It's just a murky place. To be honest, I think I believe Yelp. SPAM is hard to figure out - especially when it's shill reviews - and it's easy to imagine an outsourced sales staff (working on commission) making all sorts of demands/promises to boost their next paycheck.<p>The issue is that Yelp has the incentive to be evil here. That doesn't mean they are being evil, but incentive + coincidence == evidence? It does to many people.<p>From what we've seen: Yelp is important to business since it's a site that creates a reputation for you. Good reviews help you, bad ones hurt. Yelp does some sort of SPAM protection to remove vindictive/shill reviews. Yelp has the ability to manipulate all their data. Yelp has the ability to ruin your reputation or create a good reputation for you through that manipulation. Some businesses are complaining that Yelp <i>is</i> using that power and asking for money to keep a good reputation.<p>But there's hardly evidence. There are no emails being posted showing someone asking for money and no recorded phone calls. Reviews are disappearing and appearing, but we always change around data and sometimes algorithms are complex enough that you can immediately see why when you don't know the intent. I mean, a week or so ago I saw an article posted 4 hours ago with 30 votes showing up lower than an article posted 6 hours ago with 24 votes. OMG! PG is manipulating HN for articles he likes!<p>Maybe. But maybe it's more complicated than votes and time. Maybe the age of each vote is used rather than the age of the article. Maybe some of the votes were from SPAM accounts. Maybe it uses karma to determine vote weight. I could look up most of that in the source (SPAM stuff being absent there), but I just wanted to bring a relatable scenario into the mix.<p>If Yelp is manipulating reputation for profit, it borders on blackmail and they should be sued out of existence. But I have yet to see anything conclusive that would indicate that. To me, it looks like blundering mistakes - hiring a bad sales staff that lies; not making SPAM prevention and algorithmic changes transparent and understandable; etc. Those are problems. Being blundering and causing problems is something that one needs to address and it might be that Yelp is derelict in their duty (morally, legally, otherwise - I'll leave those bikeshed arguments for others). And maybe part of it is hiring humans to read reviews and make determinations about shill level - we can all imagine sending out an email blast to 100 people asking them to rate us as 5-star on Yelp and then a deluge of reviews that were very short over a small period of time all being 5-star (and how that would look suspicious).<p>I think transparency is the key here. Yelp needs to open the conversation up a bit and explain a bit better than "algorithms do it". I know, once you tell people how SPAM prevention works, it ceases to be prevention. Still, it's the reputation of businesses.<p>As for now, I'm willing to give Yelp the benefit of the doubt, but I hope the whole truth will come out in the future.