Yelp accused of burying good customer reviews

I don't think that really has been documented elsewhere. There have been lawsuits and allegations, but no proof, as far as I know, that Yelp has offered to compromise their reviews for cash. Yes, they give business owners willing to advertise some editorial control over their listing, but the extent of that control is fairly well-understood and not much more nefarious than Google's text ads. Correct me if there's documented evidence otherwise.

Instead, we get article after article of business owners complaining because their Yelp reviews suck and their obvious attempts to game them have been thwarted. But that's exactly what Yelp should be doing. They're useless if they can be gamed. They're also useless if it becomes well-known that they're pay-to-play, but again, I don't think there's actual evidence of that. They'd have to be pretty stupid to take that course.

Looking at the 17 filtered reviews, 16 of them are 5-star reviews from people with 0 friends and less than 5 reviews (mostly only have 1 review). There's also a 1-star review from a person with 0 friends and 1 review.

It seems like to me that their filtering algorithm is working pretty well.

And don't even get me started on the lack of ability to vote or comment on YC companies job posting spam (the reason for which I also understand)... I've spoken with a handful of these companies that end up listing multiple times, and even they have expressed interest in votes/comments simply to get feedback as to why their listings don't seem to work.

I've not witnessed this scenario you present and I have no relationship to Yelp that might give me some greater insight than anyone else. I have no idea why this might happen; I'm limited to communicating based on my own observations.

In general the labels from business owners are not trust worthy which gets them into these situations. Thus they try and create other ways of identifying spam: like user engagement on the site. However, engagement doesn't always work as a metric as spammers can cultivate spam accounts by posting lots of "legitimate" reviews on unrelated businesses and then sell reviews from the accounts to attack (boost) specific businesses. Finally, users who have a tremendous experience at a business and go on Yelp to give them 5 star reviews may have no history with yelp except as a passive browser. The engagement metric will weight poorly for their review.

So what is to be done? I don't have a good answer for that. This seems more like a human problem than a technical one. The best course seems to be: act ethically, serve your customers with compassion, write responses offering assistance to negative reviewers, and if you feel Yelp (and similar review system are a bad idea) put your advertising dollars elsewhere.

And I'm not saying that a problem doesn't exists: I'm saying that *within the scope of my experience( the complaints about Yelp have been more about owners/managers not wanting to deal with something that sucks about their business.

It may happen, but is less likely to happen than non-professionals. You have a much larger issue with selection bias for reviews, and a much easier way for vendors to bias them. I've been in shops that insist, rather persistently, that I write a good review for their store on their computer, at the shop.