to recommend a review or not. There is one curious review that shows up in the normal sort that looks like a "follow up" review despite both version of it being identical.
- kjeetgill 7y ago
  It's their anti-fraud system. Reviews get moved to Recommend after the user passes some minimum anti-fraud Activity threshold. If that was your first review, it's almost always unrecommended at first. This stops a lot of the "ask your friends and families" for 5 stars sorts of reviews.
Mikeb85 7y ago
Except in this case there's a million anecdotal stories about Yelp doing this. I've been in the restaurant industry a long time, I've taken calls from Yelp sales agents, they're shit. And their sales pitch basically is extortion (pay us to hide your bad reviews, or else). I've seen owners straight up tell them to fuck off. Thankfully they have zero traction here; my last place had a 4.5 rating on Google with 250+ reviews, and a 3.3 rating on Yelp with about 10 reviews.
- jaclaz 7y ago
  JFYI: http://www.bottobistro.com/YELP.html http://www.bottobistro.com/YELP.html
  - joncrane 7y ago
    This is hilarious and great. The whole website is really funny.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I do not have enough thumbs to adequately show my support for this.
heartbreak 7y ago
It's not Yelp directly, it's their outside sales contractors. Anyone who manages the online presence of a small business can contribute corroboratory anecdotes, including me. Yelp encourages this behavior from their contractors. I'm sorry that no one has formally studied Yelp's shady business practices, because that leaves us without data you find worthy of consumption. Maybe an enterprising law firm will change that once they smell enough blood in the water. Until then, consider that swaying someone's opinion on Yelp using their own PR resources is a complete waste of everyone's time.
- JaRail 7y ago
  The practice of using a contractor to avoid liability really speaks to the fact that they know what they're doing is wrong.
shkkmo 7y ago
> or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? They've probably carefully avoided lying while still being as misleading as possible. > If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence yelp may not alter the reviews themselves, but it does change the sorting of reviews and images for paying customers. Also the willingness/capability to carry through on the threat used in extortion isn't directly required, just the threat itself. The execution of the threat is only important when you want the consequences of non-compliance broadly known. > I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company. Really? Yelp is a business which provides little to no customer support bandwidth. Sales is easiest point of contact for Businesses with questions about reviews. Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened. For specific a specific claim that seems to provide evidence that something weird is going on: > And what is indisputably clear is that Yelp’s claim that 75 percent of the reviews that get posted by Yelp users become recommended reviews is wildly inaccurate in the case of Baraka Café. When Yelp was only displaying 16 reviews and filtering out 30, it was displaying roughly 35% of all the reviews of Baraka Café, and suppressing 65% of them. It recommended less than half the claimed figure of 75%. Most importantly, none of the suppressed views were negative, only positive reviews were suppressed.[1] [1] https://thetechnoskeptic.com/yelp-extortion-starring-role/ https://thetechnoskeptic.com/yelp-extortion-starring-role/
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  > Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened. I really don't disagree with this having happened or it being possible that the culture/leadership turns a blind eye to it. My issue is that there is this oft-repeated claim that paying clients' selection, ranking, or content of reviews is somehow different from non-paying ones. It shouldn't be hard to study this claim and yet there is no evidence of it being true. I've been to Baraka Cafe. It's great. Take a look at their "not currently recommended" reviews. As has been mentioned elsewhere, almost all (8 out of every 10) reviewers have 0 friends on yelp. Active accounts' reviews get preferential visibility. Perhaps if I start a business and tell all my friends and family to create accounts and review it with 5 stars, I too will have evidence of yelp "altering" reviews when theirs are inevitably hidden for looking suspicious.
pavel_lishin 7y ago
Don't want to edit my previous comment, but I just realized that you're listing one particular scam that you allege they're not running, while they're running another totally different shitty scam. This is the equivalent of "why are you mad, I didn't take your wallet" as you're riding off on my bicycle.
dkonofalski 7y ago
This is where the nuance of their scumminess comes in and where you're either ignoring or are ignorant of it. Yes, they can say that they're not "deleting" or "altering" reviews because that's not what they're doing. What they're doing is sorting by "Yelp Sort" and listing "Recommended" reviews. If you look at any Yelp business page, you'll see a tiny little link at the bottom that says "See reviews that aren't Recommended". They claim that these reviews are hidden behind this wall because they're from users whose reviews are biased or who don't have enough patterns to be "trusted" but this is literally just their way of hiding the reviews that people don't pay for. Since every single one of those terms is subjective, they can change what constitutes a "recommended" review and be completely subjective about why one review is "trusted" and another isn't. It's completely up to them and they totally line up with whether or not a company pays for Yelp's "services". It's a lot like the BBB. No one has to pay to be listed by the BBB but you can pay for the BBB to "arbitrate" disputes between consumers and your business when someone posts a strike against you on their site. You're just paying for them to contact the customer and hide their bad review.

basch 7y ago

Are other companies that have apps but not sites (or their site is just a download button) slimy? Should yelp not be allowed to pivot from website to app? I might not agree with that strategic direction as a customer, but its well within their right as a company to choose what they want to be.

NikolaNovak 7y ago
Depending how you set your Criteria, certainly Facebook for example will try its darnest not to let you read your messages on mobile browser, but rather force you to download the messenger ️. I would personally characterize that as slimy and annoying; others may well disagree. Internets are also full of condemnation for Reddit's app vs website, and their attempt to force the app upon user.
- jakub_g 7y ago
  If you're on Android, try Opera - don't know why but it works (Either Opera did some custom script to hide the 'install messenger' banner, or FB code is broken. But shhh don't tell anyone.)
- thedaemon 7y ago
  old.reddit.com still works for me.
oliveshell 7y ago
No one is arguing that Yelp shouldn’t be allowed to funnel customers to their app. We’re just condemning the choice as shitty and user-hostile.
- la_barba 7y ago
  I suppose if the app provided a better experience, then it wouldn't be user-hostile.
  - couchand 7y ago

Scoundreller 7y ago

I just turn around and go to Google’s reviews.

noncoml 7y ago
From Scylla to Charybdis
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Naw, one provided the service I’m looking for, and the other could and did, but now refuses to. Diametric opposites in utility.
ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
Google also sells your direct links to "Buy Tickets" and your phone number to 3rd party affiliates that will take a cut without your permission. I've been fighting for almost a year to get links in our profile pointed back to our website for a website with more than 1 Million hits a year and a 30k Google Ad spend.
- creato 7y ago
  What do you mean by "profile"? I think you just need to "take ownership" of the maps place, and then presumably you can control the links and phone number and such. Hopefully there is some verification involved... I have no idea how to actually do this, I just remember seeing a link asking if I own this or that business on maps, I guess when it is unclaimed?
  - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    We have ownership of our profile and filled out the links with what we wanted initially. In fact when we log in to manage our profile it still shows the correct link, but the link replacement is happening on a layer in between the profile management and what displays to users. After several years Google just swapped the link to a 3rd party that claims to have an agreement with us. Which there is no documentation of, and the dispute process is not handled by Google but the 3rd party directly. Which is why fixing it has taken over a year. And to correct my earlier comment our Google Ad budgets is now 120k+ per year. But even this doesn't give us the ability to appeal to a higher authority and swap the link.

soperj 7y ago

Facebook did the same thing with Messenger

fma 7y ago
Fun tidbit: you can still access messenger via mbasic.facebook.com Looks ugly, but does the trick.
- jakub_g 7y ago
  And with Opera on regular mobile site (don't know why, but it works on Opera)

not_a_cop75 7y ago

I would add to this that all services that handle directory and review services are pretty slimy. Google frequently asks me about my IHOP visit much more often that I ever punch IHOP into Google Maps. While I don't mind writing reviews, stuff like this really scares me. Back in the dot com days, I worked for one of those online phone directory start ups, and those fared better only in the naivete in capturing and manipulating data.

JaRail 7y ago
You can turn those off. https://www.howtogeek.com/407789/how-to-stop-google-maps-review-requests-on-android-and-iphone/ https://www.howtogeek.com/407789/how-to-stop-google-maps-rev...

robocat 7y ago

> simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" Apple are changing that feature in iOS13 to be a lot more obvious (menu where reader button is). And iPadOS13 (beta 4) defaults to Desktop Mode (might break lots of websites) although there is a setting to change it to default to Mobile Mode. Android Chrome users have Desktop Mode checkbox under the hamburger menu.

Skunkleton 7y ago
I wish Apple would drop their partnership w/ Yelp.
- ballenf 7y ago
  Apple Maps are frustratingly locked to the Yelp app. If it’s not installed, you simply can’t see more than the 3 excerpted reviews in maps app. To see the full Yelp listing (or full text of one of teased reviews) you have to go to yelp.com and search again for the establishment.
wlesieutre 7y ago
I'm running the iPad OS beta and have yet to run into a site that it breaks. Mostly it's a huge upgrade, you can use sites like YouTube that have been serving the gimped phone version to iPad users for years. Set the video resolution? Don't mind if I do! It sounds simple, but I've read that at lot of work went into the desktop class browsing experience so that it can handle websites that are designed for cursors. There's more to the change than just sending a desktop useragent.
- foobarian 7y ago
  From the other side of the fence, it has been a lot more efficient to use a responsive design on all clients, so that small screens automatically get what used to be the mobile site. The benefit for us was we don't need to maintain separate code paths which turned out to be quite a bit of code/markup and caused a lot of problems over time.

BubRoss 7y ago

Yelp always says that they don't delete bad reviews for companies that pay them, which I think is true - they just hide the bad reviews behind all sorts of harder to find links so most people won't see them and take them out of the aggregate.

yanhaoli 7y ago

That is simply so terrible, a lot of apps on the market are jockeying for the "download numbers" instead of the customer experience.

efa 7y ago

Probably a very dumb question. Why do sites like Yelp/Quora try very hard to force you to use the app instead of the web site? Isn't it easier to make money on ads on the web? In the Yelp app I don't get any ads. I may be more likely to browse longer in the app I guess.

derivagral 7y ago
There's been a lot of press here and otherwise lately about how lucrative mobile data is and how lax the permissions can be, particularly compared to "just" a website.
akraut 7y ago
The app can also do things to fine-tune your advertising profile like track your location in the background, etc.
- russdill 7y ago
  Yup
LoSboccacc 7y ago
> make money on ads on the web? well yeah, but a local app can get a more detailed fingerprint off the user, which includes location visited, app installed, habits etc. an app can do a lot more things when installed and closed compared to a closed browser tab. > the Yelp app I don't get any ads the profile is sent upstream and aggregated. ads served from other apps and on web pages you visit have a chance of using information collected by yelp even if yelp itself is not showing the ads, that's the point of it, a seemingly innocuous "ads free" app collects telemetry and third parties use that info to build a profile and serve personalized ads on other apps and web pages, correlating sidechannel info (last seen position, ip and other) to unmask your browser/app session and pin it to your "shadow identity" in the advertisers' system.
- spunker540 7y ago
  Also the app can send notifications to force re-engagement.

SilasX 7y ago

Yep, it’s a sad commentary on modern web development how often I request the desktop site while on mobile.

dwighttk 7y ago
the worst is when the site refuses to give you the desktop version (surprised yelp hasn't done this yet) need a "demand desktop version" option
- SilasX 7y ago
  Or a "demand better development" signal :-p
  - xyst 7y ago
    "Demand better business practices" signal

kevindong 7y ago

I wouldn't mind the constant redirects to the app IF the app was actually at least as functional as the website. The problem is that the app is less functional, which is infuriating. 1. image quality on the app is substantially worse than on desktop; a problem when you're trying to zoom into a large menu with small text 2. you can't search through image captions (i.e. to see only pictures of a particular menu item); possible on desktop but not on mobile