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Yelp names and shames businesses paying for 5-star reviews

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/yelp-names-and-shames-businesses-paying-for-5-star-reviews/

Plus: Amazon announced last week that two fake review brokers were arrested.

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.

26 comments

Brokkr

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Doesn't yelp let businesses erase poor reviews for a fee? Is the only difference here that yelp isn't getting paid?

Iwasondigg

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Yelp used to approach businesses with proposals to to that, yes. Had a friend with a small business years ago and he would get called by Yelp constantly trying to get him to pay to improve his reviews. It's so shady.

Corkyskog

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That's why it's ironic, for a long time they basically ran a small business extortion arm for any business to consumer business. A family member had the nightmare of dealing with people coming to his house, because that's what the address was and it sounded like a retail business. The bank brought up his negative yelp reviews and he had to explain how he wasn't going to pay them $5k to delete reviews that they caused in the first place by missclasifying his business space. No customers were or would ever be served there.

It's like if you had a family peach canning business that grew really large. You no longer can your awesome peaches there, because you have canning facilities that you work with. But Yelp refuses to delist your business and then you have to fight with them for years about negative reviews of your peach place, that no one has actually been to but somehow has a lot of weird ideas of how to better the experience... And when you fight them they say the only solution is to pay them a fee that they calculated out of their butt to the tune of 1-5k.

money_loo

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Yelp does not do that, those are scammers.

wander1236

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Probably

lolrightythen

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Yeah! Of course I didn't click the link, but 3rd party delivery businesses are rarely more than rent-seekers. Hating on one of their restaurant clients is bad for their bad business.

*Yelp isn't a delivery service, my b. Statement stands in a smaller context.

clearedtoland

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So, like Unity, they just want to increase their share?

IzzyData

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Pretty much. They aren't a trusted intermediary at all.

calabast

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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?

neo

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Of course not.

Madison_rogue

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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.

llama

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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.

Madison_rogue

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Are there even 10 restaurants in Harper's Ferry?

Dick_Justice

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Yelp is a failed experiment. Let it die.

thefartographer

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⭐️ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Dick_Justice is an asshole

We realize negative comments can disproportionately affect newer Lemmy users like you. For a small fee and a big apology, we'd be happy to make sure these most-likely unjust reviews do not impact your overall rating. We'd sure hate for this one-star review to accidentally end up as the top review for such a nice user as yourself.