Defamation of character and extortion; Yelp salesperson has friends leave bad reviews!
Louis Rossmann1 HN recommenders · 2015–2020
309K views · commentary · dated · Uploaded 2015-09-06
Louis Rossmann lays out evidence that a Yelp salesperson had friends leave negative reviews of his repair shop after he declined advertising. He frames it as extortion and defamation.
HN commenters cite it as evidence for claims that Yelp pressures businesses over advertising, mostly in threads about Yelp's practices.
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6 comments from Hacker News
What would you consider a proof? does a a sales rep asking her friends to post fake negative reviews count? [VIDEO]
Here is a great example of how Yelp tries to bully small businesses: [VIDEO] I suggest you watch this even if you like Yelp. It was definitely eye opening.
Louis Rossman (the guy who makes mac repair videos) had this happen to him too, and did some investigating of his own/connected the dots between the Yelp salesperson and the person leaving 1 star reviews on his business page. [VIDEO]
The video posted below has pretty good evidence of what's going on: [VIDEO] He shows how he talked to a sales person at Yelp, received a bad review, which he proves is fake by showing a search from his CRM, than digs into the social media accounts of the Yelp sales person, and finds the yelp reviewer who left the bad review (but didn't have an invoice) was a friend of the sales person. even if this is just a rouge yelp sales person, there is clearly something systematically wrong here.
You can try this guy for proof: [VIDEO] Though if you already have confirmation bias that anyone who complains of a large company of shady behavior is a crazy nut, maybe this conversation chain is simply a waste of time. Without access to Yelp internals, it's always possible to just write it off as hearsay. Especially when, if you read my post, the courts have ruled that this behavior is not racketeering, even if it passes the duck test for extortion in my view. The logical explanation offered in the video is that the salespeople themselves are the ones leaving the reviews, not sanctioned by Yelp higher ups. I worked a year doing web development and SEO for an agency that specialized in small local businesses, and enough of my clients had had similar experiences with the "Not Recommended" review algorithm after receiving harassing telemarketing calls from Yelp that I just assume that there's something shady going on. I honestly just think their business model is structured poorly. Too many perverse incentives involved. I won't be sad to see them go.
Louis also found negative reviews from people who didn't live in his community and who were also friends with the Yelp salespeople who attempted to solicit business from Louis, which is so egregious. [VIDEO]