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There were multiple issues, One of them was that they hired aggressive ad sales people who would blackmail businesses into paying for ads in return for removing
by mikequinlan 3y ago
There were multiple issues, One of them was that they hired aggressive ad sales people who would blackmail businesses into paying for ads in return for removing bad reviews. Yelp claims to have fixed this but the stench lingers.
- jollyllama 3y ago> One of them was that they hired aggressive ad sales people who would blackmail businesses into paying for ads in return for removing bad reviews. Indeed. Once people catch on that you're doing this, your credibility tanks. They thought they could get away with it, but it caught up to them.
- andrei_says_ 3y agoI love Corey Doctorow’s term “enshittification” because it perfectly captures the process of a service corrupting their own offering. Yelp started by offering (somewhat) trustworthy crowdsourced reviews for local businesses - free to the businesses. Then their purpose changed to extracting as much profit as possible from small business owners - at the expense of everything else.
- throw9away6 3y agoEssentially this, their brand was built on trust and they lost it. The same thing I think is going to happen to Air B&B unless they change course. eBay surprisingly cleaned up quite a bit so it is possible to do
- codegeek 3y agoPretty much. As a consumer, I never trust Yelp reviews and stopped clicking on their links.
- hifromLA 3y agoCan anyone comment on how this quid pro quo worked? Were sales people making database updates? Was there an internal tool? Or just an internal escalation process to expedite review removal?