Unlike Airbnb, if users lose trust in their reviews, Yelp loses their entire business.
source: I am ex-yelper.
Yelp is worse than AirBNB.
That just doesn't make sense to me? Like Yelp is telling their sells reps to ask their family to give bad reviews for businesses that don't buy ads?
There might be an argument for Yelp to adjust incentivizes for their sales people to discourage that behavior, but AFAIK they are acting on their own and not because Yelp said to do that.
Do you really think Yelp is asking their employees leverage their friend's network to leave negative reviews or do you think this sales guy is at risk of losing his job for not converting enough and so he on his own asks a friend to help him keep his job?
If Yelp wanted to extort businesses, they wouldn't need employees to ask their friends. They could just adjust the search ranking to down rank businesses that don't want to pay.
This video doesn't pass the smell test.
Even though whatever Yelp does is not illegal, it engages in unethical practices: "[R]emoving positive reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp didn’t have to publish those reviews at all. Third, publishing or showcasing negative reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp has the legal right “to post and sequence the reviews.” Finally, the plaintiffs claimed Yelp wrote bogus reviews to punish non-advertisers, but the plaintiffs didn’t provide adequate evidence that Yelp wrote those negative reviews instead of someone else. For example, even if a business couldn’t find records matching the reviewer’s details, that doesn’t mean Yelp falsified that review (compare the Yelp v. Hadeed case, which in a different legal context gave more benefit of the doubt to an aggrieved business with similar claims)."