Yelp tried to strong-arm us

It&#x27;s a sad but predictable pattern you see from everyone from the Better Business Bureau to more recent companies.<p>Being established isn&#x27;t enough, eventually they have to push on those whose information &#x2F; access they provide.<p>Personally I gave up on Yelp as years ago I could see so many reviews for places by people who clearly had no clue what that place even was. Such as if you go to a Neapolitan pizza place... you really shouldn&#x27;t complain that the pizza is &quot;just thin crust&quot;. Or the always great &quot;this place isn&#x27;t as good as X&quot; where X is a place that costs 3x as much....

This sounds like a misleading &#x2F; high-pressure sales call, but if you read into it carefully there&#x27;s nothing that indicates to me anything illegal, scammy, or even anything that would back up the claim that Yelp penalizes businesses that don&#x27;t advertise.<p>A charitable interpretation is that the salesperson is basically claiming there were 21,000 searches the business showed up in, where they could have been shown at the top if they advertised.

Why should I believe a self post? There&#x27;s a weird anti-Yelp cult but never can the people who claim Yelp is involved with nefarious business practices provide any actual proof.<p>Yelp employees don&#x27;t know about these practices.<p>Yelp says it doesn&#x27;t have these practices.<p>And these people can&#x27;t ever offer substantive evidence for the outrage porn they&#x27;re writing.<p>I&#x27;m thoroughly convinced after reading countless of these types of posts that the anti-Yelp sentiment is purely born out of salty business owners who don&#x27;t like the fact that they get terrible reviews from an experienced audience.<p>This post does not belong on HN. There is nothing worth discussing about this story except to fulfill someone&#x27;s outrage porn fetish.

Nothing about this seems credible or interesting enough to be posted here. These stories emerge every so often, and they rarely seem to exist beyond Reddit. I’d be interested in this if it could be verified, but as it is this is internet rumor momgering.

This sounds like a scam call. Did the user verify that the agent was in fact in any way associated with yelp, and not just someone trying to blackmail a business owner? As a domain owner, you get these scammy SEO agents pretending to be affiliated with google all the time.

Interestingly, the Reddit comments seem to mention Google as a better alternative.

I do wonder —with so many examples— how they avoid being charged with racketeering or extortion.

Good time as ever to mention that Foursquare is still great in every big city I try it in.

Okay, you keep on going on about Yelp. Why do I care about Yelp? Seriously now, let&#x27;s think about this for one second, okay? I&#x27;ve been in business for 24 years. Why do I care if Yelp has a review about me? Do you think I really care about Yelp? I don&#x27;t give a fuck about Yelp!