Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site’s new index documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a five-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of suspicious activity, like spamming the site with multiple reviews from a single IP address.
Can someone name and shame yelp for automatically generating pages for business listings that don’t exist like TOP 10 BEST CANTONESE FUSION RESTAURANTS IN HARPERS FERRY.
Are there even 10 restaurants in Harper’s Ferry?
Do they also notify users that they are the largest score manipulator by far of their data? And that they do so to bully small businesses to pay up or they will ruin them?
Of course not.
So is it any wonder that a business would hire fake reviewers to increase their Yelp score, when Yelp holds these businesses hostage with their outrageous policies for bad reviews? Those reviews can make or break a small business. I’m not exactly sympathetic with hiring fake reviewers, yet I’m not sympathetic AT ALL with Yelp’s business model.
Yelp needs to change how it vets reviews, and have better handling of a business’ response and deletion of irresponsible patron reviews.
Yelp is just the BBB for millennials. Fuck both of these extortionist organizations.
how could we build a federated open replacement for B2C reviews and ratings without getting it corrupted?
With code and algorithms
One step that could help would be to require proof that you actually went to $location
Yelp names their own competitors in the “extorting businesses for good reviews” racket.
lol, like anyone would ever trust Yelp again. How are they even still in business?
Boomers. Same as BBB.
Fuck yelp