I don't know, I've heard an awful lot of people who aren't tech/privacy nerds joke about how Yelp allows you to pay to remove bad reviews or add fake ones. It seems to be a common belief in at least the food industry and that employs an awful lot of people who may hear and propagate it.
Same here; I know people who are tech-averse (willing to use smartphones, Facebook, etc. but not interested in knowing anything about how it works) refer to Yelp's unreliability, without bothering to explain it. In other words, it's a known fact not needing to be explained, because they assume everyone in the conversation already knows it. I think their reputation is probably a net negative, by now, and their technology certainly cannot help them with that.
And yet no one can produce any evidence. It's just an easy excuse for a manager or owner whose location is getting poor ratings. My personal experience is that Yelp has an agressive sales force, their fraud detection system seems to fairly frequently raise false positives, but a business can do great on Yelp without paying a penny if they have happy customers.
My point was that it was widespread. There are so many small businesses that you don’t need that high a percentage to have bad experiences with sales critters or be conspiracy minded for a lot of people to hear the claim.
I meant "most people on this thread", which is the context GP was invoking:
> I can't relate to the negativity I see here.
And yes, Yelp calculated that they could get away with their shady money-grabbing since they had no competition.
Very clever, but like most dishonest behaviors - quite short sighted.
As soon as a competitor emerged, Yelp was unceremoniously ditched.
Also worth mentioning: you didn't have to be aware of their past misdeeds to be affected by the resulting rating distortions, which are still affecting users to this day.
The thing Yelp has never understood is that when they hide, deprecate, or remove a review for no good reason, the person who posted that review gripes about it to a half-dozen of their friends.
