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Comment by SnowingXIV | Hacker News Reader

Yelp is incredibly annoying as a business owner. After signing up to setup basic NAP consistency, they will automatically flag it as some sort of tag often incorrectly and then continue to call and email you asking to spend advertising dollars on their site for months. Even after asking them to no longer do so.

I'm glad google reviews and others have taken their place.

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My girlfriend is one of the main operators of a small chain of board game cafes here— her experience is pretty well the same as yours.

They rely on Google reviews and Facebook reviews. Facebook has even been toxic enough with false stories pushed in attempts to defame the company for money. I haven't heard the same about Google reviews and Reddit has been strangely fair.

I just never liked Yelp. It seems like it spoiled very early on.

edit: Just told her the news. Her response: "Good. Yelp is evil."

> Facebook has even been toxic enough with false stories pushed in attempts to defame the company for money.

Could you explain what you mean here?

It was more that the environment (Facebook, in this case) has allowed toxic situations where less scrupulous patrons were taking advantage of the social network to spread falsehoods for an attempt at personal gain by viral traction. Basically tell the lie fast and hard enough that the targeted party was helpless to defend themselves.

Thankfully it didn't play out that way. The company has a decent amount of respect in this town, and the situation was well documented in advance.

I set up my business profile pretty thoroughly, and only ended up getting one or two sales calls and a couple of emails that I unsubscribed from. Maybe they hard-sell other business types more, but I didn't really get much.

I did end up helping the restaurant down the block when they got scammed by a service claiming to be Yelp, that actually took over their profile and was making them pay to make changes to it. I think a lot of supposed "Yelp scammed me" stories are actually that - third parties.

>I did end up helping the restaurant down the block when they got scammed by a service claiming to be Yelp, that actually took over their profile and was making them pay to make changes to it. I think a lot of supposed "Yelp scammed me" stories are actually that - third parties.

Yep. I suspect this too. It's the same thing that happens with spammy SEO services that effectively threaten to hurt your search rank unless you pay up.

I already recognize their number at this point. They'll call at least twice per week.

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