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Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

The small business owners I know in Chicago say Yelp calls them incessantly, offering to let them take over their profile pages for $500/month (don't quote me on that price).

Their biggest issue with Yelp is that they tell their customers to go review them on Yelp. The customers do. Then Yelp deletes the reviews because the people who posted them weren't "true Yelpers." So only reviews from people who post lots of reviews are valid? WTF.

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That's basically what happened to us. We had all our customers Yelp about us, many who haven't even heard of Yelp. Then they took them all down because those people only wrote one review, basically for us.

No offense, but that does tread into dicey territory. It comes rather close to businesses offering customers discounts for positive Yelp reviews. How do you draw the distinction? If there is no distinction how can you be sure that Yelp reviews are true?

But, is it any more dicey that only accepting reviews from a small population of yelpers that are more loyal to yelp than to the business they review? Think of it this way a yelper whose never heard of your business vs. many loyal customers who've never heard of yelp. To some degree it turns into a yelps loyal customers vs. a business' loyal customers and yelp with always side with their loyal customers on it. Advantage yelp. If they don't let everyone participate in the conversation equally then a business can't put their best foot forward.

I did find it that the salon owner was much wiser about how she approached yelp than the bookstore owner. The bookstore person wasn't listening to her customers, and blaming the wrong person.

I'm not saying that the alternative of only accepting reviews from a small population of regular/power users is necessarily a good thing either. I'm just stating that it's not a black-and-white issue with an easy answer.

We weren't offering any discounts. We just said please write reviews and give your honest feedback since you are our customers. Seriously they took most of them down.

Sounds like Wikipedia edits.

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