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Comment by pappyo | Hacker News Reader

You need to talk to small business owners in any service industry that isn't restauranting. Those owners would consider the business practices of Yelp and (I guess) Foursquare thuggish.

Two years ago I sat in on a call with a Yelp rep with a former employer of mine (small business connected to the real estate industry). The Yelp rep said "Advertising through Yelp will almost instantly increase you rating." My employer asked "Does that mean you'll manually fix my score?" To which the rep responded, "Your rating will get better if you advertise with us."

That was 2 years ago. I know Yelp has gotten flack since then, and maybe they cleaned up. But that stink of being a thug doesn't wash off quickly, especially in the small business community.

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See, this illustrates the fallacy of the "yelp extortion" argument: what the rep said was totally clear -- when you advertise, your rating gets better. It did not imply that your rating gets better because they'll change it. That was your leap to an unsupported conclusion.

Moreover, assuming that s/he did say what you're quoting, you have to put it in context: Yelp employs hundreds (if not thousands now) of telephone sales reps. They get paid crap, work in a call center, and have zero ability to influence anyone, anywhere. Sales people, when incentivized to say things for money, tend to walk as close to the ethical line as they can without going over. I haven't looked, but there probably is data showing that advertising increases your rating. It wouldn't surprise me.

Every time I've bothered to dig into these claims, it's a story like yours, where a business leapt to a conclusion because they thought they heard something that validated a rumor they read on the interwebz.

Yes, and

    "That's a nice kid you have. It would be really pity if something happened to him, right?"

is a valid worry expressed over someone's child isn't it.

Make the comparison valid:

"Children who buy our product end up smarter and healthier than those who don't."

...and now it's just marketing. The rep didn't say that the rating would get worse if you don't buy an ad, just that it gets better if you do.

It's more like a school that sells school pride t-shirts saying, "children who purchase our t-shirts and wear them to school end up with better grades."

"What? No, not because the teachers favor them and inflate their grades, but because they end up with more school pride and do better in class!" Wink wink, nudge nudge.

That's a conspiracy theory, not evidence. But if you're suggesting that's what's behind the extortion claims, I wholeheartedly agree.

You are incorrect.

What the Yelp rep said was not clear. The Yelp rep didn't answer the question my former employer had. She avoided it. Does that mean Yelp was/is up to something nefarious? No. But it has that appearance.

And that's the point. Yelp can, in fact, be doing absolutely nothing wrong as far as their data is concerned. But small business owners don't see that. All they see is aggressive Yelp sales agents, and a better rating if they advertise through Yelp.

It's an image problem, not a data problem.

The rep said a very specific thing, and you interpreted it incorrectly.

That's the thing; even if it's not true there are almost certainly sales reps going around and saying this (and if it's not true that's almost worse).

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