> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
This quote has never been more relevant here.
> Yelp employees don't know about these practices.
> Yelp says it doesn't have these practices.
And both of these parties have skin in the game. Their incentives are, of course, to pretend they do not have dishonest and extortionate practices and to perpetuate the status quo.
> I'm thoroughly convinced after reading countless of these types of posts that the anti-Yelp sentiment is purely born out of salty business owners who don't like the fact that they get terrible reviews from an experienced audience.
I'm thoroughly convinced after your post that not only do you not understand how Yelp works (that they have the ability to arbitrarily move reviews to and from recommended and not recommended, affecting a businesses' score), but you also do not understand that Yelp is generally a bad medium for non-biased reviews, because most people will only leave a review if they're ecstatic about the business or have a gripe with it.
For every piece of feedback you see, there are probably at least 400-500 normal business interactions with regular people, despite whatever arbitrary rating Yelp has chosen to display on that week.
> And these people can't ever offer substantive evidence for the outrage porn they're writing.
You don't get to play arbiter on the height of the bar set for evidence. There have been multiple accounts over the years from business owners detailing the nature of their phone calls with Yelp. Until their algorithm for rating is open sourced, the burden of proof is actually on Yelp to showcase that the ratings are not being manipulated in any way. What's stopping them from removing a 5 star review and citing that it "doesn't follow guidelines" and pretend that it's ok?
> This post does not belong on HN.
Indeed it is your post that doesn't belong on HN. It is indicative of poor research, victim blaming and vague goalpost moving.