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Comment by sedev | Hacker News Reader

"You would expect it to be in Yelp's interest to demonstrate its reviews are credible, though I haven't seen that. Competition and articles like this should motivate them in that direction. In the meantime, they benefit from charging businesses to allow positive reviews to appear and to suppress negative reviews (if they're doing that, it would explain why they don't focus on credibility)."

I think that you haven't been looking for it, then: that exact thing is hugely important to Yelp and is why they filter out so many reviews in the first place!

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(Mostly answering to the deleted grandparent here.)

"In the meantime, they benefit from charging businesses to allow positive reviews to appear and to suppress negative reviews (if they're doing that, it would explain why they don't focus on credibility)."

We try to address this issue in our paper. Take a look at Section 3.4. Short summary: we do not find any noticeable differences in filtering between advertisers and non-advertisers, but there are limitations to our analysis.

And when Yelp does filter reviews, they routinely are accused in forums like this one of running a pay-to-play scheme.

A business owner hears from a Yelp sales guy about the benefits of sponsoring their page (top placement for a good review of their choice) and hears it as a "threat" to hide all those one shot five star reviews they talked their regulars into writing last month.

>And when Yelp does filter reviews, they routinely are accused in forums like this one of running a pay-to-play scheme.

Exactly. And, as well they should be. No business should base its revenue on taking money from those it reviews. Period. I'm not sure why this is even a gray area. Even if it runs as clean an operation as possible, it invariably will come off as extortionate at some point.

The BBB has been running this scam for so long and it amazes me that the FTC hasn't put them out of business.

As a small business owner, I have been on the receiving end of their extortion. A single complaint in 5 years, and they extort you into responding through their system, thus adding value to their business. They literally threaten that if you do not respond, they will be "forced" to give you a negative rating. They know nothing about your business and could not assess the good faith validity of any response, yet have no problem making representations about you to the world, while asking you for money.

This whole third-party review service just lends itself to abuse all the way around.

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