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Old December 17th, 2012 #1
Horseman
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 2,705
Default Yelp is an extortion racket

In case you use Yelp, this is a very shady company. There have been complaints that if you don't buy their advertising packages, they will have their "filter" remove positive reviews, or not have you show up in search results altogether. Here is the Yelp page for Yelp itself ( reviews of Yelp itself):
http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco

I made a few observations about what I read there:
1) there are many 1-star reviews written poorly, almost incoherent, or with profanity and wishing horrible death for Yelp executives, without even saying why. These are obvious to me to be posted by Yelp itself, to make anyone who dislikes yelp look like a misfit. These also have unflattering pictures (unusual since most yelp pics are of attractive people).
2) there are many 5-star reviews that are written like an advertisement. What I notice is that they go overboard with it, and don't even attempt to tone it down and hide that they are professional writers, writing fake reviews. Perhaps this is to make the reader think that Yelp is clumsy and careless with their fake reviews of themselves, to hide that they are in fact carefully crafting other slicker fake reviews.
3) I noticed one review by a negro, which was written too well, and expressed deep emotions which negros are not capable of.
4) there are some reviews which seem real, and they all repeat the same complaint that Yelp is extorting them and harming their business.

Other general observations while using Yelp over the last few months:
1) All reviews have the picture of the author beside it. The percentage of pictures which are of young attractive people is more than seems plausible (90% ?). Obviously, if you were paying someone to write reviews, you are going to prefer them to use a pic of a young person. Many of them look like they are modeling for the pic. Many of them only show a small portion of the head of an obviously young person, with the person hiding behind something (odd that so many of these exist). Perhaps these were made by someone that writes many fake reviews for a fee, and he only has a limited number of models to pose for the pics, so he will have one person pose while hiding most of the face, so as to reuse that model a second time without getting caught.
2) If I type of name of my dentist office, and provide the city and state, it won't show up in the search results. if I type in "dentist" and give the city, it doesnt list it. I forget what I did (a few weeks ago), but I managed to get it to display the yelp page for that business by playing around with it, but it was hard to do. I wonder if they refused to be shaken down by Yelp (buy their advertising package). I am going to call them and ask.
3) naturally you also have many other reasons for an individual to post fake reviews - extortion, jealousy, a competing business, trolling.
4) Yelp has a filter algorithm to hide what may likely be fake reviews. Oddly, in order to view these, you now have to inconveniently do the "type the words you see." If they are hiding good reviews of companies that don't pay up, I can see why they'd want to make it more difficult to view the hidden reviews (what possible other reason could there be? That is usually only used to be sure the user isn't a bot. Why would they need to exclude bots from accessing fake reviews?).

Just one more example of how we live in a society where there's bullshit everywhere you turn.
 
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